With 48 hours to go, the writers—overseen by husband-and-wife creators Robert and Michelle King—must rewrite the latest script and untangle a Gordian knot to come up with a new procedural case for hotshot lawyer Alicia Florrick (recent Emmy Award winner Julianna Margulies) and the firm to tackle.
In the second season of the critical and ratings hit, the personal loomed large for all of the show’s characters. Alicia gave into temptation and slept with her boss, Will (Josh Charles), after years of having bad timing. Kalinda (Archie Panjabi) went to great lengths to conceal a long-buried secret—that she had, years before, slept with Alicia’s husband, Peter (Chris Noth)—in a storyline that involved baseball bats, smashed-out windows, and assaulting rival investigator Blake (Scott Porter).
With its deft plotting and character-driven storytelling, The Good Wife—this season moving to a new night and time (Sundays at 9 p.m.)—is hard-hitting drama at its best. So it’s all the more surprising that the writers’ room appears almost serene, even as the clock ticks away. This is not your typical writers’ room, a litter-strewn battlefield where exhausted scribes butt heads, argue, and quaff vast quantities of coffee. Here, on a quiet studio lot in Culver City, coproducer Corinne Brinkerhoff—who runs the @GoodWifeWriters Twitter feed with Meredith Averill—stands at a whiteboard. Her neat handwriting is just one of many ordered particulars of the vintage room: color-coded notecards are perfectly positioned on a nearby bulletin board; whiteboards stand at the ready, bursting with plot details; and the writers—split equally between genders—around the polished mahogany table are taking turns to speak. Wait, this is an emergency meeting?
Yes, the smartest show on TV, CBS’s The Good Wife, is back for a third season. Over at The Daily Beast, you can read my latest feature, "Inside The Good Wife Writers’ Room," in which I report from the writers’ room and sit down with creators Robert and Michelle King in the editing bay and the office they share.
If that's not enough Good Wife-related goodness for you, I also got the Kings to spill on what lies ahead in Season Three for Alicia, Kalinda, Eli, and the others in a second feature, entitled "Inside The Good Wife Season Three." We discuss not only what's coming up for our favorite characters, but also what might have been, with an in-depth analysis of what would have comprised a killer love triangle between Cary, Kalinda, and Kelli Giddish's Sophia Russo. (Sigh.) WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS!
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