Star Trek won't be the only familiar brand name available only on the CBS All-Access streaming app, as a Good Wife spin-off built around Christina Baranski and Cush Jumbo has been officially ordered.
The series, which will debut in the spring of 2017, will be co-created by Good Wife creators Robert and Michelle King, along with, of all people, Field of Dreams writer/director Phil Alden Robinson.
There's the sticky matter of Baranski's Diane Lockhart likely despising Jumbo's Lucca Quinn at the end of the original series, thanks to Lucca conspiring with Alicia Florrick to humiliate Diane's husband in open court and perhaps irreparably harm her marriage. But maybe they'll both blame all of that on Alicia, who will be off rubbing her jaw somewhere, as unseen as Kalinda eventually became on Good Wife proper.
On the one hand, there's not an enormous audience overlap between Good Wife and Star Trek. On the other, CBS needs to turn All-Access into a service people feel they need to subscribe to even if they already pay for one or more of Hulu, Netflix, or Amazon. Content involving familiar brands – and, in the case of this particular spin-off, returning characters – helps, but so does building up the overall library so that eventually people won't feel like they're subscribing for only one show.
The Good Wife had long since exhausted Alicia Florrick's story, but we'll have to see if there's enough left to Diane's – and enough to Lucca beyond being a partial Kalinda replacement – to carry a show without her.