Tag Archives: Lawyer

“Stripped”

September 29th, 2009

I’m on the record as suggesting that The Good Wife’s pilot was one of the most accomplished of the fall season, delivering a clever take on the legal procedural that emphasized but didn’t contrive a personal story for Alicia Florrick, part rusty trial attorney and part struggling wife of a shamed politician serving behind bars. The pilot was sharp in how it weaved the two worlds together, both her new job and her life balancing shame and anger, and the show has a pretty bangup cast.

As always, it’s interesting to see how a second episode reacts to the pilot, especially with a procedural where the “hook” of the show seems like something that might only exist in the first episode before being slowly phased out with time. However, with “Stripped,” it becomes clear that The Good Wife is not going to be a show that sees Alicia’s husband or his infidelity fade into the background, which is both good in the long term and perhaps somewhat awkward in the short term.

The core of the series, the integration between her personal life and her job, remains an interesting combination of workplace drama and Alicia’s personal struggle. However, the way that the episode brought her husband’s stripper past into the story was less graceful than it was in the pilot, forcing things into the open by conveniently introducing a stripped-based rape case into the proceedings. It’s not ineffective, per se, but it feels somewhat more forced than it was before, and feels almost like a second pilot as opposed to an example of what the show will do in the future…but a second good pilot.

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