'The Good Wife' Snaps Sally Mann's Photography
The Good Wife is off to a very good start this season. Peter Florrick’s nascent run against Hillary Clinton; seeing Alan Cumming getting side-swiped by Margo Martindale and then vowing revenge is worth an entire season of most other dramas; daughter Grace working a whole new, appealing, steely persona as Alicia’s executive assistant; watching Jerry Adler momentarily wipe Matt Czury off the screen as creators Robert and Michelle King unearth the street-tough roots of Adler’s Howard Lyman character — really, things could hardly be going better.
Then this week, things got even juicier. Alicia was actually arguing in court against the kind of photography that Sally Mann does. The episode, titled “Innocents,” took the side (more or less; The Good Wife always posits a good counter-argument) of an adult child of a very Mann-like photographer. She was played, superbly, by Amy Irving, who did a very rare thing on television: She portrayed a high-art partisan whose lofty snobbery is a given, yet Irving, aided by Craig Turk’s script, managed to convey the idea that even entitled artists deserve respect and not TV’s too frequent go-to position, which is, snobs exist to be humiliated.
As always, the Kings’s timing was impeccable. Mann’s recent memoir Hold Still is barely off the bestseller lists, and she’s made the publicity rounds frequently having to explain yet again why photographing her children nude was and is art rather than child pornography. A Good Wife viewer would expect Alicia to be making the same argument; instead, she was arguing for the son who feels betrayed — worse: violated — by his mother. It was a wonderfully tense, well-thought-out debate on both sides.
The hour was also studded with those small touches that don’t necessarily further the story but make The Good Wife more realistic in its unpredictability; I’m thinking this night of the show’s references to the recent, eerie horror movie It Follows. Watching the show, you think to yourself, this must just be a movie the writers and/or the Kings liked and they threw a couple of mentions in there, right? Yet it also makes sense: This is how people think and talk — they make connections in their lives to things they’ve seen in pop culture, as metaphors for the way they’re thinking.
Now, if Jeffrey Dean Morgan would just dial back his bedroom-eyed, white-Barry-White lover-man investigator character just a little bit, The Good Wife will have an excellent, utterly-opposite replacement for Kalinda. We know we’re supposed to think Morgan’s Jason Crouse and Alicia will become lovers. And we don’t know what twist The Good Wife will apply to our tender suspicions.
The Good Wife airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on CBS.
