The Good Wife’ Season 4, Episode 7 Recap

The show should stop playing and just become the political drama it was meant to be.

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  • CBS
  • “But I don’t understand ... I just said penis ... why aren’t you laughing?”



Oh Case of the Week, must you torment me so? Occasionally, the “ripped from the headlines” approach can work well both in having built-in inside jokes as well as the opportunity to re-visit perhaps a controversial issue on one’s own terms, exploring nuances or alternative outcomes. Sometimes, though, that waivers too dangerously into meta humor that is not so much jokey as just eye-rolling. The part of “Anatomy of a Joke’s” COTW that worked was about how Therese (Christina Ricci - yet another guest star!) wasn’t really trying to achieve anything more than a cheap laugh poorly executed. The part that failed was the hardly-veiled disdain by the show for, not the FCC’s regulations, but the network’s, including a few meta-barbs at “being delayed because of football” (as “The Good Wife” often is).

“Anatomy of a Joke” wasn’t content to stop there, though - it employed the ole trick of getting past the censors with creative bleeping (which in this case it did with sudden traffic outside of the courthouse whose window was stuck open), and lamented the inability of network shows to show nudity or use profanity. Like “The Good Wife,” maybe? Were they steamed that there wasn’t the opportunity for naked Kalinda / Nick or naked Alicia / Will? Or for them to curse or show gratuitous violence? It’s mostly weird because “The Good Wife” is, lest it forget, a legal procedural, not “Game of Thrones.”

The problem with these parts of “Anatomy of a Joke” is that they felt like an excited student’s submission of a grand thesis that wasn’t fully considered. “The Good Wife” enjoys subverting types, and as such it can sometimes flip characters so much we aren’t sure what we’re supposed to feel about them.