"Good Wife," Good Life

Spoiler Alert: If you have been away in a cave in Borneo, isolated and without access to television, the internet or social media of any kind, and have not yet heard what happened on The Good Wife last week, do not read further.

I had a pretty great week and someday I’ll tell you all about it, but right now I want to talk about The Good Wife.  Last week’s episode of The Good Wife was mind-blowing.  It was game-changing.  It shook all that is The Good Wife to its very core.  Did you see it? No?  Well, go right now to your DVR and watch it and then come back so we can talk about it.

Now, I could go into a long explanation about what happened on this episode, but it all boils down to this:  They killed Will.   Yes, Will Gardner, Alicia’s never-the-right-time love, former boss, and the male lead of the show, is dead.  He was gunned down in the last few moments of the show in the courtroom by a deranged client he was defending. We didn't see it coming. We didn't even really believe it when it happened.  I figured that he would recover from his injuries.  But it became clear pretty quickly that he was not merely dead, he was positively, absolutely, most sincerely dead.

I wanted to know why they killed Will.  Since it seemed unlikely that the creators thought this was a good idea simply to advance the plot, I wondered if the actor wanted to leave the show. As it turns out Josh Charles decided he wanted to leave the show after the fourth season when his contract was up, but the producers convinced him to stay on for one more season so that they could plan his exit.

How lucky we all are that Charles agreed.  What they wrote for the character of Will this season was more interesting and compelling than anything we had seen in the first four seasons of the show.  And Josh Charles more than did it justice – I think it was his best work of the whole series.

But now Will is dead and what will happen to the series?  Oh, I don’t know but it’s going to be good.  In this week’s episode, we started to find out, along with Alicia and the rest of the characters, what went down in that courtroom.  We saw Alicia trying to make sense of the senselessness of his sudden passing, and desperately trying to determine what he felt about her as he left this world, all the while knowing that she will never really have that answer.  We saw the other characters beginning to grasp the loss of their friend, each dealing with it in their own way. 

It was gut-wrenching, heart-breaking, riveting, and….totally fictional.  Well, seriously now, Will Gardner was not a family member or close personal friend. Heck, he wasn't even real. After my initial shock and denial when I realized that Will Gardner was indeed dead, I skipped right over the next three stages of grief (anger, bargaining, and depression) and came to acceptance in the space of about three minutes.  Because it is not real, I can be excited about how this shakes things up in the series, and to see where this takes the other characters in the hands of some of the best writers on television.  Trust me, I will be on the edge of my seat waiting for next week’s episode.