For the second year running and for its final season, Breaking Bad won Outstanding Drama Series at the 66th Annual Emmy Awards. It virtually swept the awards in an especially stacked year, also picking up awards for Best Actor Bryan Cranston, Best Supporting Actress Anna Gunn, Best Supporting Actor Aaron Paul, and Best Writing for …
Part 3 of our listing of the best television episodes of the year to date looks at shows such as Louie and Game of Thrones, along with the individual picks of the contributors.
Emmy nominations were announced this morning and as usual, there were a number of snubs and surprises, which the Internet collectively whined about this morning. Rather than continue to mourn the lack of a nomination for Tatiana Maslany (which I admittedly complained about as well), actual solutions need to be pitched. Sadly, “chain Emmy voters …
The Good Wife is a show that exists constantly with about a dozen different balls in the air, seemingly figuring out midstream which will work and which are better discarded. The show’s fifth season is among its best in part because it quickly figured out which stories to discard (Marilyn and her baby, Damian and his crime ties, etc.) and because it started to more regularly work that juggling into Alicia’s life, as she struggled to keep control of work, her personal life, and all of the political machinations she gets caught up in. She never lost control, because Alicia Florrick never loses control, but season five danced her closer to the edge than ever before. And in the process, she learned to like, at least a little bit, the idea of letting go. More than that, though, she liked feeling like she was finally, at least a little bit, in control.
Somewhere along the way, Alicia Florrick became a great politician. She probably always had some solid political instincts about her, but at some point, she moved to the next level. She can schmooze businessmen like James Paisley (Tom Skerritt), fight off accusation lobbed at her from any number of directions, and still manage to settle a case, all while keeping her sham of a marriage looking sparkly enough for outsiders to approve. Alicia can do many things well, but perhaps her best asset is also one we have seen her develop: The ability to walk the corridors of power like she owns the place, to convince the people at the top that she is the one to have on their side.
Alicia Florrick is in crisis. She lost the man she loved, the one she saw as her lifeboat even in the rockiest storm (and he caused a fair amount of her storms himself). What she really lost, more than Will Gardner, was the possibility Will represented to her. As long as Will was out there, better days were coming for Alicia. She’d leave Peter behind. She’d stop being restrained by roles she felt forced to play. She’d figure out a way to finally just be happy.
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.
Entering into season five, the writers on The Good Wife had a plan. This has likely always been true on the show but especially going into this year, when it was clear they were going to lose Josh Charles and need to fundamentally transform the show in some ways, it seems likely that more than a few discussions were had about how to make all of this fit together. Which is why an episode like “All Tapped Out,” which wraps up the NSA subplot in a way that makes it an open question whether there was ever a point to the arc at all, can be a bit frustrating.
“A Material World” opens with a scene that is basically right out of any true The Good Wife fan’s dreams: Alicia Florrick and Diane Lockhart getting plastered together on martinis. The two commemorate their friend Will, confess to their insecurities, share a few secrets, and shake hands, coming away with a vague notion that they will begin work on merging Lockhart Gardner and Florrick Agos.
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.
Maladies Written and directed by Carter USA, 2012 Somehow, the most inexplicable thing about Maladies is that it’s being released around the United States for release; considering the film’s deliberately experimental and impenetrable quality, this is no easy feat to achieve. But the overriding question upon watching Maladies is as follows: who is this movie …
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.
Since its premiere, The Good Wife has done what is nearly impossible for most shows- it is stunningly smart, perfectly paced, and beautifully written, and it has only gotten better in its game-changing fifth season. Guest stars are nothing new to the show, which has the most creative and entertaining guest casting on television, and it uses these performers incredibly well, folding them into stories the audience is already invested in alongside characters we care about.
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.
10. The Good Wife (CBS) This year, The Good Wife did the unthinkable. Five seasons (and almost 100 episodes) in, it blew up the show. The original premise, that the publically shamed wife of a crooked politician begins her life anew at a former flame’s law firm, is gone, replaced by a baroque melodrama of …
The first half of the year may have had more standout episodes, but those that came in the second half were just as memorable, if not more so. Kate Kulzick, Simon Howell, Ricky D, and Randy Dankievitch finish their list of 2013’s best TV episodes with their picks for July through December.
“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 …