Good Wife or Best Wife?

But first: happy Passover! Happy Easter! And also, happy birthday to my cousin Seb! Yaaaaaaaay!

So, if you don’t want to read the rest of this entry, here’s the bottom line: I am enjoying The Good Wife SO HARD.

The Good Wife is the story of Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies), who is not so much the titular character as the protagonist who has a complicated relationship with the designation of the title. Is she a good wife? Is she just good? Are either of those things what she wants to be? Are they what she can afford to be? Can she afford not to be them?

The event that spurs Alicia’s struggle with this title is the conviction of her State’s Attorney husband, Peter (Chris Noth) for corruption and related sexual indiscretions. To support their two kids, she goes back to work as a defense attorney for the firm headed by one of her old law-school buddies, Will (Josh Charles) and his legal partner Diane (Christine Baranski). There, she finds herself working with their in-house investigator, Kalinda (Archie Panjabi) and competing with fresh-out-of-law-school up-and-comer Cary (Matt Czuchry).

That there is a large cast of mains, and I’m not even counting the other recurring characters, like Peter’s mother Jackie, the recurring Chicago judges, or the new State’s Attorney, but there isn’t a single one whose onscreen appearances I dread. They’re all interesting. They all surprise me with both their bad sides and their good sides. Just when I think Will Gardner’s a great guy or Jackie Florrick is annoying or Diane Lockhart’s a b*tch, they do something completely unexpected but not at all inconsistent to make me change my mind. And I love, love, love how the episodes sometimes show the characters doing bad things for the right reasons and good ones for the wrong ones.

(And here is where I also chime in to mention that if there’s not a single character I dread seeing onscreen, it’s in part because the show is shot in New York, where they can pack it full of amazing actors and actresses, each of whom is worth the price of admission.)

In fact, the more I think about it, the more sure I am that the reason the characters on The Good Wife come across as decent human beings  is because the cast and crew on The Good Wife are amazing at establishing characters’ motivations and interested in doing so.

Yes, Cary can be a sycophantic dick, but it’s hard to hate him when you can understand his fear that he’s going to lose his dream job because his only competitor is old friends with their boss. Kalinda can be abrupt, cold, and self-serving, but how can you not feel for her when you see how quickly and unjustly people would walk all over her if she let them? Teenaged Zack Florrick means well, but he’s naive enough to think he knows everything, and that leads him to make mistakes. And disgraced Peter really does love his wife and kids.

(This show is the kind where I want to keep going to explain how every single character in the recurring cast of about two dozen is awesome, even the antagonists I sincerely hope fail because I want Alicia to come out on top. I even like the accused murderer with whom Alicia clashes in one episode. I would be happy to see any of the guest performers again!)

Characters aside, hands down what draws me most to this show aren’t the overarching subplots of whether Peter will succeed in his bid to regain his former, not-in-jail position or what Alicia will choose to do regarding her romantic life. In fact, I gotta admit, if those plots didn’t come with a hefty dose of Alan Cumming as image manager Eli Gold and scenes of Alicia trying to balance her personal happiness with what’s best for her kids/scenes that mix the law case and the interpersonal stuff, respectively, I wouldn’t be quite so interested.

No, what I really can’t get enough of are wonderful scenes of Alicia and Kalinda going off together to investigate, I dunno, plot stuff. Solving mysteries and whatever. I don’t really care. As brilliant as all the characters on this show are, they are the most brilliant, and it’s so much fun to watch them together, finding clues about the cases and each other and slowly getting to be friends.

Yes, despite my panegyric, there are things about The Good Wife I don’t like: I wasn’t too keen on the season 1 finale with its cheapest cliffhanger ending ever. Usually the show understand that if your answers are good, they’re more interesting than the questions. Even when I do have a sense of where a plotline is going, I don’t care. I’m not wondering “What’s going to happen when Grace confronts Alicia?” or “Who murdered that guy, for real?” I’m watching because it’s such a delight to see the way the writers and performers carry it out. But when they try to draw tension from actual plot questions (so far, just the show’s major romantic triangle, which also makes me sad, a little, because for once in the entire history of my television watching, I liked the dynamic between two of the characters better when they were friends), I find myself unengaged.

Also, I’m on the fence about how one of the things Alicia can do better than anyone else is relate to people. On one hand, it sets off warning bells for me when a story goes, “You know what this woman is good at? Feelings!” On the other, the story carefully sets up the point so that a lot of the baggage that makes this convention annoying is gone:
1) It’s clear that this isn’t some innate lady power, but instead comes from the fact that life just punched Alicia in the kidneys, hard, so unlike most of her colleagues, she gets what it’s like to be on the lower rung of life’s ladder;
2) it’s presented not as some consolation prize for failing to be gifted in other lawyer-type-areas but as a weapon Alicia has in her arsenal as well as her courtroom skills, tenacity, etc., something that works with them to make them even more valuable; and
3) the show is very aware of the possible problems. Alicia confronts her bosses about having to handhold people instead of argue in court in scenes that seem to be asking, “How do you deal with this, if you’re a woman who happens to be good at the kinds of things women are stereotypically good at? ”
So, yeah, that other hand does have a lot going for it, but unfortunately, those warning bells are pretty loud. I guess I can only wait and see where the show takes it.

Anyway, who am I kidding? I’m so excited for the next season that it’s all I can do not to plunk down the (not in budget) cash for the next set of DVDs before I even finish my dissertation. It’s the only TV show I’ve watched where the acting/writing commentary on the DVD special features held any interest for me — for the first time in my life, I have watched an episode, immediately re-watched it with commentary on, and been sorry there wasn’t an alternate commentary track with different performers’ thoughts so I could watch it again. And there you are.

BONUS: This entry was written before I started watching season 2. So here are ten things about season 2 that make me continue to love this show.
1. They have a throwaway joke parodying War Horse. And though it’s just five seconds of screen time, they use an actual puppet of a cow designed in the same style as the Joey puppets of the stage production.
2. They understand that when you zoom in on a digital photo, the image gets blurrier and blurrier.
3. Their online viral videos and social networking stuff look like actual online viral videos and social networking stuff.
4. THINGS COME BACK. Things that Alicia and others did in shows all the way back to the very first episode of the series keep coming back to pay off in organic, logical ways.
5. On a related note, nobody gets a break on the bad things they do just because they were bada$$ or fun to watch.
6. On a related related note, nobody gets cut off — no matter how badly characters behave and how much it comes back to bite them in the butt, the audience still sympathizes with why they did what they did.
7. PEOPLE COME BACK. The show doesn’t forget about secondary or even tertiary characters. I’d forgotten about the fiscally solvent divorce attorney at Alicia’s firm — the writers didn’t, and they show how he reacts to the company shake-up, again, in an organic, logical way.
8. Michael J. Fox! Yes, it’s a blow to the childhood to see him play Not-Marty-McFly-or-Alex-Keaton. But he and his character are both awesome! I hope #7 applies!
9. All the episodes of season 1 have one-word titles. All the episodes of season 2 have two-word titles. This means either the showrunners plan to stop before too many seasons result in jumping the shark, or they secretly love Victorian-style titles (“Episode 181, 203: In Which Alicia, Kalinda, and Cary are Called Upon to Prepare a Defense for a Thorough Ruffian; or, the Price of Integrity”). Either way, I’m down!
10. They mention one Jewish holiday — and it’s Yom Kippur! Portrayed correctly! Their Jews act like the Jews I know, not the Jews who celebrate Chanukah on TV in order to add some variety to the Christmas special