I don’t think it’s possible for a television show to be any better than the courtroom drama “The Good Wife,” on CBS. It’s not simply that, scene to scene, the series is entertaining and intelligent; in the course of five seasons, “The Good Wife” has become profound. The fundamentals haven’t changed: most episodes still revolve around a single case (a murder, a class action, a corporate merger), and there are still lots of lawyers shouting, “Objection!” But the atmosphere in which all this happens has become meditative, even existential. Increasingly, as the characters argue, plot, and struggle, they wonder, What’s the point?
The show wasn’t always so philosophical. When “The Good Wife” premièred, in 2009, it stayed within the lines of its own drama. The plot focussed on Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies), the wife of a disgraced Chicago politician. Alicia’s husband, Peter (a slimy, pugnacious Chris Noth), was the Illinois state’s attorney until he was caught with a prostitute and sent to jail. Alicia was hurt and humiliated, but she decided not to divorce Peter. Instead, she kept the marriage together and went back to work as a litigator, climbing the ladder at a high-powered law firm, Lockhart & Gardner. Much of the show’s early drama is centered on Peter and Alicia’s marriage. Why, you wondered, did Alicia stand by her man? Perhaps it was fear, or love, or a wish to take the moral high ground (the press nicknames her Saint Alicia). Eventually, you come to see that her decision has its roots in her orderliness. “There are people who make the mess and people who clean up,” she says. Peter, meanwhile, wants to preserve the marriage for practical reasons—as he sees it, voters will figure that if his beautiful, intelligent, faithful wife stays with him, he can’t be so bad.
In its first few seasons, the show staged a deeply imagined, almost Dostoyevskian confrontation between the two world views represented by Alicia and Peter. Alicia, broadly speaking, represented humility—the decision, when faced with a dispute, to put aside your own feelings and interests and come to an agreement. Peter, by contrast, was all about power: cross him, and he destroys you. “The Good Wife” shows how this contrast plays out in various domains. In marriage, you can “make it work” or get divorced; in a partnership, you can come to an agreement or fight to expel the other partners; in the law, you can settle or take it to court. (“The Good Wife” loves to let its worlds pun on one another: “settling” in court and “settling” in a marriage are shown to be more similar than you’d imagine.) As her career ramps up, Alicia learns that it’s impossible to be consistently humble or consistently aggressive, because the power of each approach depends on the other. You’re more likely to reach a settlement if you’re scary in court. Conversely, when you get divorced, the love you felt is converted into hate, which now makes loving your ex a canny move, an accumulation of potential energy waiting to be unleashed.
The longest plot arc in “The Good Wife” shows Alicia becoming more like Peter—that is, becoming more comfortable with the exercise of power, more elegantly invulnerable when she is being magnanimous. Part of that transformation entails coming to terms with her own privilege. Alicia starts out the show as an underdog, but, at the end of the first season, she draws on one of her husband’s connections to win a coveted position at work. When, a few years after he’s released from jail, Peter becomes the governor of Illinois, Alicia leverages that connection to secure clients.
She’s also privileged in subtler ways that she is less willing to admit. From her husband’s sex scandal, Alicia retains an air of innocence and vulnerability; women root for her, and men are attracted to her. For much of the show, she drifts in and out of a romantic relationship with Will Gardner, one of the partners at her law firm. When, as the governor-elect’s wife, Alicia starts her own firm, taking some of Will’s most valuable clients with her, he calls her out on her own mythos of innocence and victimhood: “You’re awful, and you don’t even know how awful you are,” he says. Everyone, including Alicia, thinks that she’s a victim—but, in fact, she’s a predator, all the more dangerous for being stealthy. That dynamic played out beautifully in yesterday’s finale. Alicia’s son, Zach, is leaving for college. At work, well-meaning colleagues ask her how she plans to deal with empty-nest syndrome. Finally, at the end of the episode, her husband’s campaign manager, Eli Gold (a playful, energetic Alan Cumming) makes a practical suggestion: Why doesn’t she run for state’s attorney? Almost without meaning to, Alicia finds herself on the verge of entering politics. It’s a natural next step in her ascension, not just because she’s brilliant and charismatic, but because, despite his betrayal, she is still part of Peter’s political world. Not divorcing him has paid off.
As a viewer, you admire Alicia, and you take great pleasure in watching her succeed. And, episode to episode, the twists, betrayals, and rapprochements in “The Good Wife” make for ridiculously entertaining drama. But over the long term they suggest something unsettling: the toll that professionalism takes on our sense of selfhood. To succeed, the show’s lawyers must constantly modulate their personalities, cooling down and heating up depending on context. Often, they adopt personas in court, acting indignant, naïve, surprised, or smoothly reasonable. These lawyers are convincing because they recruit their own emotions into their performances. That’s hard in itself—especially for the women, who, as Emily Nussbaum has written, must navigate the complexities of “feminine theatricality.” But it’s also confusing, even dangerous. If you’re one person in a settlement negotiation and another the next day, in court, then who are you, really? Midway through the fifth season, in a twist that no one saw coming, Will Gardner died. Afterward, in mourning, everyone agreed that Will had been a gifted lawyer. Beyond that, though, it was hard to say who he had been. The flexible personality that made him a great attorney also made him an elusive person. Something similar seems to be happening to Alicia. Having emerged from Peter’s shadow, she is succeeding professionally—but she may be doing so without getting to know herself better. In fact, it may be that not knowing herself is helping her to succeed. (“I’m spinning,” she tells her mother, in a recent episode. “I can’t stop.”)
The competition, so to speak, between professionalism and authenticity is an old theme. In the nineteenth century, when the professional class first emerged, lots of people wrote about it. Watching last night’s episode, in which Alicia’s increasing sense of rootlessness coincides with a surge in her professional opportunities, I thought of a scene from “Buddenbrooks,” Thomas Mann’s novel about a family business. (He wrote it in 1901, when he was twenty-six.) In the scene, Thomas Buddenbrook, a successful grain merchant, takes his son Hanno to work. Hanno watches as Tom travels from one customer to another, in an endless round of meetings:
“Gruelling virtuosity” is exactly what you see in “The Good Wife”; it’s what its characters are in danger of developing, in place of “poise and character.” And yet, that might be the risk you have to take if you want to gather, and project, power. “What do you want?” a colleague asks Alicia. “I want a happy life—and to control my fate,” she replies. More and more, “The Good Wife” suggests that those wishes are at cross-purposes. Happiness depends on having freedom to think and feel in a natural way. Alicia may be taking control, but, with each step, she is becoming less free.
