David Giesbrecht/CBS

The Morning After: You Can’t Go Home Again

Quick thoughts on the season finale of The Good Wife below:

One concern I’d had as season 3 of The Good Wife went on was that the show might be attempting to hit the reset button, returning to the circumstances of the series’ beginnings, from having Cary return to the firm to giving Peter another campaign to run in which Alicia needed to stand by his side. Overall, I don’t think I liked this season quite as well as season 2—though it’s still the best drama on non-cable TV—but the finale, “The Dream Team,” did a good job of showing that it’s not so easy just to go back to square one.

Megan Draper and TV’s Best Female Characters: TIME Gives the Bechdel Test

COLLEEN HAYES / ABC (2)

How are women faring on television these days? We use Alison Bechdel’s famous litmus test to see.

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The Morning After: Back to Square One?

CBS

I’m back from vacation, which you may have surmised from the fact that, well, I’m posting things on this blog. As usual, that means a lot of catching up, so I’ll turn over this Morning After post to invite your thoughts on an increasingly crowded Sunday night of programming. (Including, besides Mad Men, Game of [...]

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TV Weekend: Mad Men Returns, A Nation’s DVRs Feel the Strain

Frank Ockenfels/AMC

Once upon a time, Sunday was a nice evening to relax and take in a good show or two before the work week began. Now it’s more like a job in itself, even if you don’t watch TV for a living.

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The Lagging Economic Indicator of TV Shows

Is the U.S. economy in a recovery? I am not the guy to ask. But As a TV critic, I’m pretty sure about one thing, though: the economy as portrayed on primetime TV shows will probably be lousy for quite a while.

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The Good Wife Watch: Whose Side Are You On?

CBS

A fantastic episode of The Good Wife exemplified one more reason to love this show: no other drama on network TV right now gives its viewers credit for as much intelligence.

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The Good Wife, Up All Night and the Spinoff-Within-a-Show

CBS

Eli Gold’s storyline on The Good Wife is the latest example of a spinoff-within-a-show: a subplot or story thread that, for whatever reason, is significant and yet separate enough from the main story—either in tone or plot—that you feel like you’re watching a tiny TV show that someone decided to hide in a larger TV show.

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The Morning After: Successful Landing?

ABC

It’s a print-magazine-deadline morning for me once again, so I’m not going to have time for a while to catch up with last night’s season debut of The Good Wife and I may or may not get around to posting. That’s where The Morning After comes in. Let us know what you thought of the [...]

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Emmy Nominations 2011: The Good, the Bad and the Surprises

The Emmy Awards are a big ocean liner that turns very slowly, and this year’s nominations, announced this morning, were no exception: a lot of familiar faces and a few new (or old but underrecognized) entries. So there were a slew of nominations for Mad Men, Modern Family and [Insert Name of HBO's Big Movie/Miniseries [...]

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The Good Wife Watch: If the Glove Fits…

Spoilers for the season finale of The Good Wife coming up: In a couple of recent Good Wife reviews, I expressed some misgivings over the show’s introducing Peter’s affair with Kalinda as a storyline. It’s not that it’s implausible, but the show has become much stronger and more complex than its original concept—i.e., political wife [...]

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The Good Wife Watch: An Affair to Forget

Quick spoilers for last night’s The Good Wife below: “Getting Off” was the first of a two-part season finale, so it seems to make sense to withhold judgment on the episode, by and large, until the season wraps up. The confrontation between Alicia and Kalinda was more satisfying than the legal case of the week; [...]

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The Good Wife Watch: Affairs of State

Quick spoilers for last night’s The Good Wife: The courtroom and personal/political stories in The Good Wife sometimes intersect but they don’t always work in concert. Often, a strong case-of-the-week pulls through a slack political story, sometimes vice-versa. In “Foreign Affairs,” it was vice-versa.

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The Good Wife Watch: Alien Nation

Quick spoilers for last night’s The Good Wife coming up: We’re well into The Good Wife‘s second season, and at long last, the longest, most expensive and highest-profile State’s Attorney’s race that has ever been held is approaching its close. On top of that, the battle for control of Lockhart Gardner and Bond has ended [...]

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The Good Wife Watch: Forget It, Alicia. It's China.

Quick spoilers for last night’s The Good Wife coming up:

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The Good Wife Friends Mark Zuckerberg

For a show that’s watched by a lot of old people—I’m one of them, so relax—The Good Wife is extremely clued in to social-media technology. Seemingly every week includes a subplot involving Twitter, viral video or a social-media website of some sort. What’s more, it’s not just window dressing; the writers clearly think a lot [...]

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The Good Wife Watch: Third Party

Quick spoilers for last night’s The Good Wife coming up: In my print-magazine piece about The Good Wife last week (full version should be online within a week or so), I wrote that one way that the show has managed to tell sophisticated stories within the constraints of keeping a CBS-sized audience is by combining [...]

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Dead Tree Alert: Uncommon Law Wife

I’ve been writing a lot in this space lately about the disappointing fall broadcast lineup, and how the networks have all but given up launching challenging shows (particularly dramas), turning that job over to cable. (It’s worth noting, by the way, that however badly Lone Star flamed out, even the most successful of the network’s [...]

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Was Lou Dobbs' High Horse Groomed By an Undocumented Worker?

    Lou Dobbs, the former CNN host who turned up this week as a client on The Good Wife, is in a real-life legal controversy. After he made a name for years with his crusade against illegal immigration, a year-long investigation by The Nation charges that Dobbs himself employed undocumented workers to maintain his [...]

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The Morning After: Wife and Sons

Great news everybody! I had a really productive work day! Bad news, everybody! That work day did not include getting around in time to last night’s Sons of Anarchy or The Good Wife. Or to posting today’s The Morning After discussion post in the, um, morning. But so as not to make this a total [...]

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The Good Wife Watch: Compromising Positions

Spoilers for the season finale of The Good Wife: The Good Wife‘s first season ended–well, almost ended–with Alicia and Peter Florrick standing in a backstage corridor, very much like the one where she hauled off and slapped him across the face for betraying her in the show’s pilot. The pilot was a very good one, [...]