A TV Show Recommendation for Binge-Viewers

Occasionally, I like to recommend a program or a book that I think my friends should know about. John Irving’s 1989 novel A Prayer for Owen Meany is one of those books. In twenty-five years, however, I’ve only been able to convince one friend to read that book. 

With this full-disclosure of my questionable ability to influence others, I would like to recommend a TV show.

My wife and I are both binge-watchers, and we just spent a portion of our summer watching the first six seasons of the CBS series The Good Wife. I thought that I’d had enough of stories about lawyers falling in love and solving cases for the good of humanity, but this series has proved me wrong. Unlike the other long running lawyer franchises of the last twenty-five years, The Good Wife has followed no formula. It has remained unpredictable, focused on ethical questions and developing its characters. It has been, in a word, good.

Whenever I see a story or book with the word “good” in the title, I wonder if it is going to challenge conventional ideas about what it means to be good or to serve the good. This comes from my favorite Flannery O’Connor story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”

Right up front in The Good Wife, the main character, Alicia Florick, the “good wife,” is shown not divorcing her husband after he admits to having affairs in the opening scene of the series. For the next six seasons, she brushes off the dubious complements of women who commend her for “standing by her man.” But there has been something else going on, and not just ironically, as so much on TV seems to play.

Spiritual Emptiness on TV

With her husband’s help, and the help of others, this Alicia Florick has paved her own way. She hasn’t divorced her husband, but she hasn’t been a doormat for him either. She has stood on her own terms. She hasn’t always been good in a conventional sense. As of the end of season six, she hasn’t really forgiven her husband for his betrayal either. Yet her character arch, which has included her own adulterous affair, has nevertheless been interesting for the suggestion that she is aware of a certain emptiness and pointlessness to her life, and it seems to her to be a spiritual problem. This became especially emphasized after Will Gardner, the lawyer with whom she had a brief affair, was killed.

Along the margins of the show, meanwhile, her teenage daughter has become a Christian. While Alicia has gone from being a junior lawyer for the firm to being a partner, Grace, her daughter, has gone from following a strange Jesus-as-revolutionary cult on the Internet to being a serious reader of the Bible. While Alicia has meetings in their apartment with clients and other lawyers, her daughter’s Bible study group can be heard in the background singing some worship song. And Alicia sometimes sees her daughter as the only person she will go to with questions. Occasionally, her daughter has good answers. Not absolute answers. But kind, loving answers. She is not written as a bigot, a fanatic, or a dope.

The Bible In Real Life

In the most recent season, an episode even put Bible reading at the center of a case involving two farmers suing each other over a patented seed one of the farmers has invented. But these farmers, who are neighbors in a community, decide that they have a better way to solve their differences than in a court of law with contentious lawyers. They take it to their church, where the lawyers serve literally as counselors. Alicia tries several scriptures out on her daughter who then scolds her, saying, “Mom, that’s proof-texting.” Ultimately, the farmers end up agreeing to terms on their own, beyond the expertise of their lawyers, following a rather literal interpretation of a passage in Matthew that deals with disagreements among neighbors.

Of course, most of the time, episodes always have their share of murder, mayhem, and lying and scheming lawyers. But there’s more to this series that just lawyers in love, or lawyers playing the system. There is something here more satisfying, more worth thinking about.

I recommend it.

Check it out.