Do you think Jesus was black? We thought he was black.

The Good Wife.

One of my favorite shows on television today is The Good Wife on CBS. Not because it takes place in Chicago (although it gets points for this) or because it has Josh Charles (Dan Rydell from Sports Night) on it, but because it is always good, entertaining, dramatic TV. The characters feel real on the show and the situations always seem fresh.

I'm going to take the approach of writing about this as though you've watched the show. At this point there are too many characters to explain and too many through stories to go into.

This week focused on three main issues:
1.) Kalinda's indictment to the grand jury.
2.) Lamman Bishop and his divorce mediation.
3.) Peter's campaign and race issues surrounding it.

Kalinda's indictment is the first - in what appears will be many - attempt by Glen Childs to derail Lockhart and Gardiner as some sort of revenge plot towards the Florricks. I, for one, have hated Childs' character since the first time he entered the show. He is stuck up, presumptuous, arrogant, and exactly what I expect a politician to seem like. He seems to think he's above reproach, and I can't stand that quality in someone. With the twist at the end of the episode, I see no way this will not get dirtier and quickly. All I can say is that I am glad that Blake's character will be gone from the next episodes. I think that Kalinda is in for a rough few weeks. Will she tell Alicia what she did? Will Peter? What a mess.

The Bishop case is an interesting one. How do you settle a divorce between a drug dealer and his wife? How can you say what his income really is to make it a fair deal? I don't really know what the lawyer and soon to be ex wife were trying to prove in repeatedly turning down offer after offer (which all seemed rather generous), but in the end it came back to bite them. Greed is a bad thing. There is no doubt in my mind that Bishop was behind the wife's overdose - you just don't mess with someone like that. One of my favorite things about the episode was seeing Brody from the Wire as Bishop's associate. I always liked him on the Wire and wish he would be used in more shows.

Finally, the race issue in the District Attorney election. Now that Eli and Peter have forced Childs out of the race, there are only two horses left. Peter (white, upperclass, politician) and Wendy Scott Carr (black, not life-long politician). Now that Childs is out of the race, Eli has decided that to win, Peter has to remove all black influence from his campaign. Or at least hide it - like Zach's black girlfriend. This is one of the dirtier and darker sides of politics. I loved the way that the entire Florrick family (minus Peter, who was not in this episode) stood up to Eli. He can be a jerk at times, and I hope that Peter can win the election without bowing to playing a game about race.

Overall, I enjoyed this episode, but it wasn't the best I've seen. The drama was certainly there at times, but it didn't last the entire episode. I don't care very much about Lemman Bishop as a character, so his story was not an interesting one. The focus just seemed to be too scattered over the episode, and it was very unlike this show to be pulled in so many directions at the same time. I'm sure they'll bounce back next week - as this remains one of the best prime-time dramas on TV today.

Until the next episode...
Chris