The Good Wife

The Kings make one last attempt to salvage something of worth from a mess of a season.

Another underwhelming hour handles an inevitable exit with a remarkable lack of fanfare.

A fast-paced, pitch-black episode of The Good Wife remembers that it’s ultimately a series about corruption.

In another middling episode, reminders that the season’s chosen stories just don’t hum the way they’re supposed to.

A scattershot outing leans hard on the funny, with mostly-good results.

As the State’s Attorney race finally comes to a close, “Red Meat” finds The Good Wife feeling generous towards its supporting cast.

A rare courtroom-heavy outing brings back a host of familiar faces, but exposes the season’s consistent flaws.

In an attempt to rebound after “The Debate,” The Good Wife overcorrects with an overfamiliar outing.

The Good Wife, Season 6, Episode 12: “The Debate” Written by Robert King and Michelle King Directed by Brooke Kennedy Airs Sundays at 9pm ET on CBS The Good Wife’s innate whiteness has never been in question. Its creators are white, the vast majority of its unusually large principal cast is white, and its storylines …

“Hail Mary” is a hectic, tense hour of The Good Wife, but its parts don’t quite add up to a totally satisfying whole.

2014 has been yet another fantastic year for television, one that continued the nichification of the medium, with highly specific and underrepresented voices breaking through in every genre. There was a comedy explosion, particularly on cable, with dozens of new series presenting confident first seasons and several returning shows reaching new heights. The dramas didn’t disappoint either, with visionary creators bringing new life to familiar settings and taking greater risks with their returning series, deepening their worlds. Throughout the year, directors and cinematographers brought lush visuals, composers pushed the auditory envelope, and an astonishing number of actors gave fantastic, memorable performances. More than a few shows delivered spectacle on a weekly basis, while others went small, deriving incredible power out of stillness and self-reflection. Some series swept the audience up, week in and week out, and others built subtly, only showing their hand in their season’s final episodes. There truly was too much great television this year for any one person to see it all (95 separate series were nominated by our contributors!), so limiting the discussion to 10 or even 20 series would be ridiculous. Instead, here is Sound on Sight’s list of the 30 best series of what has been another wonderful year for television.

2014 has been yet another fantastic year for television, one that continued the nichification of the medium, with highly specific and underrepresented voices breaking through in every genre. There was a comedy explosion, particularly on cable, with dozens of new series presenting confident first seasons and several returning shows reaching new heights. The dramas didn’t disappoint either, with visionary creators bringing new life to familiar settings and taking greater risks with their returning series, deepening their worlds. Throughout the year, directors and cinematographers brought lush visuals, composers pushed the auditory envelope, and an astonishing number of actors gave fantastic, memorable performances. More than a few shows delivered spectacle on a weekly basis, while others went small, deriving incredible power out of stillness and self-reflection. Some series swept the audience up, week in and week out, and others built subtly, only showing their hand in their season’s final episodes. There truly was too much great television this year for any one person to see it all (95 separate series were nominated by our contributors!), so limiting the discussion to 10 or even 20 series would be ridiculous. Instead, here is Sound on Sight’s list of the 30 best series of what has been another wonderful year for television.

2014 has been yet another fantastic year for television, one that continued the nichification of the medium, with highly specific and underrepresented voices breaking through in every genre. There was a comedy explosion, particularly on cable, with dozens of new series presenting confident first seasons and several returning shows reaching new heights. The dramas didn’t …

The Good Wife’s latest seasonal pivot point, in which a major character apparently heads to the slammer, happens to be surrounded with a whole lot of its most broadly silly material. “The Trial” is up to a lot of things – shifting perspectives, light social commentary, romantic workplace comedy, Law & Order episode – but for the most part it manages to hold together reasonably well as an episode. If nothing else, it makes clear that the Kings have no interest in signposting just where this season is meant to be heading, except that it will continue to be defined by Alicia’s campaign and her increasingly unreliable ethical compass.

In a strong episode, Alicia and Frank Prady contrive not to play dirty, with a mixed success rate.

Though I continue to be a stalwart Good Wife devotee, one aspect of its last couple of seasons has consistently stuck in my craw, and that aspect is front and center throughout “Red Zone,” an otherwise perfectly acceptable episode. That aspect is Kalinda’s sex life.

It’s certainly true that TV is lacking for meaningful representations of characters that don’t simply conform to heteronormative mores. The fact that Kalinda has never been comfortable within a standard “coupling” (nor accepting of any labels other characters attempt to place on her sexuality) is remarkable. Unfortunately, for the many, many great and fresh character beats the series has supplied to literally almost every other character, Kalinda hasn’t had anything new to do for a very long time now. I know I prattle on about this quite often, but it’s especially glaring in “Red Zone” because Kalinda’s antics take up damn near half of the screentime, made worse by the fact that Cary is the only regular she even shares a physical space with; her interactions with Florrick Agos are limited to a shot of a conference phone. Does anyone really care if she opts to sell out her Fed girlfriend or not? Or if she and Cary will ever “go steady”? (Shudder – Kalinda’s phrase, not mine.) The only aspect of the Cary/Kalinda/Bishop axis that provides any interest this week is the notion that Cary has thoughts about Beyoncé. And we don’t even get to hear what those are.

A rare transitional episode could lead us somewhere novel – or somewhere predictable.

A relatively wobbly episode still delivers a few very strong moments.

One of the particular strengths of The Good Wife is its uncanny sense of series memory. With well over 100 episodes’ worth of long-standing character relationships, tertiary characters, and running gags to draw upon, it’s rare that a new episode comes down the pike that doesn’t reward long-time viewers, even if it’s just in a minute way. “Shiny Objects” is, on the surface, a prototypical latter-day Good Wife episode, in that it offers up a case of the week while keeping the season’s master plot humming along, but it also manages (for better and worse) to lean on several long-standing relationships and character beats to an unusual degree.

Why is Alicia Florrick running? It’s a question that comes up throughout “Oppo Research” with good reason. Ever since Eli brought up the idea in the final moments of season five, The Good Wife has been loath to give Alicia one big, whopping, obvious motivation for once again rening her life apart in pursuit of another ambitious prize. Every time she answers the question – this week most pointedly by her new campaign manager, Johnny Elfman (Steven Pasquale, erstwhile star of Do No Harm) – her response is evasive, or negative, or completely nebulous. As promised last week, the Oppo Research phase turns out to be thoroughly unpleasant and invasive, and she’s even subject to a cheap DUI setup at the hands of Castro before episode’s end. So, for real this time: why would anyone put themselves through this, especially someone already weary of being in the public eye?

Long stretches of “Dear God” feel like a throwback to old-school Good Wife.

Sometimes what’s noteworthy about The Good Wife is in what it chooses not to give us.

Five full seasons and over 100 episodes in, and The Good Wife is managing the unthinkable: it’s accelerating.