Sorry, I should have written this BEFORE last night's episode of "The Good Wife"

I hadn't seen this promotional trailer for The Good Wife until last night, however-many episodes into the show's run. I wonder what I would have made of it if I'd never seen the show. Now, however, it not only seems to me to give an excellent idea of what the show is about, but carries the unmistakable suggestion that the people who make it know just what they're doing!

by Ken

Now is your chance to make me feel bad. OK, to make me feel worse. All it would take is for one person to claim that if the piece that follows had appeared in last night's 6pm PT time slot, he or she would have given even the most fleeting consideration to watching The Good Wife. (Of course you could still watch it online.) I had absolute power over that time slot yesterday, and let myself get sidetracked into more fulminating about those lying liars of the Right. Which only goes to show that if only by distracting us from what should be our real business, the shitheads win.

I really, really like The Good Wife. I paid less attention than I've ever paid to the Big Announcements of the TV networks' fall season plans. I've really taken to trusting, I guess, that if there's something worthwhile, it will eventually catch up with me, or I with it, whichever. I don't think I was much inspired by the premise of The Good Wife (which again is what makes me wonder if I would have taken the above preview as seriously without having seen the show as I do having seen all the episodes to date). I don't know that I was familiar with the creative people behind the show -- the sort of thing that can count for a lot more than the premise, if you know you're dealing withpeople who have a history of doing good work.

In the end, I'm guessing maybe it was more than anything Julianna Margulies who got me to take a look. Which is kind of funny, because I wasn't that crazy about her at first on ER. There's something offputting about her prettiness, which is unquestionably pretty but really unconventionally so, and to me it read as a kind of self-satisfaction or smugness. Now this isn't real, mind you, but it's a perception that seems perhaps to be not just mine, since the creators of The Good Wife, Michelle King and Robert King, seem to have counted on it.

All sorts of aftershocks emanate from the earthquake that took place before the first episode: the fall of powerful Chicago state's attorney (apparently Illinois talk for district attorney) Peter Florrick (played in guest appearances by Chris Noth), who was not only caught in flagrante -- and in graphic, publicly shown video -- with a hooker, but was indicted and convicted for financial finagling, which he resolutely denies. (

On the most obvious level, Alicia Florrick is that "good wife" we always see standing by her man at those humiliating press conferences. Hurled out of her familiar, comfortable suburban lifestyle, she keeps bumping up against pieces of her husband's (and of course her) life that are totally unfamiliar to her, and of course none of the pieces of her life fit together anymore. The new reality of her life is that wherever she goes, whoever she meets, they know who she is, and know intimate details of her life, and have opinions about her, not usually generous ones.

Alicia doesn't even have the luxury of going down for the count, because she still has an incredibly bright and aware -- undoubtedly too aware for their parents' taste -- 14-year-old son and 13-year-old daughter. With their father in prison, Alicia has to see that they're housed and fed and schooled. A lovely plot resonance: Without any other help to turn to, Alicia has to depend on her mother-in-law for help watching the kids while she's working. In the best relationships between daughter-in-law and mother-in-law there are bound to be major differences in perspective on every aspect of their lives and of course of the children's lives. And this is a long way from the best such relationship.

Of course Alicia still has connections, and is able to wangle a job as a junior associate at a prestigious law firm, one of whose senior partners, Will Gardner (Josh Charles) was a law-school classmate of hers. Alicia, however, hasn't set foot in a courtroom in 13 years, and there are all sorts of tensions and frissons associated with her, at this point in her life, stepping into a bottom-rung job. Worse still, she discovers that she doesn't so much have a job as have a shot at a job -- she's in competition with a young Harvard Law hot shot (luscious blond wink Matt Czuchry_, and isn't viewed at all favorably by the firm's other visible senior partner, Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski). The politics of the law firm have become one of the most interesting plotlines, and again the casting is cunning, because Josh Charles is personally so easily likable and Christine Baranski so easily dislikable.

Hmm, I don't seem to have mentioned the firm's crack young investigator, the incredibly hot Kalinda (Archie Panjabi), whose acceptance Alicia thinks at first she can't ever win. She's terrific too -- it is, all in all, one of the really good TV ensemble casts.

It's a world in which, pleasantly for a jaded viewer, nothing is easy or uncomplex, except the uncanny way Alicia manages in less than 44 minutes to find a trick to prove the innocence of the client she's been assigned. One hopes this isn't going to continue indefinitely.

But the show itself, that I hope will continue indefinitely. It has passed some of my toughest tests: Not only do I look forward to it each week, but I'm now pretty regularly watching it in real time rather than trusting to the DVR for time-shifting, and so far I've been really sorry as each episode ended.

#