“The Good Wife” is back for a new season, and I have a quick review of the premiere coming up just as soon as I stick with retail rules…
New night and time. New hairstyle. Fancy new office for Alicia. New opening title sequence (downplaying the incident that gave the show a title everyone now seems to regret). Frequent references to how different – dare I say new? – Alicia is acting. Even the episode title (which at one point was “Bad Bad Thing”) is “A New Day.” Think CBS and the Kings wanted to be sure we understood just how new everything was?
On the one hand, I understand that CBS wants to expand the show’s audience and also introduce it to any newcomers who perhaps didn’t watch on Tuesdays but will on Sundays. On the other, this is a show that worked very, very well for the past two seasons, and largely falls under the heading of If It Ain’t Broke…
Fortunately, most of the “new”ness was largely cosmetic – and the sort of status quo re-establishing you get in plenty of season premieres, with or without a timeslot move – and the core of the episode felt very much within “The Good Wife” formula: case with five or six twists, Alicia and Cary trying to out-swindle the other, obligatory social media references (the MMOG expert, the tutor’s impromptu dance video), colorful judge (played by Fred “Sy Ableman?” Melamed), Will and Diane wrestling with ethics vs. money, Eli being more clever than the rest of the world combined, etc. There were tweaks here and there – I enjoyed Kalinda’s flirtatious rivalry with Sophia much more than I did the feud with Blake last year, and am disappointed we likely won’t see her again now that Kelli Giddish is a regular on “Law & Order: SVU” – but this was more or less the show it was on Tuesdays, and that’s reassuring, even if the episode as a whole wasn’t among the series’ most memorable.
What did everybody else think? And has the move to a new night – and one that will make the show a frequent victim to football overruns for the next several months (as it was in New York and Philly last night) – made you more or less likely to continue with it?