Season Three of The Good Wife premieres tonight, Sunday, September 25, at 9 pm Eastern / 8 pm Central, on CBS. The show stars Julianna Margulies as Alicia Florrick, Chris Noth as her husband Peter Florrick, Josh Charles as her boss Will Gardner, Christine Baranski as her other boss Diane Lockhart, Archie Panjabi as her co-worker and friend Kalinda Sharma, and Alan Cumming as Peter’s campaign manager Eli Gold.
When the series began, Peter was State’s Attorney in Chicago and Alicia was a housewife. When it’s revealed that Peter has dallied with a prostitute while in office, Alicia’s world falls apart. Well, mostly. Peter goes to prison on corruption charges and Alicia decides to go back to work as a junior associate at the firm of Stern, Lockhart, and Gardner, where her old college flame Will Gardner is now a hot-shot and named partner. After raising two kids to their teens as a stay-at-home mom, Alicia finds herself a working mother — and essentially a single parent — inside the high-pressure environment of a big law firm, while also trying to avoid the media spotlight turned on her after her husband’s disgrace.
Over the first two seasons, Alicia has proven her mettle as an attorney and secured a junior associate job despite layoffs at the firm. Peter gets released from prison and decides to run for his old job — and wins it, as of the end of Season Two. Alicia has also re-kindled her attraction to Will, but, having initially chosen not to leave Peter, she has struggled to keep those feelings in check. The revelation of a new betrayal at the end of the second season, however, has her desperate to make a change, and, for once, not caring about the consequences.
Here’s why this show is worth watching as it heads into its third season:
1. The writing. Creators Michelle and Robert Kelly and their compadres are always ahead of their audience. Like David Simon, they don’t give you everything you need to know right away. Things that seem strange or discordant — an odd strand of dialogue, one character’s quizzical or guarded reaction — may not be explained for several scenes or even episodes. And just when you think this show is telling the obvious story or taking a client into cliche, it changes directions. As a viewer, I like being surprised. The great thing about the surprises on The Good Wife is that once they’re revealed, you can see how they’ve been stitched into the broader pattern of the story all along.
2. The acting. Although Margulies actually won the lead actress Emmy this year, and Panjabi won for supporting actress last year, just about every key actor on this show has been nominated. These people are real good at what they do.
3. The supporting characters. (See also #1 and #2.) The smaller roles on this show don’t go underwritten. These guys are not throwaways, types, or fillers. They make life difficult for the main characters and complicate the story in adroitly scripted ways, because they are part of the story. Peter’s possessive mother Jackie, locked in a perpetual power struggle with Alicia, is suspicious of anyone who tries to get close to her son. Alicia’s gay younger brother Owen is a bit of a loudmouth, and a lot self-absorbed. Peter and Alicia’s teenage kids: good kids, total teenagers. Glenn Childs, the new State’s Attorney, is smarmy and scary.
4. Kalinda. Archie Panjabi’s character deserves her own mention. The house investigator at Alicia’s firm, she’s a cynic with a hot wardrobe who keeps her private life private and knocks back tequila shots with Chicago PD detectives to get her job done. Her personal reticence isn’t just a gimmick, though: as we slowly learn, Kalinda has taken great pains, at some cost, to become a cipher. This blankness both lays the groundwork for and then inevitably damages her growing friendship with Alicia. And, bee tee dubs, unlike queer characters on most other television shows, Kalinda gets laid with regularity.
5. Everybody loves their stories. This show is very smart about lawyering and politics, but it’s not a procedural. At its heart it’s an unusually well-written and complex family drama. Otherwise known as a soap opera.
So, check it out. This is the best drama on broadcast television right now.
