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Fall TV preview: ‘The Good Wife’
The screeners for the fall television season — such as it is — have started rolling in. I add the qualifier because a new TV season is not as hard and fast a thing as it once was. Lots of shows start in the summer now — mostly low-rent reality fare and and awful imports (like NBC’s late and unlamented “The Listener”); and many promising shows are held back as potential mid-season replacements for those grand or not-so-grand fall experiments that fail.
Finally, some shows, such as ABC’s “Lost,” don’t even begin a new season until January.
Still, the concept of the fall season retains some cache and TV fans wait, hungrily, for any scraps of what the networks are dishing out. (Hmm … must be close to lunchtime!)
So, while our full-blown fall preview won’t hit for another month or so, I’m going to post some first impressions of what I’m watching. And right now I’m watching Julianna Margulies.
She stars in the CBS legal drama, “The Good Wife,” and she carries the pilot in every way. I’m not really a big fan of legal dramas, so this show was a hard sell. Maybe it’s partly because it takes place in my old stomping grounds, but this tale of a wife of a corrupt Chicago politician (does there seem to be any other kind?) worked for me.
Certainly much of the credit goes to Margulies. As the titular good wife, she must return to the workforce in order to provide for her children. Margulies must not only reacquaint herself with the courtroom after a 15-year absence but, because she’s an attorney, also deal with the major players in her politico husband’s (Chris Noth, “Sex in the City”) very public hooker-and-finances scandal on a daily basis.
She’s played an attorney before (2008’s “Canterbury’s Law” didn’t stick around long) but Margulies is best known for her portrayal of nurse Carol Hathaway over 15 years of E.R.
Based solely on the pilot, I’m hoping this show makes it. Margulies’ wounded and vulnerable, but smart character is much more fun to watch than that other wife-of-a-disgraced-Illinois-politician on television, Patti Blagojevich of “I’m A Celebrity: Get Me Out Of Here.”
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