The Good Wife picked up where it left off last season. It's the best show on TV
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Version 0 of 1. There are a thousand things The Good Wife does beautifully, but the way that it can simultaneously deliver and resolve a cliffhanger is pure art. When the show kicked off its sixth season on Sunday on CBS (it will premiere on More4 in the UK later this year), it picked up right where season five left off, with Alicia Florrick (newly-minted Emmy winner Julianna Margulies) blinking in disbelief when her husband’s chief of staff Eli Gold (Alan Cumming) asked her if she was interested in running to be the state’s attorney. As they sit in the dining room, Alicia laughs at Eli’s question (or possibly she’s laughing because Eli returned from summer vacation with significantly darker hair and eyebrows, and expected none of us to notice). Alicia says, “I’m not interested,” and then it’s over. So many shows do this: find some twist or contrivance for the final episode of one season and then smooth out that wrinkle in the next season premiere so that we can go back to life as usual. But The Good Wife is not most shows. If you thought the first episode of this year would be about Alicia’s decision to run (or not) for state’s attorney and Diane Lockhart’s (Christine Baranski) defection to Florrick Agos, you were only partially right. The Good Wife is interested in process. Not just legal process, but the process by which significant events come to pass. Alicia might have denied Eli in the dining room, but this season is going to be about how Eli and her husband Peter (Chris Noth) convince her to run for state’s attorney. The same goes for Diane’s leaving her old firm for the new one – it’s not going to be done with a handshake and a contract. Sure, it might be on CBS, but The Good Wife is no CSI, where Ted Danson steps in as the new chief and no one bats an eyelash or misplaces a petri dish. Things here take time and Diane joining will be a suspenseful waiting game, one full of landmines, pitfalls, and bombs that have to be ever so delicately defused. The new season is much like last season, which was one of the series’ finest (something rare for network television, where long-running shows usually lose a bit of juice). Season four ended with Alicia deciding to leave her old firm and start a new one with Cary (Matt Czuchry). It was a move so bold one almost expected Alicia to chicken out, or for something to change at the last minute to keep the old firm together. But no. We got to see every step of the process of how Alicia came to that decision, and how she and Cary rounded up some other partners to leave. While the process might earn the characters their decisions, it’s the consequences the audience remembers most. The most vivid image from Alicia choosing to leave is the late Will Gardner (Josh Charles) coming into Alicia’s office and trashing her desk. Not only did it complicate her defection, but showed the political and personal implications that she dredged up by making that choice. The big complication in the first episode of season six is Cary Agos being arrested for his possible role in smuggling heroin into Chicago. This could keep Diane out of the firm, but might push Alicia into the election if she feels like her firm is threatened. Either way, it found a way to turn what should have been a straightforward introduction to the season and turned it on its ear. This is really The Good Wife at its best, though. It uses an unexpected result of the characters’ behavior – in this case Cary and Alicia defending a drug dealer – to not only derail the usual narrative direction but to unearth the complicated and fascinating political connections between the characters. Cary’s arrest brings his sometimes-girlfriend Kalinda (Archie Panjabi) to his defense. She uses her past relationship with an FBI agent to get dirt. Alicia squares off against a former client of hers in court who then has her kicked off Cary’s case. Alicia runs to Diane and the two of them meeting raises the suspicion of Diane’s current partners that she might be leaving the firm. It’s an engine with a million moving parts. When one rattles, its reverberations travel through all of them – a million little cogs try to compensate for the shift in power. Like all of the best shows – The Wire, Game of Thrones, The Sopranos – The Good Wife is about perfectly drawn characters that are forced to operate in a political machinery that is much bigger and more perilous than any of them. When one individual triumphs over the machine, it not only means that another individual loses, but everyone becomes unmoored. This is all just a really fancy way to say that The Good Wife is the best show on television. It always keeps you guessing: not with cheap stunts like in other shows, but by behavior so well mapped out that it feels inevitable even as it surprises you. So, yes, when Eli lines up Peter (as he already has by appealing to his ego), you know that Alicia will run, but we never know what the result of that election could be. And that’s what draws us back every Sunday: it’s not the cliffhangers, it’s the resolutions. |