Why ‘The Good Wife’ Might Be Network TV’s Last Great Drama
Being a great network drama in 2016 is like being New York Yankee Roger Maris in 1961: It takes you just a little too long to get there. Sure, network shows pull in the biggest ratings, but when it’s time for the industry to honor its best, those lumbering beasts seem just a little too unwieldy: The last time a season longer than 13 episodes won the Emmy for Best Dramatic Series was 2006; the last time one was even nominated was 2011.
The Good Wife was that final nominee — to date, and possibly forever. In an interview leading up to last night’s series finale, co-creator Robert King suggested that the CBS drama “might also be thought of as a gravestone on the 22-episodes-a-year paradigm.” But though they titled their final episode “End,” the Kings chose to leave the story of Juliana Margulies’ Alicia Florrick where they began it: in a hotel corridor after a press conference, with one character’s face still stinging from a richly deserved slap.
The difference was that this time Alicia Florrick was on the receiving end. In the series’ endgame, her husband, Peter, once again faced trial on corruption charges. But after seven seasons of legal maneuvering, Alicia was no dutiful political spouse/photo-op accessory, standing by her man to fill out the tableau of a happy family: She was his lawyer, every bit as cutthroat and calculating as he was. She freed herself from Peter, only to risk becoming him. If keeping him out of jail meant impeaching Diane’s ballistics-expert husband on the stand by suggesting that he’d slept with one of the prosecution’s experts, well … that was just the price that had to be paid.
In The Good Wife‘s home stretch, firm bigwig Diane Lockhart (viva Christine Baranski!) had gotten Alicia on board with a plan to convert their law firm into a female-fronted partnership, but the smack she laid across our heroine’s face left the future of that enterprise in doubt — and much more as well. Would Alicia find happiness with Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s hunky investigator, the first serious romantic interest she’d had since her former lover, Will Gardner, was gunned down in court? Would she follow Peter into politics, with the support of his former backers? Would she stay true to herself? And who was she, anyway? Those questions were left hanging, although the Kings hedged their bets by posting a video explaining their intentions the instant the end credits finished rolling. (Note to the writers of TV shows: Please stop doing this.)
From the beginning, the show took an uncommonly nuanced approach to the relationship between who was right and who prevailed in court. “Sometimes I think justice would be better served with a coin flip,” Josh Charles’ Will said in the first-season episode “Doubt,” and if the show was never as cynical as he was, it made no bones about the fact that cases are won or lost by a combination of legal strategy and luck; a just result was simply an occasional fringe benefit. Alicia represented drug kingpins and serial killers, and though it sometimes took a toll, she remained morally sound at her core. (See the show’s title.)