GOODBYE, GOOD WIFE
Co-creators reflect on what made genre-defying series so unique
THE GOOD WIFE
Series finale Sunday, Global/CBS
As The Good Wife wraps up after seven seasons, it finds its namesake heroine, Alicia Florrick, facing the same dilemma as when it began: defending her husband, now the governor of Illinois, who is mired in a scandal that could send him back to prison.
The husband-and-wife team of Robert and Michelle King — the show’s creators and executive producers — recently mused on what made The Good Wife so good:
It’s “really tricky” to maintain, Michelle King said. “You tell serialized stories with not just your core cast, but with ancillary characters who aren’t regular, and you don’t have access to those actors on a regular basis. But we wanted to be able to tell what’s going on not only with Alicia, say, but also with her mom (Stockard Channing) and her brother (Dallas Roberts),” just two of the show’s countless recurring characters. “It becomes a real challenge for everyone in the production to juggle all those actors’ schedules.”
SPLENDID ACTORS IN COMPLEX ROLES
“The writing sets a tone for the actors and then gets out of the way,” Robert King said. “For instance, in our fourth-ever episode we needed an antagonist, but instead of a mean and angry male lawyer, we thought, ‘What if it’s a pregnant woman, and what if she uses her pregnancy to break up depositions whenever she wants to: ‘I feel a pain!’
“Then we brought in Martha Plimpton, who sent that idea into the stratosphere. THEN we needed to have her back, because we wanted to know more of who this character is and more of what Martha would do with it.”
COMEDY AND DRAMA INTERTWINED
“We deliberately included comedy just to keep us from being earnest,” Michelle King said. “And we have really benefited from getting actors with comic chops.”
The show’s slate of guest stars with comic roots is vast, including Michael J. Fox, Nathan Lane, Matthew Morrison and Carrie Preston, who was unforgettably hilarious in her handful of appearances over six seasons as madcap hotshot lawyer Elsbeth Tascioni.
And among the regular cast, the Kings cited Christine Baranski (who plays a fellow lawyer of Alicia), Alan Cumming, Matt Czuchry and the departed Josh Charles for their comic skills.