How ‘The Good Wife’ Explored The Many Roles Of Modern Women

The Good Wife ends its seven-year run on Sunday evening, and as viewers tune in to find out how Julianna Margulies’ character chooses to support her husband — or not — critics and producers of the show are reflecting on what the program has meant in terms of female leads on television.

Time wrote that Margulies’ Alicia Florrick was able to grow and “contradict herself without apologizing,” in some ways that would make her traditionally “unlikeable” as the anchor of prime time drama.

In an interview with The Daily Beast, show producer Robert King — who spearheaded the show for its entire run with his wife Michelle — explained that a complex exploration of feminism was always at the core of the show.

“We always wanted to talk about feminism generationally. Jackie (Mary Beth Peil) has one attitude. Diane another. Alicia another. And then Grace (Makenzie Vega) was supposed to be even another, but I actually think we went a different with that and that was more actually Zach (Graham Phillips). Where he said it’s not about gender definitions two episodes ago, and he was willing to be a househusband to his fiancé in Paris and write his memoirs. It was obviously all comic, but there is this feeling that things are not defined anymore.”

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Indeed, Time notes that in the third-to-last episode, Alicia is confronted with the ironic support of her son’s fiance who says Florrick standing by her man is not “retro,” but a new feminism where women can do whatever they want. The character later tells Alicia her marriage to Zach doesn’t have to stick if either one of the spouses isn’t happy. In the storyline, Zach plans to follow his older wife to Europe where he will write while she takes up a lucrative new job.

Writing in The Guardian, Maddie Palmer argued that all of The Good Wife‘s women, including its vast repertoire of supporting cast members, represented a different type of femininity. There were many who, as professionals, used the stereotype against them as an advantage. Palmer compared The Good Wife to Sex and the City, in that as much as The Good Wife characters were playing games, Carrie Bradshaw and crew were being who they claimed to be.

“The creators used the procedural format to bring in an impressive array of female lawyers, who all played – and played into – an expression of femininity. Patti Nyholm (Martha Plimpton) was an Earth Mother, shamelessly exploiting the sympathy extended to pregnant women and mothers of young children. Patti waddles, winces in pain, then winks: the women in the show know they’re being played, but the male characters swallow it whole.”

The Canadian Press described the show as the exploration of one character — Alicia Florrick — who had a career and children — but defied expectations by not trying to balance both. When the audience might expect Alicia to do one thing, often she would do the other. In the finale, several threads of her life are set to come together: mother to a college-bound daughter (a soon-to-be empty nester), partner in a female-led law firm, lawyer defending her client who may or may not be guilty, wife to an embattled politician, lover to a man who likes to leave town, and still-grieving woman who lost her dear friend and soulmate in a courtroom shooting two years ago.

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Whether or not Peter Florrick is guilty of corruption charges is less relevant to the plot than how Alicia chooses to support him, in court, on television, and in life. If he does go off to prison, as he did at the beginning of Season 1, The Good Wife‘s exploration will be less about his culpability than how she chooses to conduct her life and demonstrate loyalty — to her colleagues, friends, family, husband and herself.

[Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images]