“I do believe I had that.”
Me. Yes. That’s a quote from me. Regarding my prediction, months ago, on how the show would end. And that’s all we’re going to say about that.
Something struck me as I was digesting the aftermath of The Good Wife‘s series finale, “End”: I love this show for different reasons than most of the other people opining on it. Everybody — even writers and publications that didn’t cover the series at all this season — weighed in on the finale. In the kindest of lights, the reviews were mixed; in the harshest of views, it went beyond disappointing.
I disagree. Wholeheartedly, in fact. For the way this series moved through its seven seasons, this goodbye felt almost perfect. Going into it, you knew two things were inevitable:
1. Creators Robert and Michelle King were going to play with ambiguity, leaving all fans of the series with nary a moment of true resolution. They wanted to prove that you can end things like this on a network like CBS, where the typical finales come fully equipped with a nice, neat bow on them. They’ve made no secret, especially during Emmy season, that they feel as though they should receive extra points for pulling all this off on the network that airs their series, and they’re right. The messiness of “End” was one final way to accomplish that.
2. It was always going to be circular. Even if you read the most shallow of shallow interviews with the brain-trust behind the series, you knew that pretty much everybody involved in the production wanted the story to come back around. The Kings have even noted that they knew how they wanted everything to end before the first season was even finished. With that in mind, it wasn’t hard to predict that we would ultimately end up back at a news conference, Peter (Chris Noth) resigning from something while Alicia (Julianna Margulies) stands there, battle (re)born.
If there was a third inescapable fate, it would have been that these 60 minutes would be disenchanted as hell. In a video that went live on CBS’s website after the finale concluded, Robert King noted how he wanted the end to be two things that he felt were the hallmarks of the show: cynical and humorous.
Cynical and humorous, it was.
This is why I found episode 22 to be 100 percent satisfying: I loved the show for its unforgiving cynicism, its consistently dark wit, and its wildly absurdist humor that viewers could either scoff at or embrace. I appreciated and respected, to the umpteenth degree, its often-powerful meditation on contemporary feminism, yes, but did I feel like this series lost any of that value because it wound down while being centered around the scumbag husband? Not in the least. It was the only end that seemed logical.
Besides: there was never any true way out for most of these characters anyway, if only because the people who created these characters have a very skeptical and very honest world view. We should all know this by now. I mean, come on. Did you really think we would end up with Alicia and Jason (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) living on some peanut farm, 20 years later, in full and complete bliss? Or, for that matter — and perhaps more importantly — did you even want to see Alicia and Jason living on some peanut farm, 20 years later, in full and complete bliss?
I can’t imagine why. That’s simply not The Good Wife way.
Instead, The Good Wife way means that Alicia is going to get slapped by Diane (Christine Baranski) in a hallway because Alicia sold out Diane’s husband Kurt (Gary Cole) to keep her own estranged husband out of jail.
Instead, The Good Wife way means that Eli (Alan Cumming) is going to start the process of moving all of Peter’s donors and supporters over to Alicia for the kind of political future that probably breaks Peter’s heart more than an actual divorce ever could.
Instead, The Good Wife way means that the man watching in the wings at the press conference actually isn’t Jason; instead, it’s some silly janitor who represents little more than a figment of Alicia’s often-clouded imagination.
Instead, The Good Wife way means that nobody wins.
Or, well, at the very least, we’re forced to move forward without ever really knowing for sure if anybody eventually wins, and that’s the beauty of it. Was Alicia too late? Did Jason skip town? Is Peter’s political career really over? Is Grace (Makenzie Vega) really not going to college for a year? Does this mean the end for the Alicia/Diane working relationship?
We don’t know the answers to these questions. That’s a good thing.
The final, most intriguing issue this last episode juggled, of course, was where the (literal) ghost of Will Gardner (Josh Charles) sits in the spirit of Alicia Florrick. What we learned is that … well, it sits exactly where we thought it sat all this time. She’s always going to love him, she misses him, she feels as though he was her one true shot at love.
Him essentially giving her permission — and even advocating for her — to move forward with Jason felt, finally, as though Alicia can put the relationship she held with her former boss to rest for good. She’ll always love him, as she says to his ghost, but as Ghost Will says back, Alicia essentially got the best of both worlds, what with the romance and the life she built with Peter. Plus, Jason wasn’t wrong when he told her that she “needs to be needed. It keeps you from tipping over.” So, yes. Alicia might still be mourning the loss of Will, but as the ghost so smartly put it, “it was romantic because it didn’t happen.”
The same can be said about how we say goodbye to The Good Wife. All of those conclusions we didn’t get? Well, in hindsight, they might just end up growing to be more and more romantic as time passes, in large part because, well, they never happened (until an inevitable reboot on Hulu in 15 years — kidding!). And in real life, yes, happy endings can be sparse, but full resolution is nearly nonexistent. Problems don’t end, they linger. The past is built to haunt more than heal. We live with what we have, and we have the things with which we can manage to live.
It took seven years, but Alicia Florrick seems more accustomed to this now than she ever did before. There was the slap. The tears. The red face. The gathering. The posture. The walk. The behind. The future. She earned every inch of that smack Diane laid on her face, but she also earned the composure with which she able to walk away at that very humbling, very messy, very unpleasant moment.
At the end of the day, that’s what The Good Wife has always been about: the promise of an uncertain future barely being enough to outweigh the reality of a damaging past.
It’s hard to imagine it — or want it — any other way.
Approaching The Bench
My god, the acting. I mean, honestly. My god, the acting. From Diane’s facial reactions to Kurt’s affair in court to the final 45 seconds, when we watch Alicia gather herself after all that’s happened … there are going to be a million and one reasons why all of us who love The Good Wife will miss The Good Wife, but my guess is that it might take a series re-watch to fully appreciate how stellar some of these performances were over time. Do your job and give all of the cast all of the awards, Emmy. They deserve it.
Well, get ready, CBS. That nasty letter about all those characters we didn’t see is coming. You do get points for at least mentioning Colin Sweeney (Dylan Baker), though.
When Alicia started thinking about who she wants to come home to, and it started with Jason before going to Peter, my mind immediately went to, “if they run through this scenario a third time, it’s gotta be Will, right?” Once they started that scenario a third time … I, out loud, in an apartment all by myself, said, loudly, “Yes!” It seemed inevitable it was going to go there, but man, once it happened, a tingle went up and down my back. Which leads me to …
… The Will/Alicia stuff. I loved it. Loved it, with a capital, “L”. It provided a very acute nostalgic feeling that represented what it was like to fall in love with the series in the first place. Whine all you want about the later years, and this final season, and blah, blah, blah, blah … but if you’re a fan of this show, seeing those two on screen together again really should have been a shot of adrenaline into your television nervous system. If nothing else, it just reminded everybody of how unbelievably potent their chemistry always was whenever they were on screen together. It almost even lowered the impressive meter on the fun rapport that Jason and Alicia have. Like, “Oh, no. Now, this is what it’s like to see Alicia like a man!” The whole move/trick/whatever you want to call, it was just a ton of fun. Things like that don’t always work, especially in series finales, but to me, that couldn’t have been more appropriate.
So, Cary (Matt Czuchry) is going to be a teacher now? OK. I can get with that.
I’m not sure if any of you followed up with all the Extra Internet Stuff that was offered in light of the series finale, but as I said before, I ate up as much as I could, as quickly as I could. One thing that struck me about the interviews that the Kings gave was how persistent they were about noting how they wanted the final sequence to depict the notion that Alicia has become Peter (in the pilot, Alicia slaps Peter in the hallway; in the finale, Diane slaps Alicia). Maybe I’m just too stupid, but I don’t fully grasp that. To me, Alicia has been wronged. Over the course of seven years. Wronged.
But Peter? Who did we ever see piss in his milk? Yes, Alicia has become smarmy and conniving and selfish and all these awful things that she wasn’t seven years ago, but we actually saw, in real time, the things that led to her becoming that person. Thus it must be deduced, on some level at least, that such behavior is justified these days. Peter, though? Not so much. He was just an asshole from the minute we met him. Alicia, at her core, represents the product of life’s complexities taking their toll on the human existence. I just don’t think you can correlate the two, at least through the lens to which we have been subjected over the course of this series. I understand this quote from Michelle — “The victim becomes the victimizer” — and I think there’s a little bit of truth to that, but to draw straight lines … nope. Can’t do it, won’t do it.
Also coming out of the post-finale press? The notion that they actually did want Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston) to represent Peter throughout this final trial, but Preston couldn’t do it, so they had to scramble for an alternative and landed on her husband. Boo.
“You tend to confuse responsibility and love.” And there, friends, is Alicia Florrick summed up in seven words.
When Alicia asks Ghost Will if he really actually did hate her and he says he did … man, that’s just the best. Why? Because I believed that. Wholeheartedly, I believed that. If she actually were ever to talk to him again, in that situation, needing that kind of advice, I’ve not a single doubt in my mind that his response would have been exactly the same. Of course he hated her. Why wouldn’t he? It’s one of the many tiny things that made this episode so great.
Oh, yeah, and by the way? Peter takes a plea deal for one year of probation. Did any of you even catch that?
Along those same lines, too: so, the bullets were lost and then found and then lost and then found and then they were going to work for the defense, and then they worked for the prosecution, and then they worked for the defense, and then they worked for the … enough already. The only good thing to come out of that merry-go-round was when Lucca (Cush Jumbo, who I’m really interested in seeing what she does next) didn’t know the plan and kept pushing for the theory they had previously decided upon to Judge Cuesta (David Paymer). Hey. It was kind of funny.
So … what happened to Monica (Nikki M. James) again? And where did all that race discrimination stuff go?
Really, though. What. A. Slap.
Here’s a question: do you believe that The Good Wife marks the end of the 22-episode television season as we know it? This has been debated for weeks now, and you want to know what? I do. Part of what wore the series down for viewers was what wore the series down for its actors. Let’s not forget that Josh Charles said he wanted to leave at least half a season before he actually did. Julianna Margulies recently noted that there isn’t enough money in the world that would get her to do television again after doing The Good Wife. We all know what happened with Archie Panjabi, real-life Margulies drama or not. Alan Cumming told The Guardian recently that he was having conversations with his team a season or two ago about leaving the series because he felt his character was becoming too one-dimensional. Good, smart, compelling TV is hard enough to produce when it’s presented via the in-vogue spectrum that is the 10- to 13-episode arc.
This is why people love AMC, HBO, Showtime, et al, and why networks like NBC, CBS and ABC have been losing credibility by the Internet click through the last five to ten years. The Good Wife came along at a time when network television was primed and ready to go for something as messy, deep, intelligent, layered, and cynical as this series was, so it slipped in through the cracks and made the most of a unique opportunity. Moving forward, though? I just can’t see, considering how fickle popular culture’s audience is these days combined with how taxing the process can be to an actor, how the 22-episode formula lives on. I already believe this is a far more important series than most people give it credit for, but if The Good Wife ends up being one of the final examples of an era of television, that only further cements its place among the medium’s best dramas in the last 10 to 20 years. Or, at least in my opinion (wink).
Finally, at the risk of being too self-oriented (in a weekly essay that has consistently been far too self-oriented for any good taste, I might add), I want to close all this nonsense by noting how important this series is to me on a personal level. My friend Mark, whom I haven’t spoken with in far too long, turned me onto this show about four years ago by mentioning I might like it. It wasn’t long until I got my hands on all the DVDs, caught up, and never looked back. It’s been an absolute thrill to write about this series, and a trillion “thank yous” would never be enough to express my gratitude toward PopMatters for allowing me to wander aimlessly through this last season via the written word.
It, really, honestly, for the last couple years, was all I ever wanted to do: write about The Good Wife. This publication allowed me that platform, and I’m never going to stop being grateful for that. Your own feelings on the series might be mixed. Maybe you loved a few seasons. Maybe you hated most of the seasons. Maybe everything was perfect until the end. Maybe the end was the only thing of value. For me — and for reasons that go far beyond looking in on some superb acting and brilliant screenwriting each week — The Good Wife is going to go down somewhere in the top 10 on my all-time list, maybe even top five, depending on which day you ask me. As far as I’m concerned, Robert and Michelle King got it right. Maybe not all the time as a whole (again: where’d Lemond Bishop go?), but certainly most of the time. Thank you, Mr. and Mrs. King. Thank you, PopMatters. Thank you, The Good Wife.