Monsters of Television

“In lock-up, they won’t let you tweet.”

This is the best episode of The Good Wife so far this season.

Part of this is because it had pretty much everything I’ve come to love in the show. But the other part was that the episode  didn’t have any of the stuff I hate. (Read: There were no Blake and Kalinda shenanigans in this episode. None. Zero. Zilch. So glorious.) But yes, “Bad Girls” had everything in it that marks an episode of The Good Wife: political maneuvering,  law firm maneuvering, a solid case, reasonable Kalinda investigating, good family beats.

There’s a delicate balance to crafting a show with so many things going on at once, and what often happens is that some things fall to the wayside (did Jackie break her hip?) while others gain prominence. Overall, I feel that The Good Wife does a good job of giving all things equal weight though, after sleeping on the episode, I do see the critiques the episode might perhaps try and overreach here.

I still think the episode is considerably stronger than the past few episodes have been, so don’t let my acknowledgment of the critique seem like I’m discounting how much I enjoyed the episode.

Again, The Good Wife takes the ripped from the headlines approach to a court case and does a better job than Law & Order recently has done with a teen starlet with a corrupt mom. They even went so far as to cast an actual teen star for the role. Now, I had no idea who Miranda Cosgrove before doing a search for her on-line so I doubt most of the show’s grayer demographic did either. While she wasn’t totally convincing, the show’s acknowledgment that her character, Sloan, was trying to pull herself out of the Disney ghetto by acting outrageous and kind of skanky, but only as an act, worked for me overall.

But through the court case, we a number of looks at current Web culture: tweeting, Taiwanese animated news, and FourSquare. What’s fascinating to me about the use of these trends is that they’re not used negatively. If any of these appeared in, say, Law & Order, we’d be given stern talking to about the dangers of Web 2.0 technologies (and the Taiwanese!): somebody used a FourSquare-like thing to know where someone was to kill them, but made it look like they just wanted the mayorship.

Instead, the Web stuff is used productively, to aid the investigation not to warn us about its dangers. I like this approach to address the contemporary culture that these high-powered lawyers and judges, many probably without kids, aren’t exposed to and have to deal with and work around to win their cases. This is a smart, albeit exaggerated for the sake of drama, way to integrate these trends.

I don’t feel like the court case is what is attempting to overreach, nor do I think that the solid Grace plot is overreaching either.  I think were things could potentially get crowded for people is in the law firm politics and the State’s Attorney politics. So let’s break them down.

The LG&B politics continue to work for me. While I wish that Zach Grenier’s David Lee had appeared a little earlier this season to remind us about his bombastic, self-serving self, it does make sense to me that he would be fairly outraged by Bond stepping into this “fiefdom” to do peer evaluations. More ambiguous though is Dianne’s actions here, as she sides with Bond about doing the peer evaluations.  Why do this? I think it’s a very calculating attempting on Dianne’s part to regain some amount of control. She sees that Will and Bond are much closer and chummier than they should be, leaving her out in the cold.

Pile it on top of the fact that she and Will were supposed to be a team against Bond, and you can see how siding with Bond here is an attempt to anger David so she can find a new partner (not law firm partner*) in the firm’s politics: David, after all, is the only making any money. It’s a crafty move on her part, and it’ll be curious to see the eventual fallout of this when you consider Bond’s plans to make a Chicago-D.C. firm.

* Of course, the promo indicates that Dianne is splitting off with David to firm their own firm, which may indeed be overreaching in terms of plot.

Meanwhile, the political plot  gives hints at the battle that Peter and Eli face as they approach the primary (since everyone is running as a Democrat I assume). Peter’s nearly out of funds, and the DNC wants him to get out of the race and offer him the bribe of being DNC chairman (“the Howard Dean deal”). In a very real Hail Mary, Eli approaches Pastor Isiah for an endorsement to counter Wendy’s surge in the polls to make Peter a viable candidate again.

While I do appreciate and enjoy the plot, it does feel the most wishy-washy. Wendy is clearly smarter and savvier than she lets on, approach both Eli and Isiah. Indeed, in the sliding scale of cynicism, Wendy just got closer to the cynical side of things, not even waiting for Peter to drop out before attempting to poach his biggest assets. But Isiah’s decision to endorse Peter instead of Wendy does come out of nowhere: Is Isiah so offended by Wendy that he elects to endorse Peter as opposed to just stay out of the game entirely?

Here, coupled with the way-too-ominous (did the entire board need to file in like that?) coup within Isiah’s church, I can understand the idea that, as Jason Mittell discussed with me, that there seemed to be a scene or two missing from the episode in regards to this plot. I understand Isiah’s rationale, that Wendy would only come to the church after the endorsement whereas Peter didn’t seek it out until it was absolutely necessary, and had been attending since his release. But some discussion of it, perhaps with the board or with his father, might’ve eased that transition.

All in all though, a very strong, engaging episode of the series. Hopefully Blake won’t be be back until after sweeps!