Josh Charles

There’s no easy way to write about Bird People without spoiling the ostensible magic and surprise it so valiantly strives for. Cut almost dead in the middle between depicting the mundane and the thrilling occurrences between two people at a modern and disconnected hotel in Paris, Pascale Ferran’s (Lady Chatterley) film aims to be ambitious and magical, but never quite comes together as it should, often feeling incomplete and insubstantial in the process. Opening with a playful prologue that includes different people on a commuter train, we quickly eavesdrop as they play on their phones, listen to music, and engage in conversation. It’s a curious way to start things off as it suggests the random importance of these brief human snippets that we drop in on but never revisit.

The Good Wife is obsessed, especially lately, with memory, with subjective experience and the way it colors our entire perceptions of the world around us. We never get out of our heads, after all. Everything we ever experience is colored by this limitation. Our senses and our recollections are all we have to tie us to the past, and to help us pull ourselves forward. The world outside ourselves is something we can only do our best to conceive of. Anything but our own flawed memory is pure conjecture.

Death closes off the greatest venture we can ever undertake with another human being: the effort to know them fully. In life, a person’s true self is elusive, but we convince ourselves it is somehow attainable, dancing just out of our reach. But in death, all ellipses become periods, all question marks are left to dangle. There is no person left to know. There are no answers left to find. There’s just the seeking, and the void.

Sometimes something happens and the world falls apart. Gravity drops out and you are left floating, untethered to your surroundings, separate in a way. Nothing makes sense anymore. The world doesn’t work in the way it’s supposed to and it may never function in that way again. Reality feels unreal, sounds reach you as if they are traveling through water. Nothing can touch you, because if it did, everything would fall to pieces.

Everything that really happens in “A Few Words” happens in the quiet spaces, in silent moments of contemplation, in missed connections and quiet epiphanies. This is an episode set in the space between, with all of the characters out of their element in New York City, angling to land rainmaker Rayna Hecht (Jill Hennessy) while navigating the ABA conference where Alicia is slated to give the keynote address. There’s no case-of-the-week here; in fact, the only law we really see is pending. Everyone is taken out of their element, out of their comfort zone, and left to contend with themselves. Perhaps that’s why there’s so much drinking going on this week.

The mid-season break The Good Wife took over the last few months was almost certainly not built into the show’s plan for the season (if it was, it was not handled particularly elegantly). Where plenty of other network shows have taken to doing “mid-season finales” and structuring their longer, more unwieldy episode counts like two mini-seasons that form a more coherent whole, this is a show that works best as a behemoth, a large series of interconnecting plotlines that slowly fade in and out of relevance and become increasingly or decreasingly important across the season.

A few times a season, The Good Wife likes to do a “judicial gimmick” episode, throwing the attorneys into a fish out of water situation and watching as they flail, trying to adapt to something they simply do not prepare for in an average trial. “We, The Juries” is one such episode, throwing Will, Diane, Alicia, and Cary into a complicated single trial with two defendants and a bifurcated jury—one for each client. This complicates things not only for both prongs of the defense, but for the prosecution and the judge (played by the always welcome Victor Garber as an imminently decent, efficiency-minded jurist increasingly overwhelmed by the demands of the system he decided on to try the case).

The Good Wife returns from its short winter break this week with an episode that is erratic at best. “Goliath and David” has a mediocre case-of-the-week, an annoying plotline involving Marilyn’s baby, sub-par Lockhart Gardner drama, and hints that the Kalinda/Damian story is going to get as bad as we’d worried. Basically, it is an episode that shows that even at its best, The Good Wife makes the occasional misstep.

“The Decision Tree” is the show’s landmark 100th episode, and it spends a lot of time ruminating on where it has been in a season that has markedly been focused on where things are going. The episode opens with a shot of the 100 on a speedometer, as if to signal fans that things aren’t slowing down anytime soon. And while much of the episode is as propulsive as the series has been of late, it also takes time to slow down and ponder what has come before.

Ah, The Good Wife. You’re always good for a thinly veiled riff on a relevant piece of internet culture, aren’t you? “Whack-a-Mole” focuses on Scabbit, a website that is distinctly not Reddit (just kidding. It totally is.) which the FBI uses to crowd source an investigation of a terrorist attack, leading them to suspect Alicia’s kindly professor, who is writing a book on jihad, but not that kind of jihad.

The show’s interest in social media and internet culture occasionally leads to it being silly and obtuse in a vain attempt to be hip and relevant, but it returns to these issues again and again for a reason. Say what you will about it, but The Good Wife is incredibly skilled at keeping tabs on salient legal issues and building episodes around them. And the old refrain that privacy will be the issue of the twenty-first century means the show will look again and again at these debates. The internet is a fascinating place from a legal perspective, a playground where anonymity is theoretically guaranteed, where law can be subverted or ignored, and where regulation is either nonexistent or completely ineffective. Alicia’s efforts to get an injunction tonight are a perfect example: everyone agrees the legal system is woefully inadequate to deal with the situation, which makes it easy for Scabbit to exploit the law for its own benefit.

Since “Hitting the Fan”, The Good Wife’s approach has been a slow, steady, calculated examination of the days, weeks, and now month following the Florrick/Agos defection and the beginning of their rivalry with Lockhart/Gardner (which will never be referred to as “LG” in this space, lest the review be paused for a period of retching). We have watched “The Next Day”, then “The Next Week”, and now “The Next Month” as the characters adjust to their new positions, their new alignments towards former allies, and a whole new game they’re playing. The departure of Alicia in particular from Lockhart/Gardner is a massive event in this show’s history, and it is playing out as such. Things have changed for everyone. Forever. Now it’s time to see how the pieces shake out.

The Good Wife, Season 5, Episode 6: “The Next Week” Written by Craig Turk Directed by Frederick E.O. Toye Airs Sundays at 9pm (ET) on CBS The political side of The Good Wife sits on the sidelines this week in favor of the continued tight focus on the personal and the legal. Florrick/Agos is in …

The game’s afoot this week as Lockhart/Gardner and Florrick/Agos actively compete over a case, Marilyn Garbanza trails Peter’s ethical lapses, and Will works to undermine a potential partnership deal for the firm that walked out from under him. “The Next Day” plays out the early days of the aftermath from “Hitting the Fan” and while it is extremely effective at depicting the next steps, it is often clear this is an episode more committed to establishing a new status quo than one that has an agenda all its own.

When this season of The Good Wife began with Alicia still working at Lockhart Gardner, it seemed the show had missed an opportunity to leap forward, to start its fifth season with a bold new status quo in place. Yet this is not the type of show we are watching. The Good Wife is a show about how institutions get built, and how they can become slowly corrupted over time.

Every season of The Good Wife begins with a resounding reminder of just how great this show is and how much television has missed it over the course of the summer. The Good Wife is a whip smart, lightning quick legal procedural with dramatic heft and a sense of humor. It has also developed serialized elements over the course of its run that put it on par with the best of what television has to offer. Few shows are as great at building out their world with recurring characters and developing plotlines and at its best, The Good Wife has enough on the stove that something is always sizzling.