[Update 5/18/16: yesterday a pundit praised Hillary for “standing by her man.” I hadn’t thought of “Alicia” as a stand-in for Hillary before, but it is plausible.]
SPOILER ALERT. Preparing the audience for the finishing of a seven-season show, widely touted as “the best written show on television,” series creators Robert and Michelle King, explained to the viewers that the series was “about” the search for “power” by its star “Alicia Florrick” (played by Julianna Margulies), and, that power corrupts! (Lord Acton!) Hence the slap by the “betrayed” “Diane” (played by Christine Baranski).
You could have fooled me.
I had written about the series before, emphasizing what I don’t like about the law: https://clarespark.com/2014/03/24/the-good-wife-and-bad-timing/ at a point when the interlocking triangles were the main focus, as Alicia struggles with loyalty to the stability that makes her two children feel safe, versus sexual desire. To the dismay of the fans, the writers killed off her lover Will Gardner (played by Josh Charles), but another boyfriend emerged recently, another of the bad boys to whom Alicia seems addicted.
Her father never appears in the series, though a bohemian mother does, along with a gay brother. Freud is so passé.
The late Hannah Wilke with gun
So far, the Democratic playbook seems intact, as one would never know that Chicago is notoriously corrupt, and controlled by Democrats. Instead, we are immersed in the often amusing shenanigans of millionaire lawyers and wacky judges with nary but one Republican in the cast; for “Diane” proposes marriage to a firearms expert and a staunch conservative, ostensibly because of attraction to “guns” (ironically, gun laws are strictly enforced in Chicago, notwithstanding the notorious high death rate from illegal guns among the black population). Indeed, Alicia’s “betrayal” consists of an action that appears to break up this unlikely marriage between a staunch liberal feminist and her right-wing partner, hence “the slap” that supposedly echoes with a slap I can’t remember from season one. And now Alicia walks off into an unknowable future, as the strong, but ostensibly sold out feminist that we have admired (?) for seven seasons. Strong, but, we are told, corrupted by upward mobility.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/03/09/the-great-marriage-behind-the-good-wife.html. Odd that the writers, so happily married and creative, ended their acclaimed series on a sour note. Perhaps the Jewish wife “called the shots” yet again.
writers Michelle and Robert King as shown in Hollywood Reporter
The Clare Spark Blog 