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The Good Wife - Season 5 (1 Viewer)

Matt Hough

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What a breakneck paced premiere episode to the season. I loved every minute of it! And those previews for the upcoming season show some real fireworks ahead. Still one of the best shows on television.
 

mattCR

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Some fantastic scripting tonight. Reminded me why I loved this show with how brisk the pace was. I loved Calinda and Robin running down 'Tommy'.. good all the way through
 

NeilO

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Really good start to the new season and those previews show how gut wrenching the changes are going to be for our characters.
 

Adam Lenhardt

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I thought I wanted them to skip ahead to Florrick/Agos and Associates. After the premiere, I'm so glad they didn't. Not only does it mean we get a few more episodes with the phenomenal Christine Baranski and Josh Charles front and center, but the drama just under the surface at the Lockhart/Gardner is almost stifling.After the "Revenge" return disappointed me, I was so happy to see that "The Good Wife" is as good as it's ever been.EDIT: Also I really appreciated the way Eli was handled in the premiere. He makes it sound like promoting Melissa George's ethics consul out of proximity was about the optics in light of Peter's past indiscretions, but I think that was just the excuse. Eli saw somebody who looked exactly like the women Peter had strayed toward in the past, he really likes and respects Alicia, and he wanted to eliminate a temptation for Peter. And that look that Peter gave her pretty much demonstrated that Eli was right to be worried.
 

DaveF

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A wild episode.

And we all know Melissa George is really an uber-spy sent in to watch Peter...so it's best she's promoted out.
 

Patrick Sun

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Lots of animosity on the way! Good start to the season. Duplicity doesn't look good on Alicia, though.
 

Matt Hough

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Patrick Sun said:
Lots of animosity on the way! Good start to the season. Duplicity doesn't look good on Alicia, though.
And she's squirming through every second of it, so I'm glad the character knows how awful it is to be a "double agent." I actually feel a little sorry for her.
 

Stan

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Adam Lenhardt said:
Also I really appreciated the way Eli was handled in the premiere. He makes it sound like promoting Melissa George's ethics consul out of proximity was about the optics in light of Peter's past indiscretions, but I think that was just the excuse.
She's out for dirt on Peter. No matter how angelic looking she may be, she's been brought on to stir up the kettle and make more drama in this show. I don't see her luring Peter into an affair or anything, she's got an agenda and wants to bring him down.
 

mattCR

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This show manages to take on more hot button issues then anything currently on TV, and it does it very well. In this episode, we had: NSA, daughters being connected with 'suspected' sympathizers, stalkers, search engines being held suspicious because they couldn't report on how they responded to the NSA, secret trials and who gets to monitor what.

There were some great and salient political points here that were delivered in a non-preachy way but really challenged the audience about how some of these things play out and what we really think about them. I do love that we have a real divide of the ethics on the new firm with Calinda, who is apparently not aware that Alicia is in the defector team; but Alicia's mom may have just tipped the hat.
 

Matt Hough

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Alicia's mom has a way of tipping a good many secrets during the two seasons she's been recurring on the show. It's amazing Alicia turned out to be so level-headed when her mother is anything but.

Yes, another politically complex episode with so many facets that it almost makes my head hurt to think about them all. I don't know any other show on television that manages this kind of balancing act.
 

NeilO

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Yes another good episode. David Lee undoubtedly knows for sure that Alicia is in the defector team. And in a bit of bad timing Diane appears to have trashed Will when she didn't need to do so. Lots of interesting developments.
 

Matt Hough

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CBS knew the football would run late so its scheduled shows were all pushed back a half hour. Football ran even longer so shows were an additional fifteen minutes later than they were scheduled.

On Sundays like these, I have my DVR record both The Good Wife and The Mentalist and I also record an extra hour after The Mentalist for safety's sake. (I watch both shows.)

The Good Wife did play on the East Coast. I watched it from my DVR last night (in two DVR chunks).
 

DaveF

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Ok. I had a tivo glitch then. It was set to record 2.5 hrs from CBS from 9 to 11:30. However, the recording was simply non-existant for the first hour, until Mentalist came on.

My life would be much better if instead Football was delayed for The Good Wife.
 

Matt Hough

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DaveF said:
Ok. I had a tivo glitch then. It was set to record 2.5 hrs from CBS from 9 to 11:30. However, the recording was simply non-existant for the first hour, until Mentalist came on.

My life would be much better if instead Football was delayed for The Good Wife.
Ain't THAT the truth!
 

Mikah Cerucco

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DaveF said:
My life would be much better if instead Football was delayed for The Good Wife.
In a perfect world, they'd move The Good Wife either to 10p ET or another night. Put on some football "wrap up" show after the game (it'll get ratings). But it ends for the 10p ET slot. If they wrap up for 60 minutes, so be it. If it's 15 minutes, so be it. At least people who want to watch The Good Wife (or The Mentalist for that matter), wouldn't have to play this guessing game to see the show. Sure I record The Good Wife with a big enough buffer that I get the snow now, but I don't believe I count in the ratings because once I record it, I'm skipping commercials during playback. I've read if you skip any commercials in a recorded viewing, you don't count in the ratings.
 

Adam Lenhardt

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Loved all of the NSA stuff. We think of Big Brother as faceless hollow men in dark rooms listening menacingly to our every work. I have little doubt that the truth is much closer to what was presented here, and no less insidious for it. If the show's NSA goes after a sitting governor and it comes out that its fishing expedition was on the basis of calls made by a teenage girl to her ex-boyfriends, it's going to get a real black eye.The show has also done a brilliant job of capturing how the overriding deference to executive claims of national security in a post-9/11 world short circuit the constitutionally protected due process of the criminal and civil justice systems. I don't know how accurate all of the legal mumbo-jumbo is, but it has a disturbingly "Catch 22"-esque believability to it.You can cut the tension at the firm with a knife. Diane's decision to throw Will under the bus will be a significant blow to the firm. It should almost seem like the equity partners would have grounds to sue Diane for undermining the firm. In the short term, it would seem to provide distraction cover for Alicia and Cary as they wait to jump ship, while making some Lockhart/Gardner clients more amenable to the Florrick/Agos pitch.Grace definitely seems to have gotten a confidence boost from that web list of the hottest political daughters.Jeffrey Tambor is great in everything, and this season he's joined the ranks of "The Good Wife's" excellent rotating guest roster of judges which already included the likes of Judd Hirsch, Kurt Fuller, Denis O’Hare, Stephen Root, Peter Riegert, Linda Emond, Ana Gasteyer and David Paymer.
 

Matt Hough

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And Jane Alexander. Please don't forget Jane Alexander. And I'd love to see sleepy Jerry Stiller come back to the bench.
 

Matt Hough

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Another wonderfully interesting case, and the drama going on behind the scenes at the law firm is beyond nail-biting. Poor Alicia caught in the middle. Terrific plotting.
 

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