Spoiler alert: contains discussion of The Good Wife season five. Don’t read on if you wish to avoid details
In an era so riddled with spoilers that it’s best to avoid social media entirely if you’re behind on a TV series, it was a near-miracle that The Good Wife managed to keep such a big secret this year. In the mid-point season five episode called Dramatics, Your Honor (and they weren’t messing around with that title) the legal drama went down the road of a shocking courtroom shooting, brutally bumping off Will Gardner, who had, until that point, been one of its core cast members. It wasn’t the time for Will to leave the series, let alone to kill the character off so finally – he had huge storylines that had been building all season. His romance with Julianna Margulies’ Alicia Florrick was largely played out, after she had broken away from his law firm and set up on her own, but he was about to be undone by an investigation into voter fraud that had huge ramifications for all of them. And then, with one chance grab at a gun, he was gone.
The UK broadcast on More4 came some time after the US, which made it less of a shock, but when it originally aired on CBS in the States it was a true “did that really just happen?” moment. Such an audacious move encapsulated the breathtaking confidence that made The Good Wife soar this year. It’s the highest ranking US show in our list, putting it above the traditional HBO big-hitters including Game of Thrones and True Detective, which is even more impressive given that it’s a network series, which runs to 22 episodes a season, 43 minutes an episode, and has a procedural element to it that wraps up its smaller stories on a week-by-week basis. By rights it shouldn’t have the storytelling freedom of cable shows, but somehow, it manages to be as subversive, if not more so. In October, Emily Nussbaum wrote in the New Yorker that The Good Wife has “revealed itself to be a sneaky condemnation of pretty much every institution under capitalism”, which is more than you can say for the CSI franchise.
It’s unusual for a series to hit its stride so far in, but by now, five seasons of experience have hardened its resolve. It moved away from being a family-focused drama about a wife standing by her husband – they’re only together now for the sake of their image – with a side of law and politics, to a meaty political and legal drama in its own right, with a side of family. It juggles all three elements remarkably well, partly due to the fact that its storylines are typically of-the-moment and bitingly satirical. Television sometimes struggles to incorporate technology, for example, but technology is all over The Good Wife: Google, Bitcoin and Anonymous all inspired episodes, and the NSA was written into one of the season’s main arcs, with a phonehacking plotline unfolding as revelations continued to appear in real life.
But the best thing about The Good Wife is that it always remembers to entertain. I don’t recall a mainstream TV character drinking as much as Alicia since Rust Cohle got through all those Lone Stars on True Detective, and he certainly wasn’t having as much fun. Alicia drank while watching her favourite TV show Darkness at Noon, with Diane, with Will, with anyone who could knock back a shot or fancied tackling one of those enormous wine glasses with her. Regular guest stars Michael J Fox (Louis Canning), Carrie Preston (Elsbeth Tascioni) and Dylan Baker (Colin Sweeney) kept it lively and consistent, with enough in-jokes to satisfy fans, and, most enjoyably of all, the cast was truly diverse – but only because it just was, not for the sake of giving any character a plodding diversity storyline. The Good Wife, then: network television’s class act. Let’s raise (another) glass to Alicia.
