A Tale of Two Slaps (In Praise of The Good Wife)

I’ll admit, The Good Wife checks a lot of boxes for me. The murderers’ row of guest stars alone would have kept me watching forever, and I’m a sucker for a full 22-episode season (shorter episode orders are a celebrated hallmark of prestige cable shows that I still don’t totally get—if you like a show, wouldn’t you want more of it?). The Good Wife is one of the last network shows to have been nominated for the Best Drama Emmy–NBC’s This is Us is the only one that has been nominated in that category since Good Wife and Friday Night Lights were nominated in 2011 (the last network drama to win the award was 24 in 2005). And while This is Us harkens back to the sometimes soapy, must-see network shows that populated the Emmys before cable took over, The Good Wife did just the opposite and put cable characters on CBS. The show sneakily and slowly questions the virtuosity of it’s main character, quietly taking interest in the corruption, greed, and social pressures of power that so many prestige cable dramas wear so proudly on their sleeves.

On network dramas–your Grey’s Anatomys and your Laws & Order– characters are relatively stable. They encounter challenging situations, but the allure is in watching a character you like encounter a challenge rather than to watch them be challenging themselves. On cable dramas– your Homelands and Games of Throne– characters often lack traditional heroic qualities, but we root for them anyway (or at least enjoy watching them behave badly). When a really flawed character exists in the network formula, the show aggressively ignores it. Ted Mosby and Rory Gilmore are the Hannah Horvaths of their respective shows, but How I Met Your Mother and Gilmore Girls aren’t interested in exploring that. Any heroic character on cable is either quickly corrupted (Walter White) or corrupt to begin with, tasked with unpacking and sitting with the filthiness of their accrued badness (Don Draper). I guess an imperative on a cable drama is also to have an alliterative name.

The Good Wife dips in and out of these conventions, making it difficult to determine which of these archetypes you’re watching and what kind of character its protagonist, Alicia Florrick (played beautifully by Julianna Marguilies), ultimately is. The show operates under the rules and conventions of a network drama, but it’s goals are more like those of a cable drama.

Now that we’ve finished opening arguments, here’s the premise of the show: Alicia’s husband, Peter (Chris Noth), is wrapped up in an Eliot Spitzer-esque scandal involving prostitutes and the alleged misuse of state funds. As the title suggests, Alicia has decided not to divorce him in the wake of his infidelity, and she stands by him as he steps down as Cook County State’s Attorney. Backstage, after his apologetic press conference, she slaps him.

For a while, the show appears to be an empowerment fantasy. We revel in watching Alicia overcome the humiliation and betrayal of her husband’s scandal, a scandal that she has unfortunately become the face of. From the first moments we see of her, adjusting her shirt before walking, head high, away from him down the hallway, it’s exciting to watch Alicia confront the injustices in her life with a careful dignity.

Peter is in prison until his appeal, so she goes back to work and develops a rich professional life as a lawyer. The show avoids what a procedural might usually go for here which is: person with a hyper-specific life experience is the only one who can fix the bureaucracy of this law office/hospital/government/news program because of their brave iconoclasm. Instead, Alicia quietly absorbs the necessities of the work, making the show more about the legal and political worlds than the exceptionalism of Alicia herself.

The premise itself is a topical cliche, and by the middle of the first season, creators Michelle and Robert King begin to slowly undermine the Alicia Florrick victim complex, often playing into it and making fun of it at the same time. Instead of challenging the institutions, she learns to use them and how to get what she wants from them. In turn, she plays a part in building them up.

The end of the first season presents a quandary for Alicia: she’s up for the sole associate position at her firm against an eager but endearing yuppie, Cary Agos (Matt Czuchry), with whom she has developed a professional respect and rapport. She sees an opportunity to use her connections to the State’s Attorney’s office to get a leg up, and she takes it, securing the associate position. She feels guilty and conflicted for a moment, only to be told by her bosses and colleague, Kalinda (Archie Panjabi), that she should be congratulating, not flogging herself. She gives into this reasoning, and so does the audience.

So it goes for Alicia. She presents the qualities that are acceptable in a lead on a CBS drama: she leads with humility and nobly mans the sinking ship of a marriage she is stuck on. As a protagonist on a drama, the way she presents strength is unconventional. She’s careful with her words and she hardly ever uses intimidation to get what she wants. In many ways, she’s a portrait of what women must be like in professional situations (and in the public eye) to warrant respect without turning people off. However Alicia the safe, unshakable network heroine is a facade. The granularities of the legal profession and the internal politics of her firm blur the difference between what is virtuous and necessary, and the two become harder to distinguish. These small compromises are sprinkled in slowly and stealthily, hidden inside case-of-the-week episode conflicts. They’re hidden in those questionable decisions that in network dramas quickly get swept under the morality rug.

The deep, old-fashioned, network episode orders work as a feature in this respect, not a bug. Creators Michelle and Robert King smuggle a cable protagonist into a network show, and they use their long seasons to replicate a realistic timeline of corruption and personal compromise that ultimately feels both inevitable and surprising (and not in a bad, inconsistent way like Danaerys on Game of Thrones, who by some distortion of time and perception, was corrupted both extremely gradually and much too quickly).

(Emmy FYC material for the show's fifth season, for which Good Wife won one award for Julianna Margulies. The show was only nominated for acting awards that year)

In Season Five, the show leans in to this endeavour. At the start of the season, Cary and Alicia leave Lockhart/Gardner to form their own firm, Florrick/Agos, taking many of their high-powered clients with them. This storyline is a testament to what kind of interesting things can come of keeping a show going for a long time. The 13-hour-movie pitch for this show at Netflix would have definitely included Alicia in the wake of Peter’s scandal, finding her confidence as a lawyer, and a (more explicit) affair with her boss, Will Garder (and probably a flashback episode—ugh). But post-love-triangle, post-scandal Alicia got us to what I think is the show’s strongest storytelling choice of it’s run: take the four characters we’re rooting for, and pit them against each other in a believable way. The whole point of TV is that characters have many defining stories, not just a single, tidy arc. As a result, Alicia’s story is not just that of a jilted wife who got her groove back after humiliation, that hasn’t been Alicia’s story since Season One. Alicia’s story gets to be so much more. So many more, actually.

Where the network seasons get to realistically elongate Alicia’s story of empowerment, they also help to realistically illustrate how people continue to convince themselves they should continue to seek out more power, money, and social capital. When Alicia is finally confronted by Will about leaving the firm, he says, “You’re awful, and you don’t even know how awful you are.” Network shows are built to excuse their main characters rather than indict them. Incidentally, all of our brains are built to excuse ourselves instead of indict ourselves as well. Here Will outlines one of Alicia’s most interesting flaws, one that is tied to the format of the show: she insists on casting herself as the good guy. She transcended her circumstances with grace and dignity, that’s what made her so engaging at first. But Alicia isn’t an underdog for very long (and her status as an underdog from the start is arguable).

In the series finale, Alicia gets her pilot-slap dealt back to her, this time from her friend and colleague, Diane Lockhart (played the incomparable Christine Baranski) over an in-court betrayal (and a cruel one, at that).

It’s clear what the Kings want us to know about Alicia over the run of the series: she’s changed, and not altogether for the better. They put her visually and obviously in Peter’s position in the pilot. (If it was any other show, it would be too on-the-nose to work.) We spend roughly 22 hours with Alicia every season, and in this final moment you start to strongly suspect that we shouldn’t be assured that she's been learning good lessons in that time, even when her arc appears to point up. She’s a corrupted cable anti-hero in a television format that more closely replicates what it feels like to be a corrupted character’s head than Mad Men or Breaking Bad does.

Plenty of cable shows have shown characters compromise their values little by little, and plenty of network shows have kept their characters in a moral safe-zone year after year. The Good Wife successfully melds the two and makes Alicia Florrick a study in the insistence to cast oneself as an unassuming underdog, a mindset that ultimately enables the gradual compromise of values.

Okay, now for the cross.

While The Good Wife makes good use of the network model to take a unique stab at what cable dramas are doing for similar (mostly male) characters, it has some very network-induced flaws. By virtue of it’s 22-episode seasons, it has the space and time to throw up a lot of subplots and side-stories, some of which it ultimately just isn’t able to juggle successfully. As a result, a lot of interesting (and some not so much) storylines get abandoned without explanation or conclusion. It embarks on some detours that become boring or annoying (Kalinda’s-Supposedly-Lethal-Husband and Eli’s involvement in the Lockhart/Gardener firm politics qualify here), which end up feeling more like wasted time than productive padding.

Like all network shows concerned chiefly with syndication sales and longevity, The Good Wife is a machine built to run forever. Sometimes that goal gets in the way of its other, loftier, goals. Though the showrunners appear to have a durable grasp on what this show is about, there are times when their fealty to the machine they built eclipses the shows more interesting ambitions. They let the idea that at its start this show was notionally about a love triangle play out for about a season and a half longer than is necessary. Similarly, though Alicia’s underdog complex is an interesting feature most times, the show can never help itself from starting a season with Alicia in a put-out victimized place from which to climb out of, even when she has become far too savvy for it to be plausible (the seventh season suffers from this the most).

Permission to redirect?

Just because The Good Wife’s problems are all related to being on CBS doesn’t mean it could be perfect if only it were on cable. Many cable or streaming shows seem to think they must be upsetting, uncomfortable, or downright difficult to watch (or see—I’m looking at you, Ozark) to be considered Serious Television™. But The Good Wife is a network drama. It gets to be well-lit all the time, the women wear immaculate professional skirt suits, and the men never recycle a tie. The Good Wife has a better sense of humor than every single show that has ever aired on AMC. This would certainly be a much less enjoyable show to watch on cable.

Furthermore, what The Good Wife achieves with Alicia Florrick and with the world of political and legal corruption she inhabits, they simply couldn’t achieve on cable. The Good Wife is about how people who become complicit, corrupt, or compromised do so by thinking of themselves as a network hero all the way there. When it isn’t obvious that you’re doing bad things because you’re not making Blue Meth or leading a crime mob in New Jersey, you can go your whole life thinking that you’re just doing your job, solving the case-of-the-week. You can run for State’s Attorney without having any idea why you would want to do so. You can put a close friend’s husband on the stand, knowing he’ll have to admit to an affair that ends their marriage. You can do so in service of your husband who you should have left seven years ago. In the cases of many of the side characters in the show, you can do so much worse.

The Good Wife looks to the institutions these characters are paying fealty to rather than the intrinsic evil in the people themselves. It’s a show about how one mistakes having power over others for personal empowerment, and it uses the audience's expectation of an empowerment fantasy to demonstrate what obtaining power conditionally entails. Even well-intentioned, feminist mothers have to kick some people on the way to the top. What The Good Wife thinks should be done about how the institutions we are a part of encourage us to do this is, to use one final legal term, beyond the scope. However, it does seem to think getting a straight slap to the face never hurts (at least not figuratively).