Via: Tuned In
Spoilers for last night’s The Good Wife below: I’ve never lost faith in The Good Wife, but I’ll admit that in the first half of season four, I thought the show was flagging–largely, but not simply, because of the misbegotten Kalinda’s-ex-husband storyline. The show was still able to produce excellent episodes, but it really feels like it’s rallied since the beginning of the year. Last night’s outing, “Red Team / Blue Team,” was the peak of the season to date, a likely candidate for my Best Episodes of 2013 list and an (almost) top-to-bottom an example of why no other broadcast drama is pulling off this level of entertainment and subtlety at the same time. A few reasons why, in hail-of-bullets form: * The Good Wife does great courtroom procedural drama and great serial drama, and one reason I suspect it’s been able to thrive with a (fairly) big audience on CBS is that they’re often independent of one another. That is, if you don’t care about the running story, you can still enjoy the trials and vice versa. But when the court case and the running stories sync up, as they did in “Red Team / Blue Team,” the show can really clobber you. Getting to see Alicia and Cary pit themselves, in surrogate mock-trial battle, against the self-interested creature that is Lockhart-Gardner was a real treat. * The show allows its characters to be messy. No one is entirely unimpeachable here. We root for the firm when it’s under outside threat, but when it comes to dealing with its business and sharing its spoils, it’s as cuddly as Roman senators daggering each other in the Forum. We sympathize with Will and Diane, but they can turn ice-cold–including to their own employees–when need dictates. And yes, even Alicia can act self-interestedly. She’s skated ethical lines on cases before, and she can’t not have known that she was getting the partnership offer to divide-and-conquer the fourth-years’ rebellion (as well as to leverage Peter’s potential election win). She took it anyway,
Read full story at: Tuned In
Posted: February 18th, 2013
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