Spitzer, Toe-Sucking Hooker Spawn ‘Good Wife’: Jeremy Gerard

Sept. 22 (Bloomberg) -- As Alicia Florrick, Julianna Margulies nails the blank stare we’ve seen so often on the face of a disgraced politician’s wife.

In the hypnotic opening scene of “The Good Wife,” a potentially addictive legal drama that has its premiere tonight on CBS at 10 p.m. New York time, she’s frozen in the pose of supportive partner. A few seconds later, as her husband is carted off to jail for a farrago of corruption and sex charges, she slaps him hard enough to tattoo his cheek. She’s feral with rage and humiliation.

We’ve seen this violent pain before. As the romantically tortured plaything of George Clooney in the early seasons of “E.R.,” Margulies, whose circumflex eyebrows sharpen her dark- haired beauty, perfected the art of playing the resilient victim. Her model in “The Good Wife” may be Silda Spitzer, yet the real touchstone for Alicia is the strong-willed heroine of Victorian fiction. Fire everything in the arsenal at her: She’ll be back stronger and steelier than ever.

Abruptly required to support herself and two teenage kids as the legal bills grow by the day, Alicia returns to lawyering after a 13-year hiatus. A friend from law school brings her in as a junior associate at the high-priced Chicago firm where he’s now a partner. It’s a coven of back-stabbing ladder climbers and she’s barely on the first rung.

Alicia’s first assignment is a pro bono job, defending a woman accused of murdering her ex-husband. A trial ended in a hung jury and she is told to pursue the same strategy taken by her predecessor, Diane Lockhart, the firm’s top woman. When Alicia realizes the strategy won’t work, she goes her own way.

Fraught Mentor-Student

Christine Baranski plays Diane narrow-eyed, pursed-lipped and unforgiving, offering the promise of an entertainingly fraught mentor-student relationship like the one in the Glenn Close series “Damages.”

Fortunately for Alicia, one person has her back: Kalinda Sharma (Archie Panjabi, fitting the part like jeans). The firm’s investigator, Sharma isn’t above undoing an extra button on her blouse, Erin Brockovich-like, when there’s important information to be extracted from a wide-eyed male.

“The Good Wife” is the brainchild of husband-and-wife writers Robert and Michelle King, whose last network series, “In Justice,” concerned innocent convicts rotting in jail. They think outside genre conventions. Early on, Alicia passes an office where a videotape is running of her husband, the former state’s attorney, having his toes sucked by a hooker. The bad husband casts a long and sinister shadow.

‘Twilight Zone’ Theme

The great cast includes Chris Noth (“Mr. Big” from “Sex and the City”) as that ratbag husband; Matt Czuchry as Alicia’s nemesis, an aggressive young associate; and Mary Beth Peil as the old-school mother-in-law who has moved in to help care for the kids and provide ongoing annoyance. (Alicia’s mobile phone rings with the theme from “The Twilight Zone” whenever Peil calls, courtesy of her equally annoyed 13-year-old daughter).

I hope “The Good Wife” doesn’t devolve into a standard- issue case-of-the-week series. The premiere gives Alicia the gift of problems on every front: the husband in jail deluded into thinking he’ll make everything right; the relentlessly demanding job that will certainly take her away from her kids at a crucial time and, above it all, the question of whether she can evolve from the passive role of good wife to become something more substantial. It’s impossible not to root for Margulies. I mean Alicia.

Rating: ***

What the Stars Mean:
****       Do Not Miss
***        Excellent
**         Average
*          Poor
(No stars) Worthless

(Jeremy Gerard is an editor and critic for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Jeremy Gerard in New York at jgerard2@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Manuela Hoelterhoff at mhoelterhoff@bloomberg.net.