Warning: This article contains spoilers from the series finale of “The Good Wife.”
As “The Good Wife” ended its seven-season run Sunday night, it’s hard to tell what we’ll miss most about this superb series. For starters, it’ll be hard to imagine Sunday night without Julianna Margulies soothingly advising us to “stay tuned for scenes from our next episode.”
The show didn’t make its exit on a provocative note à la “The Sopranos” or “Seinfeld.” No “whatever happened to” flash-forward like “Six Feet Under,” either. That series never did roll that way.
We did get the return, sort of, of the late Will Gardner (Josh Charles). He wasn’t brought back from the dead by a sorceress, as in another show that also airs Sunday nights at 9 p.m. Rather, Will popped up as a ghost of sorts, like a lawyerly Jiminy Cricket chatting with the titular Alicia Florrick (Margulies).
Will aside, “The Good Wife” ended like it started: with Alicia standing — albeit temporarily, and sort of — by her husband, Peter (Chris Noth), as he made another shameful exit.
But of course we weren’t really back to square one. Alicia is a much different person than she was seven years ago. She is older, more assured; she has a career. She was about to divorce Peter and take off with lover Jason Crouse (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) — if she could just find him. She was willing to coldly throw her colleague and friend, Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski), under the bus — and then Diane slapped her in disgust. (Another echo, this time of Alicia slapping Peter in the pilot.) In the very last shot, Alicia walked away from us, crisply adjusting her jacket on her way to … well, we’ll never know what.
As an episode, “End” (incidentally a 2013 episode was titled “Everything Is Ending”) was just fine. It was hard to care about the details of US Attorney Conor Fox’s (Matthew Morrison) crusade against Peter because frankly Peter should have been nailed for election fraud, not for obstructing justice on a murder case from five years ago that nobody could remember or care about.
But the episode was not so much about that latest trial’s technicalities as about what was going to happen to Alicia. Thankfully, the series ended on a question mark rather than a resolution. Except for the clunky use of a Regina Spektor song — come on, this isn’t “Grey’s Anatomy”! — the episode was typically elegant, written and directed by the kind of adults with whom you’d like to share a glass of red wine or tequila.
Of course “The Good Wife” had ups and downs over seven years — nobody can maintain absolute quality control on a grueling 22-episode-a-year season— but overall it was the rare broadcast drama that held its own against cable’s “prestige” offerings. Not to mention the rare show to explore, among other things, the inner workings of a married professional couple. The finale even threw a few more insights our way, as when Lucca (Cush Jumbo) told Alicia, “You tend to confuse responsibility for love.” We’ve been there, sister!
The good news is that the series stopped before it could descend into ridiculousness. Creators Michelle and Robert King already are on to their next project, “Brain Dead,” a horror-political satire that starts airing this summer. It’s fine — in many ways, their job is done.