I felt great because it was ideal for the show and Julianna loved it. The streaming service has, theoretically, an infinite amount of space to create any length of season it would like to. What can viewers expect when they watch the season finale on Sunday?
Advertisement
Of course this once great drama became frustrating.
Claire Underwood on “House of Cards” shared Alicia’s use of silence and noncommittal stares, but Claire, like her show, came from a place of near comic-book ruthlessness; she was no Everywoman facing the rubble of betrayal, the demands of work and family, the treachery of office politics.
That’s a lot of drama – but “The Good Wife” has also been laugh-out-loud amusing. When it’s good, “The Good Wife” is a crackling character drama and legal procedural, with more formal experimentation and scintillating performances than other shows can achieve in their lifetime. Really, five seasons might have been the ideal length.
While she considers herself a liberal, she says: “What the show touches on and what I think is so important is it shows all sides of the story”. On the whole, it succeeded more than it failed, and on the whole, its failures were mostly just the plateau of mediocrity.
The hit CBS drama “The Good Wife” reaches its dramatic conclusion on the series finale Sunday May 8.
The “Good Wife” characters, so captivating and, at times, freaky, were one of the show’s strengths. “But it also feels very right to end with the seven-year story its creators envisioned, and to celebrate the show’s final run while at the top of its creative game”.
But even more remarkably for a medium that traffics in crazes and clones, “The Good Wife” has always been genre-defying, neither a copy of anything that came before or, thus far, tempting any programmer to try to copy it. And then the show went backstage, behind the political theater, to explore how these marital circumstances might play out, what the phrase “good wife” means, what role political enemies might play in exposing the truth, and how an accomplished woman might cope with being reduced to a Tammy Wynette cliché. It was an ambitious, impossible task, as Noel Murray explains at the A.V. Club, because every subverted expectation made the next one that much harder to earn. What’s odd for me is, for example, I’ve been wearing this fabulous blazer for eight straight days, so there are very few items I’ve worn on the show where I’ve only worn them for a second. No one expected Josh Charles, who hadn’t had a first-rate TV showcase since Aaron Sorkin’s Sports Night, to become such a worthy leading-man playing Alicia’s colleague-lover Will Gardner. But I think Grace-while making it clear she is not the Messiah-would probably point out that in both the Old Testament and New Testament, it’s not just Jesus who gets resurrected, nor only Jesus who does the resurrecting.
“I think it is a challenge to deliver this kind of storytelling on a 22-episode basis”, said Debra Birnbaum, executive editor of television at Variety. Behind-the-scenes tensions also led to the freaky sidelining of Emmy-winner Archie Panjabi, and though the details of that feud are still tantalizing secrets, long hours on set can’t have helped. And The Good Wife marked the return of Julianna Margulies to series television in a role tailor-made for her strengths as the kind of strong-yet-sensitive character that she arguably hadn’t had since the role that first brought her to prominence, in ER.
I started the show in myearly40sandI’m leaving the show in my late 40s.
Advertisement
Shows like “Outlander”, “Orphan Black”, “House of Cards”, “How to Get Away With Murder”, “Jessica Jones”, even “Penny Dreadful”, owe as much, if not more, to “The Good Wife” than any of their cable peers or even the expanding digital universe. The way it deftly incorporated quirky guest turns by stars like Michael J. Fox, Carrie Preston and others into the mix kept the energy high.
