Down and Out in Denver

Julianna Margulies as The Good Wife

I had seen one or two episodes of The Good Wife before last night but had not seen the first six.  Confronted with an evening in and with little desire to do anything productive, I found one of those pirated TV sites and watched the first six episodes.  All in a row.  Dear readers, I am addicted.  It is a wonder I had not become hooked before, so much is this show up my alley.

The premise: Alicia Florrick’s husband, Peter, has been convicted of corruption charges stemming from his alleged misuse of funds during his time as State’s Attorney for Cook County (Chicago).  That’s the alleged part (at least in the narrative of the show). What’s not being denied by Peter is that he had sex with a number of prostitutes, over a reasonably long period of time.  Alicia (Julianna Margulies) is the good wife, and is clearly inspired by Silda Spitzer, Dina McGreevey, and Hillary Rodham Clinton (whose photo makes an appearance in the pilot).  The ads for the show generally left the viewer with the impression that this was all that was going on.  But no: with Peter (Chris Noth, whose appeal I have never understood) in prison, Alicia must go back to work in order to support their two kids (they have also lost their house).  She had worked as a lawyer before her kids were born and she manages to get a job as a junior associate at an up-and-coming Chicago firm through a friend from law school.  There she gets to solve crimes, defend the wrongfully accused, and compete with the other junior associate for a permanent position in the firm. (Cause on TV that’s what first-year associates get to do at law firms.)

Had I known all that, I would have been on board long ago.  Because The Good Wife manages to combine two of my very favorite elements in one TV show: legal procedural and story about female

Alicia stands by her man

empowerment.  But there is more!  The show’s title is deliberate and interesting.  Alicia is, in one sense, the good wife.  The pilot opens with Peter confronting a bank of reporters and cameras as he announces his resignation, admits his misdeeds (the prostitutes), but proclaims his innocence regarding the misuse of funds.  Alicia stands beside him, glazed look on her face. We have been here before.  Too many times.  But immediately after they disappear from camera’s view, we get to see what happens: she slaps him.  And this back-and-forth between “standing by her man” publicly and railing against him privately continues throughout the episodes.  She still loves him but she is also increasingly enraged by him, the more so as she discovers further infidelities. But the show goes further.  Alicia is a good wife, in the sense that she goes back to work to support her family, but she clearly also enjoys her work and is good at it.  She also makes a number of choices (some of which involve her husband’s knowledge of the very cases she’s trying) that are ethically dubious, at best, and illegal, at worst.  She may be good, but she’s also human.  And this makes her an immensely appealing character.

There are so many other reasons to like this show.  Chief among them is, of course, that the main character is a woman who is not just one-dimensional.  She is capable and yet also vulnerable: a wife, mother, and a skilled attorney, and all these things matter to her.  And that she is played by Julianna Margulies, who does a really fantastic job.  I was not a big ER fan, but like every other American, I have seen at least a few episodes of the show that ran for 15 years.  So I remember Nurse Hathaway and I’m glad that she’s back and that yet another network is taking a chance on a whole show centered around a female actor over the age of 40.  She’s not the only great female character.

Kalinda & Alicia: Sisterhood is Powerful!

Her relationship with the law firm’s investigator, Kalinda Sharma (Archie Panjabi) is fantastic.  Kalinda is young and assertive and very good at her job.  At first she is pretty skeptical about Alicia’s abilities.  She criticizes Alicia’s propensity to identify too quickly with the clients (and indeed there is an irritating degree of automatic female empathy that the show thinks is more subtle than it really is), but eventually comes to respect her talent and intelligence.  There are some excellent – and slightly unsubtle – scenes that could well be described like this: “sisterhood is powerful!”  And I loved every one of them.  One of the firm’s partners is played by the brilliant Christine Baranski, and while she doesn’t always get to be as funny as we know she can be, she’s still pretty great.  Guest stars have included Martha Plimpton (!) as a very pregnant and rather duplicitous corporate defense attorney and Leslie Hendrix as a feisty jury consultant (Hendrix is best known as Medical Examiner Elizabeth Rodgers on Law and Order).

The Good Wife is not without a few faults, the first of which I’ve already mentioned:  the writers often have Alicia identify with women and victims, as if this would happen automatically as a result of her experiences and her sex.  To their credit, she also manages to recognize the ways in which that identification is sometimes misguided. The show also has an irritating habit of having all characters identify Alicia as “Mrs. Florrick.”  This makes sense in certain situations, but much less so in others, particularly when characters with whom she interacts at work – some of whom have no idea about her famous husband – refer to her as this instead of Ms. Florrick or simply Alicia.  In fact, almost all characters who are married get called “Mrs.” in all kinds of professional settings and this just seems silly, not just because many of them might have kept their own names but also because, even if they have not, workplace etiquette in many of these situations would demand that they be called “Ms.” The single women, like Kalinda, just get called by their first names.

Does the show misrepresent life in a law firm?  No doubt.  Is it slightly heavy-handed in its depiction of women’s empowerment?  Probably so.  Is it a little manipulative in its marshalling of emotions?  Absolutely.  Is it a TV program?  Indeed it is.  And one I plan to watch every Tuesday night.