TV - Juliana Margulies, In Closing Arguments For 'The Good Wife' - By The New York Times

Jesse Ditmar For The New York Times

Juliana Margulies Flanked By The Creators of 'The Good Wife'

Robert and Michelle King. 

The CBS series is coming to an end after seven seasons. 

After an acclaimed seven-year run, “The Good Wife” comes to an end on Sunday, May 8. And as the television show’s creators, the husband-and-wife team of Robert and Michelle King, and its star, Julianna Margulies, gathered at a SoHo hotel for an interview in mid-April, just three days after filming the 156th and final episode of the CBS drama, it was clear they hadn’t quite decompressed yet.

“Someone said ‘You must feel great, you wrapped,’” Ms. Margulies said. “And I said, ‘I feel like I’m in a dream.’ I’m not quite there yet.”

[ The cast of “The Good Wife” on favorite moments from the show ]

“The Good Wife” — initially inspired by the spectacle of stand-by-your-man news conferences like those involving Silda Wall Spitzer, married to the disgraced governor of New York — traced the professional and personal re-education of Alicia Florrick (Ms. Margulies), the wife of a discredited politician forced to resume her legal career to support her family.

With wryly literate writing, complicated characters and timely explorations of issues like abortion, gun rights, gay marriage and government surveillance, the hourlong drama was an outlier among the procedurals and nighttime soap operas of the broadcast networks. And shows of its kind — serialized dramas stretching nearly two dozen episodes each season — may well be a vanishing breed as actors and writers tire of the grueling July-April filming schedules, preferring the shorter seasons of prestige cable and limited network series. The Kings’ next TV endeavor is the 13-episode “BrainDead” on CBS this summer, a satirical mash-up of sci-fi, horror and Washington politics.

During a nearly two-hour interview, Ms. Margulies and the Kings often finished one another’s sentences and joked about working together again — on a one-woman show about a female Stalin. In these edited excerpts, they chatted about their goals for the finale, the changes in Alicia and the challenges of shooting sex scenes for broadcast television.

Earlier this year, there were rumblings that “The Good Wife” might return for an eighth season even though the Kings were leaving. How did the decision to end the show come about?

JULIANNA MARGULIES I felt like I was put between a rock and a hard place. I was getting messages from all over the place that if you want to keep doing the show, CBS will do it. And in the beginning of the year, Michelle and Robert came to me and said we’re writing the show as if it were ending, because we’re out. So suddenly I felt like I was put in this very precarious position. If I say yes, I’m screwing them over, because they had a vision for the show, and it’s their baby. And if I say no, the network’s going to be angry, and so is the cast and the crew.

But then CBS made that decision for me, and I didn’t have to do a thing. David Stapf, who is the head of CBS Studios, called me and he said, ‘The last thing that I would want of the show that has been a feather in CBS’s cap for seven years is for the eighth year, without the Kings, to be the one where critics start saying they should have ended when the Kings did.’ And he’s right. I think they were honoring the Kings’ intentions.

ROBERT KING Plus, we were sabotaging things. We kept starting trash fires in the writers’ room. [Everyone laughs.]

Finales can be tricky endeavors, given how viewers chime in on social media. What was your vision for the ending of “The Good Wife”?

MICHELLE KING The only thing I’ll say is that the show has always been all about Alicia. So the finale just had to honor the end of Alicia’s journey.

ROBERT KING One of the things we wanted to do is show how much that character had changed. Not just a flipped-switch change but progressively over seven seasons. That’s why there are some memories in some of the shows we’ve done this year.

What were the biggest changes for Alicia?

MARGULIES I think her biggest change was not caring what people thought. Which enabled her to forge ahead. She stopped worrying about being the good girl, even though deep down inside that’s who she’ll always be, inherently. And as Alicia started to become better at her job, she managed to change who she was in her private life.

MICHELLE KING I do think she’s a different person. Thematically for the series, it’s all about what are the consequences of even unfortunate things in your life. Alicia started with something horrible, when she was publicly humiliated. Her husband cheated on her with prostitutes. But that’s what pushed her to have this new and interesting life. Is bad news always bad news? I think you’ll see that question raised all over.

How else did the show change during its seven seasons?

MICHELLE KING In Season 1, it was more 50-50 in terms of closed-ended cases versus serialized stories. And then the show became more serialized. And it’s tricky to do. There’s a reason that serialized shows live more on cable and streaming than they do on network. Because it’s really hard to top yourself 22 times and not get to melodrama. “Scandal” embraces it, and good for them. They don’t try to live in reality. But if you try to live in reality, like “The Good Wife” does, that’s a difficult thing to do.

ROBERT KING You couldn’t keep throwing the bombs that we could throw in the fifth season when we knew Josh Charles [who played Will Gardner, Alicia’s erstwhile boss and love interest] was leaving and that we could break up Alicia and Will, knowing we were going to kill him in the 15th episode. But we couldn’t kill someone every episode.

That’s why networks like hospital shows. There can be blood on the floor in every episode.

For shows that aren’t formulaic procedurals like the “NCIS” clan or a nighttime soap like “Scandal,” does the departure of “The Good Wife” herald an end of an era?

MICHELLE KING If it is an end of an era, and I don’t know if it is, it’s because of the actors. The actors, rightly, don’t want to work that many episodes if there’s an option. To do 13 or 15 episodes and have a life, and do your best work, I think a lot of stars are now saying that’s where I’d like to live, please.

ROBERT KING One of the reasons why networks struggle with it is because it’s hard to maintain a voice with 22 episodes. So maybe it is the last, only because it’s really insanely hard work.

MICHELLE KING It could be that stand-alone stories remain on networks, because that’s what they do really well. And I think they can be a lot of fun, these strictly procedural, closed-ended shows that don’t live and die on the quality of the acting. Part of it is a puzzle element or a mystery.

Julianna, what would it take for you to commit to another network show with 22 episodes a year?

MARGULIES There’s no amount of money in the world.

ROBERT KING Is that true? Even if you like the part?

MARGULIES Even if I like the part.

ROBERT KING So you won’t do network again, but you’d do cable?

MARGULIES In a heartbeat. I would do cable for sure, because it’s four months. It’s like doing a movie.

If a network would do 11 episodes and then have a two-month break and then do 11 [more], I could do it. Because it’s not just a commitment of time on set. I’d come home at the end of a 14-hour day, I have a family to tend to, and then I have nine pages of dialogue to learn. So it just never ends.

What characters or plot lines saw their arcs changed or dialed back over the course of the show?

ROBERT KING Christine Baranski’s character [Diane Lockhart], at the very start of the show, was supposed to be kind of the bitchy boss to Alicia. It was playing off of one premise, which is the mentor who comes to sabotage her mentee. If anybody’s met Christine Baranski, though, you can only go so far with that before you embrace just how wonderful she is. She had this incredibly good funny laugh that we would hear in the dailies between the takes. Why are we sending her off in this kind of direction? Let’s have other people be villains.

One we cut short was because he got another job. That was Jason O’Mara [who played Damian Boyle]. He was more of a gang lawyer, a little shady. What was supposed to happen was that when Will died, he was someone who really stepped up. Then he got a job, on “Complications.”

MICHELLE KING That happened a lot, didn’t it? If you’re trying to do a serialized story with actors who are not your regular cast, you have to be a bit nimble.

MARGULIES They had a whole idea for Oliver Platt, but then he got a series.

MICHELLE KING He was a very smart, very conservative businessman, and it really allowed us to play with issues with the Diane character being such a liberal. And yet to be able to see them as intellectual equals and be very respectful of one another even when they had different opinions, that was really interesting to explore. So it was a great pity when we couldn’t have access to that.

ROBERT KING One of the things we wanted to pursue on the show more and more is there’s a real left-leaning bias on TV, which I’ve heard about. [Everyone laughs.] You watch TV, and if there’s a priest, you know he’s going to be a child molester. There’s a predictability. It’s not even trying to be propaganda for the right; it’s just that there should be an honest discussion that shows that for people on the other side of abortion or on the other side of gay marriage, there’s an intellectual argument there.

What was it like having to hew to broadcast network standards and practices?

ROBERT KING There is a problem standards and practices has with thrusting.

MARGULIES Did you just say thrusting?

ROBERT KING The thrusting issue. And we would have to delicately go around problems of thrusting in pretend-sex that anybody would have. We’d even have to morph images because we wouldn’t get a take that was clean of thrusting.

But it was kind of amazing how much CBS let us do. The first episode of the second season was about oral sex.

What did the departure of Josh Charles allow you to do differently?

ROBERT KING The loss of Josh seemed like it would be catastrophic to us, but I thought it gave us a new lease on who Alicia was, with the underpinning of mourning. How does a [series] show the fact of someone dying, as opposed to a lot of these shows that kill off someone every week?

Is there any merit to the rumblings of a feud between Julianna and Archie Panjabi [who played the private investigator Kalinda Sharma], that they didn’t film their scenes together toward the end of her run on the show?

MARGULIES It’s all silly gossip, and I don’t want to go there.

If the show were to continue, what are some of the issues that you would want to deal with?

ROBERT KING Trump and populism. How American democracy is veering a little more toward European populism, both on the left and on the right. The right wing is tending to be anti-immigrant, and the left is looking toward socialism.

MICHELLE KING I was just stumbling over the fact that there are certain companies that have manifestoes online about how proud they are for the number of people they fire. And I just thought, oh, that’s an episode. And yet there are no more to write.

And if there were one more plotline for Alicia, what would it be?

MARGULIES One of the things I found interesting this year was what Eli [the political adviser to Peter Florrick] kept saying, that Alicia’s the star. Because Alicia doesn’t see herself that way, at all. So even though there was this jilted run for state’s attorney that she got thrown under the bus for, I would love to see how far that could go. Especially in the environment of Hillary [Clinton] right now, I think that would be really interesting.

SOURCE - New York Times BY Lorne Manly. April 28th, 2016.
Retrieved by JuicyChitChats on Friday April 29th,  2016.
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