This past Sunday, I interviewed Julianna Margulies, of “The Good Wife,” at The New Yorker Festival. At one point, I asked about a rumor that has fascinated fans of her show—the rumor that the fictional acrimony between two of its characters, Alicia Florrick and Kalinda Sharma, is mirrored by a real-life feud between the actresses who play them, Margulies and Archie Panjabi. Margulies was game to answer my question (“It’s silly gossip,” she said), but, beforehand, across the table, she fixed me with a look that fans of the show would have recognized: the expression of appalled and disappointed skepticism with which Alicia so often faces her opponents in court. It was scary, but also great. This is it, I thought—the closest I’ll ever come to being on “The Good Wife.”
The “Kaliciagate” scandal is both beneath “The Good Wife” and perfect for it. The rumor started last summer, after the show’s fifth season, when Emily Orley, of BuzzFeed, pointed out that the two actresses hadn’t shared a scene in thirty episodes: instead of meeting face to face, they’d talk on the phone. Although there was a logical explanation for their estrangement—Kalinda had slept with Alicia’s husband!—thirty episodes of separation seemed excessive for people who often worked together. Then, this May, Panjabi’s farewell episode aired. (Her character, Kalinda, had been written off the show.) For the first time in more than fifty episodes, Alicia and Kalinda appeared together onscreen, meeting for one last drink in a bar. Although the scene was moving, something about it looked off. Online, fans speculated that the actresses had been filmed separately and then composited into the same room during post-production. When the show’s creators, Michelle and Robert King, were asked if the scene had been faked, they didn’t deny it. Instead, they said, bafflingly, that lots of shots on the show were fake. “We’re making the show every day using tricks, like if you’re in a car and there’s green screen and it looks like Chicago out the window, but that’s not exactly where we are,” Michelle King said. (The show is filmed in New York.) Needless to say, this only served to intensify the rumors.
On Sunday, I played my own small role in furthering the saga. When I asked about it, Margulies adamantly denied the existence of a feud between her and Panjabi. “There’s no animosity on my part,” she said. In reference to Kalinda’s computer-assisted farewell scene, she suggested that there had been a scheduling conflict: “You also have to remember, she was also doing a show called ‘The Fall.’ ” The next day, however, after a report about the event was published on Vulture, Panjabi disagreed via Tweet. “@TheFallTV was not even in production at that time and I was in New York ready to film the scene!” she wrote. Their disembodied exchange was covered not just by People and Us Weekly but also by CNN.
It seemed like a plot right out of “The Good Wife.” On the show, people are always trying to cover up their private disputes; inevitably, those disputes reveal themselves, often electronically, through a leaked e-mail or a revelatory piece of metadata. Maybe there’s some reality behind “Kaliciagate,” or maybe fans of “The Good Wife” have learned its lessons a little too well. In either case, the rumor is both silly and fascinating. Rarely do you see life and art in such mutual imitation.
Margulies, of course, talked about many things besides the alleged feud—much of it more interesting, in my opinion. She drew the audience’s attention, for example, to a plot arc that I, at least, hadn’t appreciated enough, involving Diane Lockhart, who was one of Alicia’s law partners, and Reese Dipple, a conservative billionaire and client of the firm. Last season, Diane, a liberal feminist, entered into an unusual arrangement with Dipple, who is pro-life and pro-gun: whenever “R.D.” held a mock trial at his think tank, the Plenary Institute, Diane would participate, arguing the progressive side of the case. (In one memorable episode, she represented a gay couple who had been denied service by a wedding planner.)
It seemed as though Diane, who had recently married a conservative man, might be trying to change R.D.’s political outlook; needless to say, she was also strengthening her relationship with a valuable client. This was just a pleasant, aimless subplot until, at the end of the season, it turned out to be decisive. After Alicia withdrew from the race for state’s attorney, Diane moved to hire her back at the firm; R.D. protested, threatening to take his business elsewhere. (The Florrick name, he said, had become “like Blagojevich.”) Diane withdrew her offer to take Alicia back. “She threw Alicia under the bus for Reese Dipple, who stands for everything she’s fought against her whole life,” Margulies said, with some heat. “He stands for guns, he stands for anti-abortion, he’s anti-gay-marriage—everything that Diane has stood for. She threw me under the bus to keep him!” It’s typical of “The Good Wife” that even the betrayals are Pyrrhic and double-edged: in siding with Dipple, Diane had betrayed not just Alicia but herself.
Alicia’s abandonment—her solitude—is now almost total. “I am constantly reminded, when I play her, of how sad and lonely she is,” Margulies said. She was convinced, she continued, that Alicia’s character had feelings of unhappiness that had yet to be explored or acknowledged by the show: “I think she has a lot more than what they’ve written for her, which is what makes her exciting for the writers,” she said.
It has been widely reported that “The Good Wife” may be entering its final season; Robert and Michelle King are working on a new show, “BrainDead,” in which a Capitol Hill staffer discovers that aliens have eaten the brains of many members of Congress. The pressure is mounting: Will “The Good Wife” come to a satisfactory conclusion? Talking with Margulies, it occurred to me that the show’s greatest challenge may lie in the portrayal of realistic and believable happiness for its heroine. “The Good Wife” has excelled at exploring the complexities of work and politics; it has also captured the exhilarations of thinking and talking, and of intellectual competition. Its characters tend to be unhappy people who find happiness only when they are using their prodigious minds against one another. That kind of happiness is, for obvious reasons, self-defeating: it has the effect of pushing other people away. Only one character seems to enjoy family happiness in the conventional way—the crafty lawyer Louis Canning (Michael J. Fox), whom Alicia calls, in the new season, “the devil.” How can he be so two-faced as a lawyer and, at the same time, so happy and devoted as a husband and father, with a wife and children who are equally devoted in turn? It’s unclear how Canning’s work and personal lives are related; perhaps they aren’t. His happiness, increasingly, is a code that Alicia wants to crack.
Because drama depends on change, writers often find lasting happiness hard to dramatize. When Tolstoy wrote, at the beginning of “Anna Karenina,” “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” he was stating an artistic problem more than he was stating a fact. (On Sunday, Margulies said that she’d read “Anna Karenina” three times.) Tolstoy’s novel is, among other things, a book about the value of happiness: often, he thought, we discount it, in favor of other, more exciting feelings, like anticipation, love, and triumph. Amid the drama, suspense, and sadness of his novel, he tried to show what happiness looked like—to make its plainness rich, its simplicity luminous.
“The Good Wife” has traced, with great precision, the progress of Alicia’s unhappiness. The show began with the destruction of her marriage (it now exists only for P.R. purposes), and, since then, season by season, it has tempted her with appealing visions of happiness only to reveal them as hollow or unreal. It would be easy, I think, for “The Good Wife” to continue down that road—for the show to stay disillusioned, cynical, and dramatic, coasting toward some dark end. Personally, I hope that it does the reverse—that it imagines, within its world, a route to plausible happiness for Alicia. I hope it answers the riddle it has posed.
