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Why ‘The Good Wife’ Was Cancelled Despite Good Ratings

By Stacey Cole
Published on: 06:02 PST, May 12, 2016

The Good Wife ended its seven-season run last Sunday night, according to Cleveland. The news of the impending cancellation was announced during CBS’ coverage of the Super Bowl last year, and for many fans, the announcement came as a surprise and could even have been an unintentional slip by the network.

The revelation came during a promo clip for CBS’ The Good Wife, in which it said the seventh season of the show would be its last. However, fans of the CBS show admit that the show, although still good, is not as exciting as it used to be, so the move to end the series now may have been planned way in advance.

The Good Wife has seen better days in previous seasons. And even though the seventh season still has good ratings, the fans of the show, which is a mix of legal drama, political intrigue, and soap opera, note that the CBS series lost its original appeal.

Julianna Margulies, who plays the lead character Alicia Florrick on The Good Wife, has won two Best Actress Emmys for the role, which says a lot about the success of the show. The decision to cancel the show now still left the fans open-mouthed.

And even though The Good Wife creators Michelle and Robert King weren’t exactly open about the finale episode, there was one detail in the show that could be used as a major cliffhanger to end the show: Alicia’s husband Peter (portrayed by Chris Noth) facing a jail sentence.

However, it wasn’t the original ending idea of the creators. And some reports even claim that Noth’s character wasn’t supposed to survive to the final episode of The Good Wife. So it looks like creators started preparing for the show’s end well in advance.

It’s believed that the change of The Good Wife ending was also inspired by Alicia’s true love, Will Gardner’s death (portrayed by Josh Charles). While Charles expressed his desire to be killed off on the show and Noth wanted to stay, the creators decided to keep Noth’s character until the end.

Even though The Good Wife deserves all the acclaim and awards, the show has often been invisible in the eyes of many TV viewers who enjoy other big TV series such as Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and Homeland.

The Good Wife has shaped a whole new definition of the woman in the TV world, according to the Los Angeles Times. The CBS show, which aired its first episode in 2009, just like Glee and Modern Family, managed to bring major changes to the perception of modern “prestige drama.”

The Good Wife, each season of which usually featured 22 episodes, is unique in its depiction of female characters. While female lead characters on such major TV series as House of Cards, How to Get Away With Murder, Orphan Black, and even Outlander are building up their efforts to stretch boundaries, Alicia, played by Julianna Margulies on the show, never even acknowledged those boundaries.

It was Alicia’s distinctive smile and attentive attitude that won the hearts of the Good Wife viewers. In fact, Margulies’ character has never allowed anyone to be categorized or judged.

And with The Good Wife ending its seven-season run on Sunday, it’s rather surprising that the show found a home on CBS in the first place. But with the unprecedented success of The Good Wife, particularly in the earlier years of the show, CBS must have been happy that they took a chance of this unique TV drama.

[Photo by Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images]

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