Oct 23 2009
The Good Wife Check-Up
I made a promise to myself that, this TV season, I’d give any new shows I watched five episodes before I decided to dump them as I feel I’ve been a bit hasty in the past (though, to be fair, I did break that rule with Stargate: Universe, but I had never really intended on permanently watching that show anyway). Unfortunately, I have to say that The Good Wife will be the first new subscription on my DVR to be deleted. I feel a little bad about it because it’s not a terrible show and it clearly has an admirable feminist agenda, but, in the end, it’s just not very memorable.
There was one major hurdle to my appreciation of this show and that’s its star, Julianna Margulies. I’ve never been a fan of hers and, during the years that I watched ER she was always one of my least favorite characters. I haven’t had nearly as much of a problem with her in The Good Wife, but I do think that show would have been aided by a more talented and charismatic leading lady. At the end of the day, Alicia Florek is really a fairly dull character who has found herself in an interesting situation. The role is really begging for someone to add some flourish to it and Margulies delivers just what’s on the page, nothing more. One of the main issues that I have with Alicia is that there’s no real conflict with her other than what comes from outside. She’s just too good. I have sympathy for her crappy situation of being a wronged housewife who gave up her career only to have her private life dragged through the mud, but I’m not really interested in watching an hour every week of a saintly woman battling all the mean people around her. I want to see this woman’s warts and, at this point, her biggest wart is that she’s too passive and that makes for really boring television.
One major reason I was interested in watching this show was its impressive supporting, which is chock full of actors that I’ve really dug in past roles. Unfortunately, Christine Baranski (totally wasted), Josh Charles and Matt Czuchry seem to have been warming the bench, waiting for the moment they can actually play a role, rather than an archetype. Archie Panjabi has a slightly more interesting character than those three, but a lot of what she’s been given thus far is pretty one-note. Chris Noth is really the only actor in the entire show that seems like he’s benefiting from his participation. There’s some irony to the fact that all of Noth’s scenes take place in prison, when it seems like the other actors are the ones being restricted.
The show’s lead actress has declared publicly that The Good Wife is not a procedural. Based on what we’ve been shown so far, she’s dead wrong. Just because Alicia occasionally has rows with her mother-in-law, visits her husband in prison and has two kids that she sometimes sees in between work hours, that doesn’t change that the primary thrust of this show is the winning of a legal case each episode. That’s basically the definition of a procedural. Law & Order has added a character’s battle with cancer to the mix this season, but you know what, it’s still a law and order procedural.
Since I’m now ditching this show, I also want to take a moment to address the feminist angle that the creators seem to be angling for. I dig the whole working mom thing and I’m really into the idea that they’re trying to harness the power of a woman whose been victimized, but there’s a major issue I have with the way its been executed. So far, pretty much every case Alicia has tried has involved her emotionally connecting with her client as a wronged woman, as if, somehow, this is the only thing that defines Alicia. In some ways this goes back to my previous point about Alicia being an underdeveloped character, but its bothersome to me that the writers seem intent on defining her only on the basis of her wife/mother/victim roles. It’s all surface. For this to be a truly feminist show, she needs to be more than that and they need to not take the easy way out of having her express empathy for a woman that’s been raped or a wife who’s lost her husband at every turn. It’s cheap and it’s not winning this feminist over. I like my feminine icons to be real.
This show had a lot of elements that could have added into something more, but it just didn’t have the courage to take any risks. It’s an adequate and average production and will fit well amongst the other procedurals in CBS’s stable, it may actually last for several years, but there just isn’t enough there there for me to keep watching.
