A middle-aged woman competing with millennials for a lone spot in a law firm. Mercenary lawyers with shifting ethical boundaries. A woman relegating her painful past to its rightful place and leaning into the workplace. A TV show showcasing adept use of technology. A show about the American zeitgeist. The CBS show The Good Wife was all of that and more. And with the end of its seventh and final season, it’s left me bereft.
I first started watching The Good Wife largely because of nostalgia as it is set in Chicago (though shot entirely in New York City) where I lived for a few years before coming back to Mumbai. When it first premiered in 2009, The Good Wife seemed like a standard crime procedural which was loosely inspired by the disgraced Governor of New York Eliot Spitzer’s prostitution scandal.
It started off with Alicia Florrick (a career-defining move for the excellent Julianna Margulies) standing next to her husband Peter Florrick (Chris “Mr Big” Noth), the State Attorney of Illinois, as he publicly admits to his “abuse of office charges” and is eventually sentenced.
Alicia has to pick up her law career from where she abandoned it many years ago, to take care of her family. What follows is a painful acclimatisation to a job at a law firm, which she has got because one of the partners is her friend (also ex-lover) from law school — Will Gardner (Josh Charles).
Her struggle to remain relevant as she claws her way up to a permanent position in the firm, racing ahead of much younger, albeit ill-connected colleagues, was a thrilling watch. The office intrigue — set against the “case of the week” which more often than not were ripped off the headlines — always provided a nuanced view of hot ticket political and legal events.
But what set The Good Wife apart (and continued to fascinate me) was its ability to portray both sides of an argument coherently. For instance, boss Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski) in the sixth season episode “Loser Edit” defended the hot ticket issue of Gay Marriage. Diane defended a gay couple in a conservative think tank, who were refused service by a wedding planner because her Christian beliefs did not sanction same-sex marriage.
This episode was topical since a similar sequence of events occurred in Indiana around the same time. One of the many rewards of watching The Good Wife has been to watch the characters passionately use the judiciary to defend not just the disenfranchised, but also billionaires, cheating spouses, murderers and clueless dilettantes. Then there were the colourful judges, played by a pool of talented senior actors, each one with a defining quirk. Not to forget the story arcs involving the extended Florricks — the Loy family. The Good Wife treated every vertical with complexity, nuance and a different point of view.
We are in a time of ‘Peak TV’: one show after another is raising the stakes when it comes to television’s ability to lure viewers into the lives of sharply-etched characters. So, the future’s not far when another law/crime procedural knocks The Good Wife off the top. Be that as it may, this show will always occupy a corner of my heart.
Despite operating within the network’s restriction of a 43-minute episode and the contingent content constraints, the creators managed to narrate the public and private battles of its protagonists in a manner which made me emotionally invest myself.
And more than anything else, I will miss Alicia Florrick. When the show began, she started off as a victim of her husband’s infidelity and corruption: ‘good wife’ put in a corner.
But she fought back and reclaimed her place: she competently provided for her family financially and emotionally. Her ideals evolved. And then as the circle of life moves on, she became a persecutor herself.
Episode after episode, The Good Wife provided many things to ponder over, but most importantly, it always gave me hope. Hope in the power of the judiciary. Hope in the success of second chances. And hope in seeing feminism triumph.
I will miss you Alicia (And Diane, and Carey, and Eli, and Kalinda, and Luca, and...) and I know you will treat life well.
The author is a freelance writer
