“What do such large, loose, baggy monsters, with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary, artistically mean?” Henry James asked, in a 1921 essay about very long novels. A vast book like “War and Peace,” he wrote, was indisputably full of life; the problem was coherence. A writer could paint on “too ample a canvas” and find “pictorial fusion” elusive. The resulting story could be exciting and resonant, and yet of “no more use for expressing a main intention than a wheel without a hub is of use for moving a cart.”
The loose-baggy-monster problem bedevils long-running television shows like “The Good Wife,” which concluded, with a rich and unsettling final episode—“an ending that commanded respect,” as my colleague Emily Nussbaum put it—last Sunday. (I’ve been in mourning since then and am, frankly, bewildered by the news that a spin-off series is coming in 2017.) Such shows are like boxing matches: they are improvised performances that go on for as long as possible (in this case, seven seasons and a hundred and fifty-six episodes), with narratives full of feints and jabs as well as solid hits. By the end, the ring is littered with abandoned plots, orphaned characters, and forgotten themes—evidence not just of an exhausting and unpredictable battle but of everything that the show’s creators started but never finished saying. By the end of “The Good Wife,” we’d watched its heroine, Alicia Florrick, build a law career, run for office, turn friends into enemies and vice versa, and grow either independent or lonely, depending on your frame of mind. The question was, what did it all mean?
As “The Good Wife” approached its finale, it gave us hints about the definitive statement it might leave behind. For a long time, a tension had been growing in the structure of the show. Even as its weekly legal-procedural plot rolled on, those events came to seem irrelevant and boring, not just to the audience but to Alicia; meanwhile, the state of Alicia’s soul—the slow-burning subject at the heart of the whole series—seemed ever more troubled and unknowable. In a world that was increasingly out of joint, Alicia seemed to be progressing toward some new and unpredictable state of mind. For her, transformation, liberation, comeuppance, exhaustion, nihilism, despair, and rebellion were all plausible. At times, she appeared on the verge of handing down her own unsentimental verdict on the universe, like a power-suited version of Ivan Karamazov, the character in Dostoevsky who decides that he doesn’t like the world God has made and tells Him, “I return my ticket.”
“The Good Wife” heightened this existential suspense by spending much of its final season on a narrative fakeout. It introduced an obviously insufficient new love interest, a private investigator named Jason Crouse. In many ways, Jason was the male version of Kalinda Sharma, the show’s original (and beloved) P.I.—he had an appealing beard, a sexy voice, and many leather jackets—and he and Alicia made love, ate pizza, and traded steamy texts. But the affair never felt real or substantive, and eventually we realized that it was as unreal for Alicia as it was for us. Jason was simply too shallow a character for Alicia to love. In the final episode, Alicia acknowledged that she saw Jason as a consolation prize, a solution to the problem of solitude rather than a source of sustaining and fulfilling happiness. This raised a question: If Alicia wasn’t going to be happy, what, or who, was she going to be?
The measured mediocrity of the Jason subplot underscored a broader malaise. More and more, Alicia found herself aloof from life; although she had seized power as a lawyer and a woman, she had also realized that she couldn’t use that power to solve her inner problems—problems, in many cases, that had been created by the seizure of power in the first place. It seemed as though “The Good Wife” might end by resting its gaze on the distinction between power and happiness. This is well-trod territory on television, where many of the best shows, no matter how fanciful, are essentially workplace dramas exploring, allegorically, the problem of work-life balance. (“Game of Thrones” asks, among other questions, whether good parents make weak monarchs.) “The Good Wife” would have been perfectly within its rights to end with a reflection on this familiar theme.
But the show’s final episode took a different turn, reminding us that “The Good Wife” has never just been a show about power; it has also been about knowledge and the ways it can change an argument, a court case, a life. Seven seasons ago, the series began with the revelation of Peter Florrick’s infidelity. Now it ended with the revelation of another affair—this time between Kurt McVeigh, the husband of Alicia’s law partner, Diane Lockhart, and McVeigh’s former student Holly Westfall. Diane probably should have discovered the affair; in retrospect, the signs were obvious. But she missed it, perhaps willfully, just as Alicia once missed the signs of Peter’s transgressions. Alicia’s ignorance was once regarded with condescension by onlookers, Diane among them, who affected an air of knowing familiarity with her private life. This time, though, it was Alicia who unmasked Diane’s affair, with a nonchalance that said, in effect, “You should have known!” Alicia forced Diane to acknowledge a truth she would have preferred to ignore.
Alicia’s insistence upon the truth (for, it must be said, her own practical ends) was part of a larger debate, staged in the final episode, about the question “How much do you want to know?” When it came to Peter’s corruption charges, Alicia maintained a studious disinterest in the question of his guilt or innocence; she did the same on the subject of Peter’s alleged affair with a co-worker, Geneva Pine. Professionally, she kept her distance from the truth, insuring that she knew no more than was necessary to “zealously represent” Peter. And yet, when it came to thinking about her own life, Alicia was unsparingly honest. “The Good Wife” has always excelled at cheekily dramatizing Alicia’s mind at work, and the final episode centered on an inner dialogue she staged, with herself, through a series of imagined conversations with Will Gardner, her late boyfriend, whom she had betrayed professionally just before his death. When Alicia asked Will, “Did you really hate me?” he said, with a hint of genuine hostility, “Oh, yeah.” (It was Alicia, of course, who was acknowledging Will’s hatred.) Later, in the guise of Will, Alicia reminded herself that their life together had been “romantic because it didn’t happen”; in Will’s voice, she exclaimed, “God, you have so little self-awareness!” With this neatly ironic Möbius strip of dialogue, Alicia created, in effect, an introspective loophole. She knows that self-knowledge is dangerous and needs an excuse, sometimes, for not having it.
Alicia is certainly more self-aware at the end of the show than she was in the fifth season, when Will told her, “You’re awful, and you don’t even know how awful you are.” But it would be inaccurate to call her a truth-teller; she’s more like a lawyer of the inner life. In her thoughts and feelings, Alicia has internalized the rules of the judicial system, which relies not just on arguments but also on the management of information. In the courtroom of Alicia’s mind, as in a real courtroom, much is known but ignored—there is a great deal of inadmissible evidence. (How many conversations in “The Good Wife” have been brought to an end by the injunction “We shouldn’t be talking about this—we could be subpoenaed”?) In retrospect, it seems clear that Alicia’s character was fascinating, in part, because her selective approach to self-knowledge raised questions about our own inner lives. To what degree are we, like Alicia, lawyers who “zealously represent” ourselves to ourselves by carefully managing how much we know about who we are and what we’ve done? Are we obligated to know, and admit to knowing, everything about our own lives and characters? Or is it better, and smarter, to nurture ambiguity, performing innocence through artful ignorance?
The answer, almost certainly, is that it’s better—morally, if not practically—to know. But knowing comes at a cost: it means acknowledging one’s guilt. In its preoccupation with guilt, “The Good Wife” resembles no literary work more than Kafka’s “The Trial.” In both stories, the theory is that there’s an ultimate court of law, a higher, final, moral court, in which we’d all be found guilty if all the evidence were put before the judge. At a minimum, we’d be guilty of being weak, self-interested, and dishonest—of being human. We can evade that guilty verdict only if there are rules that render some evidence (ignoble thoughts, craven motivations, imperfect natures) blessedly inadmissible. But what, exactly, are the rules of evidence? How can we know what will or will not count against us?
In both “The Good Wife” and “The Trial,” many people claim to deny the existence of that higher court. Instead, they cling to the idea that our man-made legal rules are the only ones that count. All the same, they can’t help suspecting that other, more important rules exist, and that those rules might shape some ultimate verdict. In the final episode, Alicia, speaking as Will, sums up the man-made rulebook by saying, “Ethics change! We’re all adults here.” But Will’s assurances aren’t fully convincing, especially to someone like Alicia, who knows what it is to be hurt and wronged. They raise a question: What if we’re not adults? What if we’re just children who pretend to sophistication, playing to win at a self-serving version of moral life while ignoring the rules that matter?
“The Good Wife,” in this sense, is a show about the doubts that plague all systems of law and morality. Unlike Peter and even Diane, Alicia yearns for another, better set of rules—and that yearning, in itself, suggests that playing by the rules we have is incriminating. Only cheaters have more than one rulebook. It’s for this reason that, in an episode called “Judged,” Alicia complains about how, even as she succeeds, “Everything just gets swallowed up by more disgust.” She is mastering a system that she knows to be not only rigged but false and insufficient. Over the years, the genuineness of Alicia’s growing desperation has elevated “The Good Wife” from a melodrama about power and betrayal into a nearly philosophical meditation on the risks inherent in moral life.
But the show has been elevated, too, by its tenderness, tolerance, and compassion. One way to respond to risk is fear; another is faith. Because the ultimate rules of moral life are unclear, no truly honest person can plead not guilty in the court of life; one has no choice but to accept provisional guilt while hoping that, somehow, the judge will look kindly upon you. “The Good Wife” has quietly, implicitly explored the role that this moral faith plays in our attempts to be good, even for an atheist like Alicia. In the final episode, Alicia sits in the gallery of a courtroom, its benches recalling the pews of a church; Grace, her daughter, sits next to her. Grace loves her parents no matter what. She’s convinced that they’re trying their best; she believes that they can be saved, that they are fundamentally decent, and that their innocence persists despite their failings. We can’t know whether she’s right. But we can say that “The Good Wife” loves its heroine. For all its worldliness, it’s remained a gentle and humane show. It has no illusions, least of all about the ones we use to maintain our innocence. And yet, despite everything, it has seen Alicia the way we all want to be seen—from Grace’s point of view.
