TV Watch: It's surely not enough to say that "The Good Wife" is "the smartest drama currently on the air"

In this Season 6 preview, Good Wife cast members talk about the new season.

"Six seasons in, however, I've become weary of evangelizing for [The Good Wife]. Recently, I had lunch with an entirely charming TV maker, who was educated and intelligent about many forms of television but had never watched The Good Wife, because, he admitted with a shrug, he perceived it as being 'for women.' Although he was a fantastic lunch companion, he's dead now."

-- New Yorker TV critic Emily Nussbaum, in "Shedding
Her Skin: The Good Wife's thrilling transformation"

by Ken

When I say in the post title that "It's probably not enough to say that The Good Wife is 'the smartest drama currently on the air,' " in case my meaning isn't obvious, what I mean is that this isn't necessarily saying much, and almost certainly not enough.

One reason I'm grateful for the Emily Nusssbaum piece from which I've quoted above is that, while I'm pretty aware that The Good Wife isn't reaching the audience it should, I tend to forget just how underappreciated it is. Is it really possible to think that just because the show takes seriously the role of women in many areas of society, it's "for women"? Now that Emily has shared this bizarre notion, as I think about it, I'm kind of afraid that the answer is yes, this may be entirely possible to imagine.

(By the way, in the chunk I've quoted above, I assume what Emly means is that the charming TV maker is dead to her now, not that the poor fellow lives no more. When I first read this, I took it to mean that since the lunch in question the man had actually died. Which, even apart from being sort of startling, also wouldn't seem to make any sort of point.)

In approaching Season 6, Emily says, she "felt a twinge of protective nostalgia."

After a great season, the show didn’t even get nominated for best drama at this year’s Emmys (although the snub might be a point of pride: “The Wire” was never nominated for best drama at all). As sharp and as deep and as witty as “The Good Wife” is, it lacks all the Golden Age credentials. The series’ showrunners, Robert and Michelle King, a married couple, don’t have a pugnacious-auteur reputation or Hollywood glamour. They’re collaborative workhorses, producing twenty-two hour-long episodes a year, more than twice as many as their peers on HBO, FX, or AMC. (“True Detective” had eight episodes; “Fargo” ten.) Their series débuts every September, on schedule—no year-and-a-half-long hiatuses for them to brood about artistic aims. And on network there are ads, and pressure for product integration, and the expectations of a mass audience (must be clear, must be exciting, must be familiar, must be appealing), and the strict rules implicit in corporate culture—all of which would be difficult even if CBS didn’t keep bumping “The Good Wife” back by forty minutes for football.

Goodness knows, I've screamed bloody murder often enough about the show's delayed start time during football season. The solution I've finally settled on is to program my DVR for an extra hour of recording beyond the scheduled end time, hoping that that will cover the delay. If it means I can't record something else, well, then I hope the something else is something that can be rescheduled for another time.

I might add that even though I always record The Good Wife, it's one show that I almost always manage to watch the same night. Sometimes I even watch it in real time, commercials and all -- assuming it's a night when I'm able to figure out when the damned thing is going to start.

So right off, kudos to Emily for overcoming that understandable weariness to evangelize for The Good Wife.

My second reason for being happy she has written this piece is that, as usual, she doesn't see the show quite the way I do, and the things she sees are interesting. I know, for example, that I would never have made these observations:

[E]pisode by episode, the Kings [again, showrunners Robert and Michelle] have shown themselves to be unusually flexible and pragmatic TV makers, taking risks, then backpedalling quickly when they fail, as with a repellent “Fifty Shades of Grey”-ish plot about the firm’s investigator, Kalinda Sharma, which was written out when the audience rebelled. The show’s structure is classical, built on the model pioneered by “The X-Files”: there are “case of the week” plots mixed with season-long stories, which in turn echo within the larger arc of Alicia’s transformation—into what, we don’t yet know. But “The Good Wife” resists formula at every step. The Kings go grand, then tiny, staccato to legato, turning necessities into virtues. Pressures that crush other TV shows inspire clever work-arounds. Take, for instance, the S.V.U.-inflected cases that have popped up in recent seasons—plots that could turn sleazy, like lucrative clients a firm takes to bankroll pro-bono work. Instead, the Kings have found fresh angles on pulp and noir, blending such stories with their trademark emphasis on Silicon Valley and technology, often using memorable characters like the creepy wife-killer Colin Sweeney (the great Dylan Baker).

Such broader moments also act as camouflage for the show’s true strength, its sneaky, slow-building subtlety, including a technique in which the Kings plant a story, bit by bit, to the point that viewers have no idea where the plot is going, then expose a pattern. One of the most striking such plots occurred in Season 3, when Peter Florrick, at that time the state’s attorney of Cook County, had a series of run-ins with black employees, none of which seemed like a big deal—only to have their firings suddenly appear, to those outside the office, as evidence of a damning institutional bias. The story was different from other, blunter TV portraits of racism: Peter didn’t think of himself as bigoted, but his enemies weren’t wrong. It was a smart take on the way that organizations can harbor racism without any individual being overtly hateful.

I'm not even sure I agree with every characterization here, but I certainly wouldn't have looked at the show from these angles, and they're interesting. And this take on Season 5 -- up to the shock of the death of Will Gardner (Josh Charles) seems to me quite delicious:

Last season’s even more audacious arc was a timely satire of the N.S.A., Strangelovian in tone. As with the race plot, the idea was planted in advance, in sequences that felt at first like comic side plots. When Alicia’s teen-age son’s girlfriend, whose parents are Somali, weeps on his voice mail after they break up, her recurrent hangups are misinterpreted by the N.S.A. as hints of potential terrorism—which gives the agency an excuse to eavesdrop on everyone linked to the Florricks. The entire fifth season was bracketed by scenes set in the N.S.A.’s blank cubicles, not among bigwigs but among nonentities: two Rosencrantz-and-Guildensternesque geeks who, when not trading viral videos, listen in on every call that Alicia makes. They get so caught up in the Florrick story line that they become, essentially, “Good Wife” fans. And while their spying is insidious, it isn’t some grand conspiracy, as on “Homeland” or “House of Cards.” The first tap simply leads to the second, which leads to a “three-hop” ruling, which leads to absolute surveillance of all things public and private.

Emily writes interestingly about Will's shocking departure later in the season, and about her relief at what she's seen in the first two episodes of Season 6. It's a really good piece, about a really outstanding show that somehow just hasn't gotten the attention that quite a number of significantly less ambitious and less successful shows have.

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