A farewell toast to 'The Good Wife'

Drink up, Good Wife fans. After seven seasons, 156 episodes, and who knows how many glasses of red wine, CBS is cutting us off.

On Mother's Day.

If we're being honest, it's for our own good. Or at least for the good of Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies), the wronged political spouse whose personal and professional reinvention deserves to be celebrated, not dragged out to the point where no one cares anymore.

Already it doesn't matter to me if The Good Wife sends Alicia off into the sunset with her hunky investigator, Jason (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), or if her about-to-be-ex-husband, Illinois Gov. Peter Florrick (Chris Noth), goes back to prison, throwing yet another wrench into her complicated life.

Alicia's getting her groove back has never been what made me watch, and it isn't what, for many seasons, made The Good Wife one of the best shows on television.

Her most intriguing relationships weren't with the men who periodically found the middle-age mother of two irresistible - no, not even the late Will Gardner (Josh Charles), with whom she had a tortured romance - but with her allies and adversaries, male and female. They're the ones who helped make her a better lawyer, and if not a better person, at least a more interesting one.

Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski), Eli Gold (Alan Cumming), Cary Agos (Matt Czuchry), Jackie Florrick (Mary Beth Peil), and Kalinda Sharma (Archie Panjabi) all added more sizzle to Alicia's life than any lover could. And whatever did or didn't happen offscreen between Margulies and Panjabi, the loss of their characters' friendship did damage to a show about a woman for whom such intimacy didn't come easily.

Last Sunday's episode reunited some of the players from the show's first episode, including David Paymer as the judge who's never liked Peter, setting the stage for a finale that could bring the series full circle.

The moment in that episode that gave me goosebumps?

When Alicia, thinking like a lawyer, not a wife, showed Louis Canning (Michael J. Fox) just how little she now cares about her estranged husband's affairs.

"Wow," he said. "God, I love you."

"I know," she replied.

Canning, a lawyer who believes in using everything he has, including a physical condition whose symptoms resemble Fox's Parkinson's, has been both a thorn in Alicia's side and one of her biggest fans.

He's just one of the distinctive characters written for The Good Wife's guest stars, an honor roll that has included the likes of Nathan Lane, Martha Plimpton, Anika Noni Rose, John Benjamin Hickey, Carrie Preston, Dylan Baker, Vanessa Williams, Oliver Platt, Margo Martindale, Mike Colter, Stockard Channing, and Rita Wilson.

Born at a moment when the sight of a woman standing beside her disgraced politician husband had become all too familiar, The Good Wife moved on to more pressing matters.

In a medium, and on a network, where law enforcement is probably overrepresented, it dared to show us prosecutors who sometimes overreached, a federal government that spied on its citizens (including Alicia, in an ongoing subplot that's been both appalling and amusing), and the liberties and principles we've surrendered in the name of fighting terrorism.

The recurring stories about ChumHum, the Google-like search engine that Hickey's character owns, are likely the most entertaining TV stories ever told involving algorithms.

Hot-button issues such as same-sex marriage, gun control, and abortion got their share of screen time, but so did religion. The Christian fervor of her teenage daughter, Grace (Makenzie Vega), stood in contrast to Alicia's atheism, which was in itself remarkable. TV characters may spend less time at worship than many Americans, but relatively few admit to an utter lack of belief.

But then the Good Wife writers regularly dared us to judge their characters, showing the hypocrisy of lawyers who fought for liberal causes while clinging to an old boys' (and girls') network in hiring, or who, reluctantly or not, put the bottom line before justice.

The need to keep the pot boiling, combined with the comings and goings of recurring characters whose players were free to commit to other jobs, occasionally made for disjointed storytelling.

I've lost track of Alicia's job changes. Peter's recent run for the Democratic nomination seemed nearly as ill-advised as the Season Four plot line involving Kalinda's abusive ex.

Yet even playing on a field made uneven by broadcast TV standards and seasons twice as long as many cable series, The Good Wife regularly distinguished itself as a show about adults for adults.

And as adults, we should know it's time to wish Alicia well and then let her go.

graye@phillynews.com
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