The Good Wife TV Review - Well Acted Legal Drama Series

WE DON’T want to sound condescending but we rarely watch local TV because of its tired old plots mostly about a baby stolen from its mom and growing up an “ampon”, or about two women fighting for the same man. Paulit-ulit. We’re now also very finicky even with the movies we watch, whether local or foreign, unlike before when we felt we must watch everything. Now, most of the time, we feel we just waste our time when we watch a movie, even the big-budgeted Hollywood flicks with eye-popping special effects.

So where do we get our fix now? From Hollywood TV drama series. We usually start watching the first season and if it manages to hold our interest, we then go to the second season. But usually, our interest quickly wanes and we stop watching, which is what happened to “Grey’s Anatomy”, “Desperate Housewives”, “Lost”, “American Horror Story” which failed to sustain our attention.

Right now, we’re hooked on legal TV series: “Scandal” with Kerry Washington (the most lurid), “Suits” with Gabriel Macht and Patrick J. Adams (which works mainly through the charisma of its lead actors), and the best of all, “The Good Wife” starring Julianna Margulies and Archie Panjabi.

The show is now on its 6th season and so far, we’ve watched up to its 3rd season. We’ve become avid fans of Julianna as Alicia Florrick and Archie as Kalinda Sharma. We so love them! Actually, not just them but the other characters also, who we’ve learned to care for, like Josh Charles as Will Gardner, Christine Baranski as Diane Lockhart, Matt Czuchry as Cary Agos.

The series have flawed, morally ambiguous characters in complicated narratives with amazing story arcs, but each episode also offers stand alone intriguing ‘case of the week’ stories neatly wrapped up by the end of each hour. It’s smartly written and you can get easily hooked as it brilliantly combines the personal story of the lead character (quite complicated and multi-layered) with courtroom drama, crime stories, as well as social and political commentaries. And yes, there are also twists and turns to surprise you as the series goes along.

The series is set in Chicago and starts with Alicia standing by her husband Peter (Chris Noth) as he resigns from being State’s Attorney after being involved in a sex scandal. He gets jailed on charges of corruption and Alicia (shades of Hilary Clinton), a lawyer who chose to retire to spend time with their family for 13 years, now has to go back to law practice to support their two kids. She becomes a junior associate at the Lockhart and Garner law office. So we see her doing litigation in the courtroom and struggling to learn the ropes again, while raising their kids and dealing with her husband’s infidelity and a meddlesome mother in law at that.

Julianna as Alicia is so engaging to watch as she uses nuanced, understated acting instead of the showy kind of emoting in local soaps where it’s normal for actors to go into hysterics and chew up the scenery. But it’s not only her who’s splendid but all her co-stars, who all give solid, appealing, even compelling portrayals on their own. Even the guest stars are good, like Michael J. Fox (who has Parkinson’s disease in real life) as an unscrupulous lawyer who uses his condition to win the sympathy of the jury and judges.

If you haven’t seen “The Good Wife” yet, we strongly suggest that you get the first season right away and also be hooked on how business really gets done in legal and political systems, with trade-offs regularly done just to get through the day.