Skip to main content

The Daily Beast: "The Good Wife: Creators Robert and Michelle King on the Season Finale, Alicia and Kalinda, and More"

The season finale of The Good Wife was full of dramatic bombshells. I talk to creators Robert and Michelle King about rebooting the show, the start of a ‘civil war,’ Alicia and Kalinda’s dynamic, and what’s next. WARNING: Spoilers galore.

Over at The Daily Beast, you can read my latest feature, "The Good Wife Creators Tell All," an exclusive Season 4 postmortem interview with The Good Wife husband-and-wife creators Robert and Michelle King, in which we discuss the Alicia (Julianna Margulies)/Kalinda (Archie Panjabi) dynamic (or lack thereof), what really happened between Kalinda and Nick (Marc Warren), the year of Cary (Matt Czuchry), Robyn Burdine (Jess Weixler), and much more. (Seriously, it's a long interview and I had to cut a lot for space.)

With two simple words (“I’m in”) the fantastic fourth season of CBS legal drama The Good Wife came to a staggering conclusion on Sunday evening with the revelation that Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies), Illinois’s newly minted first lady, would be leaving Lockhart/Gardner to join the startup firm captained by former rival Cary Agos (Matt Czuchry).

The move effectively reboots the show, which will return for a fifth season in the fall. What will Alicia’s decision mean for her star-crossed romance with Will Gardner (Josh Charles) once he gets wind of her betrayal? And what does it mean for The Good Wife that its main characters are being split up and established as potential adversaries?

The Daily Beast caught up with The Good Wife creators Robert and Michelle King to discuss the love triangle between Alicia, Will, and Peter; the shifting dynamic between Alicia and legal snoop Kalinda Sharma (Archie Panjabi); new investigator Robyn Burdine (Jess Weixler); whether Kalinda is a murderer; audience backlash to the Nick (Marc Warren) storyline; and much more. What follows is an edited transcript of the conversation.

The Good Wife has mined the pull between idealism and ambition throughout its run. How does Alicia's “I'm in” represent the outcome of that battle?

Robert King: Alicia could have fought her way to the top of Lockhart/Gardner, given that she had been made partner. To us, it was a little bit more of a personal decision, because of the feeling that she could not control her sexual attraction to Will; their proximity was a problem. Yes, there's an element of what Cary is saying, which is, “We could be the new Diane and Will,” and there is ambition there. But it's joined together with the fact that she feels the only way to stop from being adulterous would be to leave Lockhart/Gardner. That sweet spot for the show that we enjoy so much is where the personal and professional combine.

Should it matter that it's Colin Sweeney's involvement that sways her? Has she in some ways made a deal with the devil?

Robert King: I was about to say yes. I can see on Michelle's face she was about to say no.

Michelle King: Apparently, there's a difference of opinion in the King household. I don't think it's relevant. She would have done it either way. It didn't matter that Sweeney was pushing her to do it.

Robert King: In many ways, Alicia wants to feel that she can do Lockhart/Gardner right. And yet, when you start with Colin Sweeney and Bishop and Chum Hum as clients, you are already starting off with a step in the wrong direction.

Continue reading at The Daily Beast...

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

What's Done is Done: The Eternal Struggle Between Good and Evil on the Season Finale of "Lost"

Every story begins with thread. It's up to the storyteller to determine just how much they need to parcel out, what pattern they're making, and when to cut it short and tie it off. With last night's penultimate season finale of Lost ("The Incident, Parts One and Two"), written by Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, we began to see the pattern that Lindelof and Cuse have been designing towards the last five seasons of this serpentine series. And it was only fitting that the two-hour finale, which pushes us on the road to the final season of Lost , should begin with thread, a loom, and a tapestry. Would Jack follow through on his plan to detonate the island and therefore reset their lives aboard Oceanic Flight 815 ? Why did Locke want to kill Jacob? What caused The Incident? What was in the box and just what lies in the shadow of the statue? We got the answers to these in a two-hour season finale that didn't quite pack the same emotional wallop of previous season

The Daily Beast: "How The Killing Went Wrong"

While the uproar over the U.S. version of The Killing has quieted, the show is still a pale imitation of the Danish series on which it is based. Over at The Daily Beast, you can read my latest feature, "How The Killing Went Wrong," in which I look at how The Killing has handled itself during its second season, and compare it to the stunning and electrifying original Danish series, Forbrydelsen , on which it is based. (I recently watched all 20 episodes of Forbrydelsen over a few evenings.) The original is a mind-blowing and gut-wrenching work of genius. It’s not necessary to rehash the anger that followed in the wake of the conclusion last June of the first season of AMC’s mystery drama The Killing, based on Søren Sveistrup’s landmark Danish show Forbrydelsen, which follows the murder of a schoolgirl and its impact on the people whose lives the investigation touches upon. What followed were irate reviews, burnished with the “burning intensity of 10,000 white-hot suns

Pilot Inspektor: CBS' "Smith"

I may just have to change my original "What I'll Be Watching This Fall" post, as I sat down and finally watched CBS' new crime drama Smith this weekend. (What? It's taken me a long time to make my way through the stack of pilot DVDs.) While it's on following Gilmore Girls and Veronica Mars on Tuesday nights (10 pm ET/PT, to be exact), I'm going to be sure to leave enough room on my TiVo to make sure that I catch this compelling, amoral drama. While one can't help but be impressed by what might just be the most marquee-friendly cast in primetime--Ray Liotta, Virginia Madsen, Jonny Lee Miller, Amy Smart, Simon Baker, and Franky G all star and Shohreh Aghdashloo has a recurring role--the pilot's premise alone earned major points in my book: it's a crime drama from the point of view of the criminals, who engage in high-stakes heists. But don't be alarmed; it's nothing like NBC's short-lived Heist . Instead, think of it as The Italian