A quick review of last night’s “The Good Wife” coming up just as soon as I insist our children be raised Jewish…
As I mentioned a while back, I don’t have cable in my office (though I did install an actual TV and DVD player in there since I wrote that post) for a variety of reasons, including the fact that more than 90% of what I watch is either something I see in primetime when I’m home with my DVR, that I get on a DVD screener, or that I can stream on my iPad. Certain shows tend to get lost in the shuffle of this set-up, like most of FX’s Thursday comedies, or like “The Good Wife,” which virtually fell off my radar after the first four or five shows of this season. I’m busy with other things on Sunday nights, and I have no easy way to watch it in the office, and eventually the episodes started getting deleted off my DVR, even as I said that I wanted to catch up.
But one of the advantages of the show bridging the gap between network and cable is that it’s much simpler to jump back into than if I were to try tuning in on a random “Sons of Anarchy” after missing seven episodes in the middle of a season. There wasn’t even a “Previously, on ‘The Good Wife'” segment, and yet I could pick up on virtually everything happening between the firm and Louis Canning, the changed circumstances of the gubernatorial campaign, etc. (And though I’d like to go back and see what I missed at some point, I was glad to see that Kalinda’s husband was written out while I was away.)
I certainly picked a good one to come back to, as “The Seven Day Rule” sat in that “Good Wife” sweet spot of ambiguous morality, characters we like having genuine conflicts with one another, and legal maneuvering that didn’t feel too much like the Kings just trying to fictionalize some meme or news story into the show. We know Alicia can’t join Canning’s firm because Michael J. Fox will have an NBC sitcom next season, but the idea of her becoming a partner under these circumstances – and the way that will change the way she views both Will and Diane – is a very promising one. (And her sense of disappointment with everyone who matters in her life also helped lead to her great drunken outburst in front of the reporter, a fine comic moment for Julianna Margulies.) And if this is it for Nathan Lane on the show (for now, anyway, as no “Good Wife” guest star disappears forever, unless they get their own series), it’s been a pleasure to see how effective he can be in a much more buttoned-down mode than he’s generally asked to play.
For those of you who’ve been watching the season all along, how have you found it? Was Kalinda’s husband the only bump along the way, or have there been other issues? And how did you like the way things resolved themselves here?