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The Good Wife - TV Drama
American television is as good as it's ever been right now, which means it has the best writing in the entertainment industry. American film isn't even close. This week we saw the end of one of the greatest shows in TV history, with the finale of Lost. If you love great writing like I do, that's a big loss. But there's a lot of talent in TV right now. So while we've been reluctantly bidding farewell to Lost, The Good Wife has quietly moved up the ranks until it is now one of the five best dramas on TV.
When you watch a terrific single episode of television, you naturally want to praise the author of that episode. But a huge amount of the credit for any episode must go to the original construction of the show itself. In fact, creating a great series on TV is almost totally dependent on the show's structural conception.
In my TV Drama class, I talk extensively about the seven key structural elements that determine a successful show and how to write them. One of those is the character web. Character web is crucial in any work of fiction, but especially in TV drama where the audience returns to the same family of characters week after week, hopefully for years to come.
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Character web has to do with how all the characters in a story hang together as a single fabric. Notice we're not just talking about the main character here. We're talking about how all the characters relate to one another, both connecting and contrasting. If you come up with a unique character web, in which each character is set in opposition to the others in the right structural way, you will have a successful series that can run forever. Of course, that's easier said than done.
If you study the character web on The Good Wife, you see one of the reasons this is the best legal drama to come along in some time. There are many elements that go in to creating a tight character web, including character hierarchy, role, and archetype. But the element that most distinguishes the character web on The Good Wife is the moral relationship of all the characters.
Legal dramas have been shading the line between good and bad, guilt and innocence, for a long time. The days of the righteous defender against the oppressive prosecutor are long gone. David Kelly has done a number of legal dramas that highlight the moral complexity of being a lawyer. But The Good Wife has taken the moral conundrum to a new level.
The key technique for constructing a moral character web is to start with the central moral problem of the hero. Then make all other characters some variation of that moral problem. In The Good Wife, Alicia Florrick, the main character of the title, begins as a "good person." In fact she is perceived as a paragon of virtue because her husband, the state prosecutor, has been caught cheating on her and is in jail for corruption. Alicia must go back to work as an attorney to support her family while under the harsh glare of publicity.
As the first season progresses, however, Alicia finds herself in a number of morally difficult situations that call into question just how good she really is. Most prominently, she feels a strong attraction to her boss and has to use her husband's possibly corrupt connections to defeat a colleague who is competing for her job. From her initial elevated position, Alicia can only decline when forced to succeed in a morally impure world. As Sartre said, we all have dirty hands.
Creating this interesting main character is the first step in building a strong show. But what sets The Good Wife apart is the way the show's creators, Michelle and Robert King, have constructed a web where all the characters must traverse morally dangerous ground. And each character, like Alicia, must find some balance between love and business success without becoming morally corrupt.
Having set up a character web where each character is caught between guilt and innocence, the Kings can play out a story structure in each episode that combines stand alone and serial elements and is dense with reversals and betrayals. Each episode tackles a legal case that serves as the fulcrum for all the characters to have to confront tough moral decisions. With so many characters conniving and choosing, each episode feels like a moral cyclone where everyone is simultaneously jockeying for success without losing their soul.
This story structure gives the show two major strengths. First, even the minor characters have complexity, so each is compelling and together they are a knockout. Second, each episode is packed with plot: the writers tease the audience with a moral challenge in the opening and then relentlessly turn the screws until the final scene.
Because this show was constructed so well from the start, I expect it will only get better as it goes on. Whether you are interested in writing for television or not - and you should be - study The Good Wife to see how master storytellers work the craft. Goodbye Lost, hello The Good Wife.
Comments
Bill Hays
19 Jul 2010, 01:50
In a genre dominated by LA Law, Perry Mason and perhaps Boston Legal, a TV
series about a law firm needs fascinating clients and great cases. The
Good Wife comes up short. As a new associate with an unusual amount of
experience, Alicia could be drafted to work on the OJ Simpson case, or two
high school students who tried to kill every arrogant jock/athlete who ever
slammed them into a locker, but Alicia seems trapped doing dull divorce
work. The larger problem is the quagmire of ad-supported TV. Every ten
minutes, there has to be a crisis, so the audience will have a reason to
come back after the commercial. If the hero is a lawyer sitting in a
courtroom for several weeks or months on a complex murder trial, where do
you get them? Alan Shore always had a sexual harassment case or two going
on at the same time, split between him and "Denny Crane." Too many
commercials. Too many commercials that are often spectacular, with better
camera work and bigger budgets than the show itself. Watch an episode of
The Good Wife without switching channels, and it's obvious that someone is
trying to sell you a car, not entertain you with a great story.
In the pilot episode of "ER," the character of Nurse Hathaway (Juliana
Margolis) was so broken up by the callous way Dr. Ross cheated on her, she
committed suicide. That made her a compelling character. Alicia hasn't
reached that level, and probably never will.
For a while, "House" was the best show on network TV. Then, "The
Mentalist." "House" offered a wonderful on-going conflict between an
atheist House, an agnostic Cameron, a former Catholic Chase, and Foreman's
disgust with his intensely born-again parents. Network television is
terrified to admit there are different viewpoints on organized religion,
but audiences love to see how it plays out, as long as each viewpoint gets
an equally credible spokesperson. On "Criminal Minds," at least two
members of the team should be atheists, but the producers are obviously
Roman Catholic and only know how to write for their own group.
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