After seven seasons, CBS’ The Good Wife is finally wrapping things up at the end of this season. Well, “wrapping up” might not be the right phrase to use, as series star Julianna Margulies says things won’t quite be so tidy when the show ends.
I said to Christine [Baranski] when we shot the last scene, ‘Wow. The fans are either gonna love this or hate this, but there’s not going to be a ‘meh.’ There’s no tied up bows. And I hope that the fans can understand the trajectory it puts Alicia on.
Julianna Margulies spoke with Variety Thursday night during the party that was held to celebrate the long-running drama and its final season. And, it sounds like the end of The Good Wife will mostly serve as a continuation for the storylines and characters that fans of the show have come to know and love, a sentiment that show co-creator Robert King echoed during the event.
I think [fans can expect] some surprises. We didn’t want to be that show that kind of took a breath and kind of sat back like, ‘Ok, let’s all say goodbye.' We wanted it to feel like a continuation of the story.
Originally, The Good Wife focused on Alicia Florrick, the wife of a prominent Illinois politician, Peter Florrick (Chris Noth), who has to return to her career as a lawyer after her husband is put in prison during the fallout of his political corruption and sex scandal. Needing to provide for her two children, Alicia goes back to work as a defense attorney after 13 years as a stay at home mother. The series dealt with both her cases at her new law firm, and her personal life in dealing with the scandal, family, feelings for her husband and her growing feelings for another lawyer at work, Will Gardner (Josh Charles).
Season 7 of the hit political and legal drama has seen Alicia make new allies as she continues her high pressure career while dealing with the added pressure of having her husband, who she decided to stay with years ago, run for Vice President alongside Hillary Clinton. She’s also dealing with the fallout from a friend’s confession that he deleted a voicemail she had received from Will before his death, that might have made her change her mind about which man to choose.
Well, I’d say it takes some guts to end a series after seven season and not wrap everything up neatly. Julianna Margulies is correct that fans of The Good Wife will likely either be in love with the final episode or hate it with a passion that lives on for months to come. Hopefully, the show’s creators have found a way to balance giving the audience some answers with giving them a definite feeling that Alicia and the other characters are entering a new chapter in their lives. We can all judge for ourselves when The Good Wife airs its series finale on CBS May 8.
