What To Expect From This Season Of ‘The Good Wife’

SPOILERS AHEAD! If you haven’t finished season five of The Good Wife, drop what you’re doing and watch it now – it contains one of the biggest mid-season bombshells in recent memory.

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The Good Wife, that sparkling jewel of American network television, premiers its sixth season in the US this Sunday night — and I, for one, am stoked to see more of that Emmy-award winning booze hound, Alicia Florrick.

For the uninitiated, The Good Wife is a long-running CBS courtroom drama, starring Julianna Margulies as the wife of a disgraced politician who is forced to re-enter the workforce when her husband (Chris Noth) is sent to jail on fraud chargers. For the past five seasons we have watched Alicia climb the ranks of her law firm Lockhart & Gardner, under the guidance of the managing partners, Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski) and Will Gardner (Josh Charles).

The show remains one of the only critically-acclaimed series to successfully produce 22-episode seasons, a fact that they somewhat passive aggressively pointed out in their ‘For Your Consideration’ campaign for this year’s Emmys. And all through its five season, 112-episode run, it’s stayed a critical favourite. Margulies has won an Emmy, Golden Globe, Critic’s Choice Award and two Screen Actors Guild awards for her performance, and The New Yorker’s Joshua Rothman wrote of the show, “I don’t think it’s possible for a television show to be any better than the courtroom drama The Good Wife.”

Season five threw us some curve balls and one heart-breaking death and, as usual, the finale left us with more questions than it answered. Will Alicia run for state’s attorney? Will Diane really leave the firm she built from the ground up? Will Howard Lyman finally get his corner office? LOL j/k – no one gives a shit about Howard Lyman.

Here’s a look at what we can expect from season six.

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#1: Florrick, Agos, Lockhart?

There are intrigues and mergers afoot at Lockhart & Gardner and Florrick & Agos. Or is that Lockhart & Canning? Or Florrick, Agos & Lockhart? Or maybe Canning & Associates?

Season five ended with my fantasy mentor Diane Lockhart offering her services (and her $38 million a year in client billings) to that pack of start-up ragamuffins at Florrick & Agos. The teaser for the season premier, ‘The Line’, shows Alicia toasting to the beginning of Florrick, Agos & Lockhart — but it’s unlikely that our old mates Louis Canning and David Lee will let that go-ahead without some devious machinations.

http://youtu.be/VQAGTBoUwlQ

Much of the battle will seemingly rest on who wins the business of the adorably-named tech company, Chumhum. Last season, Lee and Canning were on the verge of poaching them from Florrick & Agos by somehow manipulating the wife of Chumhum’s founder, Neil Gross. No doubt this conflict will play out in the first few episodes – Chumhum is 75% of Florrick & Agos operating income, or was until they got the might of the Lockhart clientele to add to their books.

With Diane becoming a name partner of their firm, it looks like cracks will emerge in Cary and Alicia’s partnership. In the final episode of last season this was heavily foreshadowed with two heated confrontations regarding the merger. It’s likely that we’ll see some of the same partner-hustling and vote-counting that made Lockhart & Gardner so unstable. Let’s see if the three of them can weather these challenges better than LG, who seemed to have a partnership challenge every second episode.

Series showrunners Robert and Michelle King told Vulture that they write seasons in two halves, each half having a beginning, middle and an end. So perhaps the formation of Florrick, Agos & Lockhart will be the first major story arc of the season.

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#2: Alicia’s Ascent

In his New Yorker article, Joshua Rothman wrote that The Good Wife’s longest story arc was Alicia’s transformation into her power-hungry and powerful husband, Peter. And indeed with Eli’s season five lightbulb moment of her running for state’s attorney, this seems to be playing out in a very literal way. While the teaser for ‘The Line’ has Alicia vehemently denying that she will run, we’re not fooled. If a character says they’re “never saying yes” on TV, they’re definitely going to say yes at some point.

After Will’s death, Alicia started contemplating the pointlessness of her work, even questioning — for the first time since the series started — whether or not she actually wants to be a lawyer. She tells Cary that she’s “tired”, and her mother that she’s “spinning”.

Will running for State’s Attorney give her something meaningful to focus on, or will she sink further into existential despair?

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#3: Alicia + Finn Forever

There’s a new hunk in town and his name is Matthew Good. Hello sir!

Finn Polmar is already a fan favourite, and while the creators of the show have remained tight-lipped, there are hints in the episode one preview that Finn and Alicia will start to see each other socially and maybe, hopefully, romantically.

Finn is no Will 2.0; he’s a straight-up good guy, more saintly than even Saint Alicia, which is not the type of man she usually digs (look at the morally flexible Peter and Will). But it’s unlike the show to leave a character as all light and no dark – I expect we’ll dig into Finn’s flaws or troubled past this season.

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#4: Peter The Scumbag

Peter is just the worst, right?

His political campaign was exposed as being involved in some very dirty tactics to win the governorship, and while he dodged a bullet thanks to Will’s death, chances are those planted ballot boxes are going to come back to bite him.

Then there’s his penchant for interns (Bill and Hillary, anyone?). He and Alicia seem set on their power couple, no-divorce-sleep-with-whoever situation, and we can bet Peter takes advantage of his new found sexual freedom. But as Eli says, there is no way that this arrangement will be kept a secret. If it comes out this season, it could hurt both his and Alicia’s chances at political success, so keep an eye on that.

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#5: Kalinda And Cary

It’s fairly safe to assume that Diane will take her gal Friday, Kalinda, to her new firm — which means Cary will once again be working with his sometimes-sex partner. Cary found out at the end of season five that Kalinda uses him for information, but it remains to be seen whether he’ll call her out, or whether Kalinda will even still be interested now she has nothing to gain professionally.

The preview for next season also shows Kalinda vaguely threatened by everyone’s favourite drug lord, Lemond Bishop, who warns her to stay away from an investigation. Kalinda’s always pretty chill about her work, so I’m sure she’ll just back right on down and won’t get into involved in stuff that’s super dangerous and way out of her league…

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#6: Cases And Characters

The Good Wife is, at its core, a classic law procedural drama.  Though the showrunners have said that every episode in the new season won’t necessarily revolve around or resolve a single case, there is no doubt that several significant cases will arise.

One of the show’s strengths is dealing with legal issues that delve into advances in technology, particularly the Internet; Wired columnist Clive Thompson has called it “the most tech-savvy show on TV”. Having already dealt with the likes of Bitcoin, the Silk Road, NSA surveillance and Anonymous, it’s safe to assume that any large-scale tech cases of the past year are fair game. Perhaps someone hacks the Cloud and releases a bunch of naked celebrity photos onto the Internet? Just a thought.

This show is also a gold mine for guest stars. Big names already announced for this season include Taye Diggs, David Hyde Pierce of Frasier fame, and Gloria Steinem (!) appearing as herself.

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#7: Whatever Happened To…

This is the show that never forgets. If a storyline is left unresolved, you can bet your ass it’s going to come back in one day. Here are some semi-open storylines that could reappear in season six:

Kalinda’s husband: Yes he was the worst — that whole plotline was the worst — but we still don’t know what happened. Did Kalinda kill him? Is she really that badass?

Tascioni, Hecht & Associates: Everyone’s favourite guest star, Carrie Preston, has ended her run on True Blood, which hopefully frees her up to bring more Elsbeth Tascioni to our screens.

Alicia’s $6 million lawsuit: Yeah. That still hasn’t been cleared up and no one seems that concerned, which is… odd.

Zach Florrick: He’s off to college and the actor, Graham Phillips, is listed as a recurring character, rather than a series regular next season. It will be interesting to see how Grace deals with being the focus of Alicia’s motherly attention.

While we can’t know exactly what season 6 has in store, we can be sure that the core elements of what makes this show great will remain: attractive lawyers hurling rapid fire objections at increasingly quirky judges, while Alicia continues to wear the shit out of pencil skirts and drink glasses of wine the size of her head.

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Season six of The Good Wife premieres on Channel Ten on October 8, 9.30pm (but returns to American screens this Sunday.)

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