CBS’s “The Good Wife” returns for its seventh season, and just like last year, following the death of Will Gardner (Josh Charles), the show hits the reset button.
Scheduled for 9 p.m. Sunday (but who knows what the actual start time will be with football overruns) on KDKA-TV, “The Good Wife” is also starting to feel as if it may be time for the series to come to an end, a depressing thought given that the show remains the best drama on broadcast television.
Nothing lasts forever, and it would be better for “The Good Wife” to conclude before it grows tired. There are only so many ways writers Robert and Michelle King can rearrange the characters’ circumstances before it feels forced.
Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies) is once again starting her own law firm, acting as a bar attorney for bail hearings, where she makes a new friend, lawyer Lucca Quinn (Cush Jumbo, a welcome addition to the cast). Her “friend” role makes her the new Kalinda following the departure of series co-star Archie Panjabi at the end of last season.
Alicia also goes looking for a new investigator and eventually finds one in gravelly voiced Jason Crouse (Jeffrey Dean Morgan, “Extant”). In a troubling sign that suggests viewers may never see MIA investigator Robyn (the delightful Jess Weixler) again, Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski) is looking for a new investigator, too. Robyn was last thought to be hidden away somewhere unseen at the Lockhart/Agos law firm. If Diane needs a new investigator, where did Robyn go?
The show tries to keep up with the goings-on at Lockhart/Agos, but these stories are awkwardly untethered from the main Alicia plot in the first two episodes of the new season. The show pits Cary against elderly layabout senior partner Howard Lyman (Jerry Adler), a pretty weak plot.
A juicier story thread finds political shark Eli (Alan Cumming) at odds with Illinois Gov. Peter Florrick (Chris Noth) over Peter’s decision to replace Eli on his presidential campaign with folksy barracuda Ruth Eastman (the always-great Margo Martindale, mercifully freed from that terrible sitcom “The Millers”).
CBS has not announced that this is the final season of “The Good Wife,” but with ratings declining and the Kings writing a new series for CBS to air next summer — “BrainDead,” a comic thriller about a young Capitol Hill staffer who discovers aliens have come to Earth and eaten the brains of a growing number of congressional leaders — “The Good Wife” seems likely to conclude sooner rather than later. It will be sad to see this show end, but it’s better to go out on top than as a shadow of its former self.
TV writer Rob Owen: rowen@post-gazette.com or 412-263-2582. Read the Tuned In Journal blog at post-gazette.com/tv. Follow RobOwenTV on Twitter or Facebook.
First Published: October 3, 2015, 4:00 a.m.