The Good Wife: The First Season

Emmy winner Julianna Margulies came a cropper a couple of years ago with a series on Fox called Canterbury’s Law in which she played a crafty lawyer. Her new CBS hit series The Good Wife likewise casts the able actress as a lawyer, but this time she’s struggling to keep her head above water. It’s a role that earned her this season’s Golden Globe and SAG awards (as well as an Emmy nomination) for her work, and the kudos were well deserved; she’s doing some of her strongest work in years as the wronged wife of a state attorney trying to get her own personal and professional life back on track after thirteen years of contented ignorance about her husband’s less than admirable deals and liaisons.

Each episode splits its running time between Margulies’ Alicia Florrick’s various court cases (fitting nicely into the comfortable CBS procedural mode that has been the network’s bread and butter for quite a few years now) and the domestic issues story arcs which rise up between Alicia and her two children (Makenzie Vega, Graham Phillips), her imprisoned husband Peter (Chris Noth), and her meddlesome mother-in-law (Mary Beth Peil). The professional duties Alicia undertakes are daunting due not only to her rusty courtroom skills but the fact that she’s come back to work as a lowly junior associate, a probationary position in direct competition with a young shark Cary Agos (Matt Czuchry). And her brittle boss Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski) isn’t always as welcoming as she might like, so she turns for help and comfort to the firm’s male partner Will Gardner (Josh Charles), a man she had been intimate with when both were university students at Georgetown. Also on hand to aid Alicia in her case work and to lend a comforting shoulder of support is criminal investigator Kalinda Sharma (Archie Panjabi). Around the midseason mark, Alan Cumming joined the cast as Ari Gold, the image consultant for the disgraced Peter Florrick as he attempts to put his life back together and even possibly make another run for office.

As for the cases themselves, they’re infinitely less complex than the kinds of problems that puzzled Perry Mason for almost a decade. Alicia finds herself dealing with investigations concerning rape, felony murder, jury tampering, DUI and assault of a police officer, arson, judicial biased sentencing, medical malpractice, insurance fraud: situations that generally need only one bit of undiscovered evidence to put the defense on the right road to a solution. More promising are the slowly revealed indiscretions of Alicia’s husband which not only led to his termination from his job and subsequent arrest but also the gradual dissolution of the marriage, all of which is doled out piecemeal during the course of season one. Her volatile family situation propels dramatic story arcs all season long.

There are no problems with the acting in the series as the principals all have steady and sturdy holds on their characters. Julianna Margulies, Christine Baranski, Alan Cumming, and guest star Dylan Baker all earned Emmy nominations for their work this season, and Archie Panjabi won as Best Supporting Actress for her turn as the quietly effective investigator. A fun array of guest judges and prosecutors cycled in and out during the first season. Among them were Tony Goldwyn, Denis O’Hare, Joanna Gleason, David Paymer, Peter Riegert, Martha Plimpton, Chris Bauer, and Titus Welliver (doing especially good work as Chris Noth’s nemesis). Gary Cole made a number of guest appearances as a ballistics expert and was always a welcome addition to the cast.

Here are the episodes contained on six discs in this first season set. Names in parentheses refer to the commentators for that particular episode.

1 – Pilot (creator Robert King, director Charles McDougall)

2 – Stripped

3 – Home

4 – Fixed

5 – Crash

6 – Conjugal

7 – Unorthodox

8 – Unprepared

9 – Threesome

10 – Lifeguard

11 – Infamy

12 – Painkiller

13 – Bad

14 – Hi

15 – Bang

16 – Fleas (Robert and Michelle King, Christine Baranski, Josh Charles)

17 – Heart (Robert and Michelle King, David Zucker, Brooke Kennedy)

18 – Doubt

19 – Boom

20 – Trade-Off

21 – Unplugged

22 – Hybristophilia

23 – Running

Video Quality

The program’s 1.78:1 television aspect ratio is replicated here with anamorphic enhancement for widescreen televisions. The series is shot digitally, and colors are solid while flesh tones are accurate and appealing. Sharpness is generally good though there is softness in some of the photography which gives each episode’s overall appearance an up and down quality. There are moiré patterns to be noticed on brickwork and other backgrounds, and in the scene-setting flyovers of Chicago (the pilot was filmed in Vancouver and the series in New York), there is often aliasing, too, though these are generally not problems elsewhere in the imagery. Each episode has been divided into 6 chapters.

Audio Quality

The Dolby Digital 5.1 audio track gets the show’s most important component – dialogue – perfectly delivered into the center channel. Though music is the set’s most important immersive audio presence, there is an occasional ambient sound effect that gets thrown to the front or rear soundstage, though the rears are underused. There’s a bit of distortion in some of the music cues, but this happens infrequently.

Special Features

There are three audio commentaries (see above episode list for episodes and commentators). The commentary for the pilot is the best of the ones offered in this set. The creator and director discuss clearly and intelligently what they were going for with the series. The other commentaries tend to be drier and less interesting though Christine Baranski does discuss her designs for her character with some insight.

The deleted scenes are scattered over all six discs. They may be viewed together as a group on each disc or separately, and there is also the option of watching them with or without audio commentary by Robert and Michelle King, David Zucker, and Brooke Kennedy. Disc one contains six scenes (3 ¾ minutes together), disc two has five (5 ½ minutes), disc three has four (6 ¼ minutes), disc four has one (1 ¼ minutes), disc five has four scenes (4 ½ minutes), while disc six has two scenes (4 ¼ minutes).

There are five on-air promos for the series which are presented in anamorphic widescreen and run a total of 4 minutes.

“Aftermath: Real-Life Events” features the producers David Zucker and Robert and Michelle King discussing the idea for the series and its implementation for network approval along with star Julianna Margulies discussing her own response to the story of a wronged woman. It runs 17 ¾ minutes in anamorphic widescreen.

“The Education of Alicia Florrick: Making Season One” is the set’s most substantial bonus, 75 ¼ minutes detailing the making of the first season from the writing and shooting of the pilot through moving production to New York City featuring the building of sets, scouting locations, additional casting, costuming the actors, and plotting the transitions of the characters throughout the season. The feature is presented in anamorphic widescreen.

In Conclusion

The Good Wife had a very successful first season and will be coming back for a second. With good video and audio quality and an adequate array of bonus features, this first season set comes with a definite recommendation.

Matt Hough

Charlotte, NC