The very Good Wife

You may have seen trails for The Good Wife, lurking on More 4. Season 2 has just started in the US, and I'm going to try to convince you why you should seek it out if you get the chance. (Btw I think the first series is being repeated on daytimes on Channel 4 at the moment - so set that PVR/skybox/virgin box, whatever.)

If you're not familiar with the show, it's basically the aftermath of an incident like this:



Sorry, couldn't resist putting that in - but the Little Britain sketch actually does sum it up: the press conference with a politician publicly apologising for his sins, loyal wife at his side, has become a cliche. But no-one has really asked what happens to the poor cow afterwards....

The show is about Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies, ex of ER),the wife of former State's Attorney Peter, (Chris Noth, y'know, Big from SATC) She's the, er, Matt Lucas character in all this. Her hubby is sent to prison following a corruption, cocaine and 'Hoes scandal, and boy, does everyone keep reminding her about it.

So she has to go back to work as a single, working mum - it's pretty fortunate that 13 years earlier she was a hotshot lawyer who came top of her class at Georgetown (naah, I don't know where it is either, but I'm assuming it's somewhere prestigious and WASPy).

Anyhow, she now finds herself working in Comrade Obama's post-racial America with lots of young 20-somethings and a 2-dimensional old flame, armed only with a killer wardrobe, intelligence and heels. So far, so LA law.

But where this differs from other courtroom dramas is that it begins to dawn on you that her husband wasn't necessarily corrupt, and may have been set up by his successor, the ruthless Glen Childs (played by the magnificently-named Titus Welliver). It's this unfolding conspiracy and the battle between these two that drives this show.

But its also got a superb cast: Archie Panjabi won an Emmy last year for playing Kalinda, the law firm's freelance private detective, Chris Noth is superb as Peter Florrick - you really are never sure whether he's a good guy or an evil bastard, and of course Alan Cumming as Eli Gold (he's Peter's reputation rehabilitator, a sort of Max Clifford of the internet).

And that brings me to another point - The Good Wife is incredibly savvy about how modern media and politics work.

Look at this scene from the latest episode: a newly-released Peter is back on the campaign trail, and is answering questions in a webcam interview about justice and the importance of stiff sentencing. Meanwhile, in the other room....



V cool, eh? In another aspect, it reminds me a bit of Burn Notice* No, it hasn't got sexy Miami locations and lots of explosions, but you learn a new factoid in almost every episode. This week, the GLW and I learned the basics of US military law. So there you go.

Oh and another aspect that's equally impressive is that many of the storylines come from news headlines. In one episode, Alicia discovers youths are being given severe sentences for minor crimes by a judge, because he's getting brown envelopes stuffed with cash from a private youth custody centre, which gets paid per inmate. You couldn't (and they didn't) make it up.

Lastly, Juilianna Margulies does a superb job of portraying a woman trying to hold onto whatever dignity she has left after her husband's prozzie-shagging ways become public. It's a dream role - it must be, that woman must have spent nigh-on 20 years in cold, windy Chicago, rather than signing up to a nice, warm sub-tropical drama like Lost (or Dexter..or Burn Notice...or the Glades or Hawaii Five O...actually, disregard the last two, they're absolute shite). This, however, in my increasingly dodgy 1970s Indian soft-drink scale of goodness, is Mangola (m'lud).

*I'll be looking at Burn Notice soon.