I’ve written before about The Good Wife and the way it depicts corruption. There’s a current trend of “bad” main characters in dramas. After one season, I couldn’t bring myself to watch Weeds, mostly because the brother character was so repulsive, but also because I couldn’t bear to watch one of my favorite, most likeable actresses in the role of a woman who made claims on my sympathies while at the same time making so many bad choices– and the children!
Breaking Bad is another much-celebrated show in which we’re meant to identify or perhaps just be mesmerized, by an ordinary science teacher, dad, and father, as he descends into worse and worse criminal behavior. I’ve never been able to watch that show, either. (To see Stephen Colbert joking with Vince Gilligan about the corrosive effects of living with that character, click here.)
The Good Wife is not in the same category as Weeds and Breaking Bad (and let’s not forget Dexter). It is much more subtle, so I feel like we’re lured into our identification with the characters until we say, “Wait a minute, that’s not right…” The more I watch it, the more I realize how brilliantly the show embodies the deep corruption and moral laziness that is woven into American culture.
The first show of the fourth season, which aired on Monday, is a perfect example. From the traffic stop at the beginning of the show, I just felt uneasy. Something isn’t right here. Yes, of course, the cop is totally over the top in fabricating the drug stop and search. Yes, he shouldn’t be able to get away with that.
However, from beginning to end, as the plot unfolded, what made me uneasy was the privilege on display and the way the show illustrated how privilege works in our society. Right there on the side of the road, the kids say, “Can’t you use dad’s name to get us out of this?” Alicia Florrick doesn’t say, “That’s not right,” but rather “this isn’t Cook County.” She makes a quick phone call to an associate who might have a connection in Madison County, where the stop occured. Over the course of the show we see that tableau on the side of the road several more times.
Back at home, the son gets busy on his computer and turns up first the dashboard camera footage, then the names of other targets of this cop’s behavior, and finally makes a video out of what he’s found that goes viral. It’s the viral video that gets the charges dropped and gets Zach a personal apology from the cop.
Also in the meantime, father Peter Florrick makes a call, but when Alicia gets to the real corruption (i.e., police illegally confiscating drug profits leaving St. Louis rather than actually busting drug dealers heading into St. Louis), she is thwarted by a threat from one county’s attorney to another that, hey, if you step on my drug corridor income, I’m gonna step on yours.
So in the end what we have is that the cop is a jerk. And he must be punished by the “good” Florricks. Thanks to Zach growing up in a world of privilege, he has the means and ability to expose the cop online. For which his mother is very proud of him.
But every time they showed the “dashboard cam” footage from the police officer’s car, I was struck by how uneasy it made me feel. There they were, making their phone calls, working their angle, your average upper-middle-class family with no fear, just annoyance, at the law and its interruptions and harrassment. There was no question who was going to win this battle. The cop’s behavior could not be allowed to stand because, well, what about Zach’s college applications?! In fact, Peter threatens the Madison County attorney that he could similarly disenfranchise that man’s son from the Universtiy of Chicago.
We are used to having our cops and lawyers on television break some rules to achieve justice. It’s a classic American plot we brought with us from Westerns. But the lawyers at Lockhart/Gardner play fast and loose not for the sake of justice so much as, well, money. They’re $60 million in debt and taking on unsavory clients. When Carey protests, Alicia Florrick reminds him he’s not at the state’s attorney’s office anymore. They need money! “Oh yeah, I forgot.” Of course, the state’s attorney’s office, as we see continually, is not necessarily concerned with justice or following the rules either.
I love the show for what it exposes and how subtly it does its exposing. Because of that, I could really do without Kalinda turning into la femme Nikita, using her “Kalinda boots” to demonstrate her martial arts skills and not just for their subtle dominatrix appeal. It was more entertaining when she was mysterious and her only problem was manipulating her former lesbian lovers into doing favors for her. Still, her mix of vulnerability and complete bad-ass-ness makes her one of the most compelling secondary characters on a television drama.