TV REVIEW: 'THE GOOD WIFE'

Julianna Margulies Serves Up A Tasty Cliffhanger a la Mode

By: Clare Elfman

October 18, 2010

I anxiously awaited the new season of The Good Wife. This show has me hooked, so on Tuesday nights at 9:50, I take my coffee and my plate of goodies down to my bedroom which is also my TV sanctuary, I get comfy in my deeply mattressed bed, tuck in my down comforter, settle my tray and enter a world which left me, last episode, with a "cliffhanger."  Peter (Chris Noth) is going back into politics and, cameras on him, he has held out a hand for Alicia, his good wife, and if she takes it, it's a commitment to the man who betrayed her. Meanwhile, the political manipulator, conniving Eli Gold, a great performance by Alan Cumming, was holding Alicia's cellphone while she decides whether to go onstage to join the ambitious husband.   On the cellphone is a text message from the "other man" who might make Alicia happy. Eli deletes the message. She will never know that Will professed his love; he will never know that she didn't get the message. And that is a big cliff.

That is the same sort of anticipation that kept me on the edge of my seat in 1935 when I paid a dime to get into a Saturday matinee at Bard's Theater in Baldwin Hills: two full features, a newsreel, a cartoon and a "cliffhanger" in which the hero gets boshed falling off a cliff or stuck on a railway track with the train bearing down, absolutely certain death until the next week when he is miraculously saved to go on for another death-defying adventure.

This same engineered anticipation went into the soapy tales I loved to hear on the radio in the late '40s when I rocked the baby's carriage and leaned into the radio adventures of Our Gal Sunday, the tale of a simple girl from the backwoods of Appalachia who marries a rich and titled Englishman.

These are more sophisticated times. We wouldn't watch anything so transparently contrived, but it's the same sort of excited anticipation that keeps me coming back to Good Wife week after week. It used to be Dexter, also well-written, but I pass on that one now that it's so formula. Each week, Dexter kills a bad guy, cuts him up and packages him neatly, tosses him, and the next week another guy; or House, also well-written with good characters, but each week he has to solve a life-threatened medical case which he usually does just before the final commercial.

The Good Wife is a cut above. And it's a woman's show -- my demographic. Well-written characters, an engrossing story, and a great cast. Now, you might call it an extremely slick soap, but the characters are too credible and, as a bonus, since Alicia (Julianna Margulies) is a lawyer, we get a good court case each week.  (One of the reasons I liked the late, great Boston Legal.)

Here is the storyline that gets me running upstairs to the fridge when my plate is empty to be provisioned for the next segment:

Peter has betrayed his wife with ladies of the night, and his political enemy has seen to it that the media plastered his misadventures all over the TV screen. But Alicia is the good wife who worries about her children who love their father, and she gives her errant husband a chance to change, takes him back to her apartment but not to her bed.  Alicia has taken a job with a good law firm and is reacquainted with old school boyfriend Will. She's not as ambitious as Hillary Clinton. She's the good wife who loves her kids. The two children are real, not the bizarre, weird, chunky twins in Hung who looked so oddly unlike their slender handsome parents. These are normal kids who want to help their father, but, like normal, inexperienced kids, they innocently fall into traps. Peter has a wasp mother who is herself ambitious for her son. Alicia now has a gay brother. So is she the "good wife" who stays out of loyalty, or will she opt for her own freedom? And last week, the husband did something really caring, so he is possibly actually trying to change.

The supporting cast is first-rate. Alicia's boss lady is Christine Baranski; you may remember her from that wonderful dance scene in Birdcage where gay Robin Williams asks help from his son's mother and they have a "moment" before being discovered by Robin's "other."  This politically progressive lady falls for a super conservative ballistics expert (Gary Cole) who was a great favorite of mine back in 1996 when he played the devil in American Gothic. And a real treat is a relatively new face, Kolinda, the gal who finds information any which way she can -- a sexual, clever lady who knows all the cops. Archie Panjabi gets the info by fair means or foul.

Alan Cumming, who is now the voice of PBS for the Masterpiece series, played a great, smarmy, dishonest clerk in a 1995 British film, Circle  of Friends. Now he's out to push Peter into higher office. In this episode, he's blatantly trying to woo the gays and the Jews by getting Peter to hold a Yom Kippur break-the-fast dinner. Peter's waspy  mother wonders if they can serve pork. Eli Gold is doing a balancing act at the table at which Peter's daughter questions some of Israel's actions and unsettles the table. Alicia saves the evening by making a toast. This is the day of Atonement, she says. So let's atone.

What a good hour. You want to enjoy the next one with me? Big bed, plenty of room. Come on over, but bring goodies for the tray. Trust me, the show is not soapy, but it is slick and cliff-hangy when Will and Alicia's eyes meet, he thinks she knows, she doesn't know; the son knows and wants to tell but Eli won't let him get involved; the daughter has done something and she's too embarrassed to tell.

So real and so intriguing that it's easy to forget the writers who sit at their computers dreaming all this up. The magic of fiction! Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh will be forever remembered in Streetcar Named Desire, but who thinks about Tennessee Williams who sat at his old typewriter (before computers) probably sloshed and trying to survive as gay in difficult, non-accepting times? So who on Earth are Michelle and Robert King who dreamed up The Good Wife?

I don't want to think of them either. I want to watch this real family and wonder what I might do if I were married to a guy who betrayed the marriage bed -- a guy who needs me now, and I've just met this old love, handsome and unencumbered by scandal. I could so easily escape, but I have two kids who still love their father.  Which way do I go?

And the coffee is finished and the goodies are gone, and I have to wait until next Tuesday.