Using my Kalinda icon for the first time in ages

[st_aurafina]

I have disappeared into a black hole where all I do is crochet and watch The Good Wife. I've just hit Season 7, which seems to be a place with not enough oxygen or gravity. It's an eerie, slightly skewed version of the show I was watching in 2009. I started rewatching because I was missing all the cameos in The Good Fight - I couldn't remember who anyone was, apart from Elsbeth Tascioni.

Random Observations:
- even in S7, this show still has legs. Like, drama and pacing and mind-grabbing hooks. It's a good show, even as it slowly sinks under the icy waters of the Atlantic.

- I had forgotten how ruthless Louis Canning was. Michael J Fox has acting chops for days and days.

- I will follow Christine Baranski anywhere. Diane is a goddess. I love her laugh. There's a S4 episode with Elsbeth Tascioni defending an athlete before a sports board, and they need someone who speaks French. Diane demonstrating her proficiency in French, and flirting with the French judge, omg. The best thing ever.

- Last time, I stopped watching before [spoiler]'s death because I wasn't enjoying the show enough to invest in a sad thing, but now that I've seen it, it was as terrible and wracking as it should have been.

- half the guest stars have been on Person of Interest. (Same shooting locations, I'm guessing?) I keep saying things like "Oh, you're that extremely hot older lady detective from the episode where Carter goes to New Rochelle." Also, the actress who played Jessica Ardnt (who was John Reese's girlfriend) plays Louis Canning's wife, yay. (yay for graphics reasons. Maybe I can make art for my John/Jess fic.)

- Speaking of guest stars, I kept looking at Lemond Bishop (the extremely suave corporate looking drug dealer) and wondering why it was so wrong wrong wrong to see him as menacing, until I realised he is played by Mike Colter who is Luke Cage. Luke would never be so horribly smilingly terrifying.

- the same goes for Becca, Zach's manipulative girlfriend. She played June Colter in Don't Trust the B*tch in Apartment 23. June could not make her face look calculating. (I feel like this would be a good place to put the Patrick Stewart acting gif. But I can't be arsed.)

- Peter Florrick is so much darker than I thought. He's menacing and narcissistic and I find the way he is protective of Alicia to be really scary.

- Eli Gold is a treasure, and watching Alan Cumming makes me want to check out his new show even though it sounds dreadful.

- I ship Will and Diane laughing together and dancing. What a great team.

- The scene where Will finds out that Alicia is leaving the firm, when he sweeps everything off her desk in a rage, was so genuinely frightening. I had not thought that Will had that kind of rage inside him.

- The on-set tension between Julianna Margulies and Archie Panjabi really makes it hard to watch Alicia and Kalinda interact. The further in, the more excruciating it gets, and as much as I want to ship Alicia/Kalinda, I can't make myself accept it. But it's still so clear to my shippy heart that Kalinda is totally in love with Alicia. It hits all my lady/lady knight kinks enough to make me happy. Kudos to Archie Panjabi for carrying that all by herself.

- Having said that, I have a side-eye for a lot of Alicia's decisions in the later seasons. Like the way she disowned Zach for helping his girlfriend get an abortion (completely legally and supported by her parents.) Um. And the weird non-event of all her love interests post-Will. It all seems weird and stifled and ham-handed, and makes me question directorial choices possibly made by the actress.

- the longer it goes on, the less I could care about rivalry between the name partners of whatever legal firm people are in. Having said that, seeing David Lee rush into a partners vote still dressed in his Gilbert and Sullivan admiral's uniform will never not be funny.


tl;dr, The Good Fight is awesome, and I highly recommend. Everything that bugged me about The Good Wife (the in-firm fighting, the endless love triangles, the way on-set animosity infused the storylines) is absent. And there's Christine Baranski playing Diane Lockhart which the best thing ever. (And is it just me, or are the opening credits really awesome? I love them, especially the choral part.)

Comments

[shopfront]

Yeah, Julianna killed Kalinda/Alicia for me too, sadly. I also wonder, given some of the rumours that eventually leaked out about her being difficult to work with in general, if some of the later season weirdness was the writers and producers etc getting their own in a little too, heh.

Also tooootally with you on The Good Fight being all the good bits of Wife. I've only seen season one so far, but it's freaking fantastic. If only Kalinda would show up there....

[st_aurafina]

if some of the later season weirdness was the writers and producers etc getting their own in a little too, heh.

I am torn between this, and her having creative control in a weird way. Like, the love interest storylines after Will are so strange and unfocused. And Alicia just gets more and more isolated until it's just her and Lucca, as if the actress can't stand to be around anyone. Or vice versa.

Also tooootally with you on The Good Fight being all the good bits of Wife. I've only seen season one so far, but it's freaking fantastic. If only Kalinda would show up there....

It's so good! I'm four episodes in now, and it's all glorious.

[monanotlisa]

Yes! The Good Fight has solved so many of the issues of The Good Wife.

I stopped watching TGW eventually, before Season Nine, but I still think it is an amazing show; I'm stunned and grateful it existed and paved the way for more of its kind.

[st_aurafina]

Yes! The Good Fight has solved so many of the issues of The Good Wife.

It does!! And yes, I'm grateful for TGW too, because it gave us so many great characters, even Alicia before things got weird.

[umadoshi]

I don't even remember for sure which season I broke up with TGW halfway through (S6, maybe?), but oh, I loved so much of it before then. (It was a "wandered off and didn't go back" breakup with the show, not an abrupt ragequit.) I really do need to check out TGF, which sounds fantastic.

The on-set tension between Julianna Margulies and Archie Panjabi really makes it hard to watch Alicia and Kalinda interact.

Everything I've heard about that situation sounds just beyond frustrating, and Kalinda was my favorite, and just...UGH. ;_; (I haven't heard much detail, though; am I remembering right that it was pretty much entirely Margulies being grossly unprofessional towards Panjabi for some reason?)

[st_aurafina]

It was a "wandered off and didn't go back" breakup with the show, not an abrupt ragequit.

Me too - I got a season behind, then I heard that [spoiler] was killed, and I didn't bother to pick it up again.

am I remembering right that it was pretty much entirely Margulies being grossly unprofessional towards Panjabi for some reason?)

Yes, apparently Julianna Margulies bore some ill will for Kalinda being an unexpectedly popular character, and asked for her to be written off the show - their final scenes in the finale episode (which I haven't gotten to yet, so IDK) were shot separately and patched together. This is definitely happening in S6/7, because they talk to each other by facing into the camera, not actually in the same frame as each other.

Whatever happened, it's horribly unprofessional. And depressing.

[talkingtothesky]

....Huh. Maybe it's a good thing I never continued past the end of S1? I will just remember fondly that scene they got sloppy drunk together at the bar in s1 and leave it at that. (Hmm okay my memory is so fuzzy. Alicia got drunk and Kalinda was there...sober.)

Butttttt I really wanna see all there is to see of amazing Elsbeth so???

[st_aurafina]

It's a good show, and I've enjoyed my rewatch. I have only started skipping through episodes in s6/7, to be honest, and most of that is because I don't really care about Peter Florrick (though I love Eli Gold, his campaign manager who is played amazingly by Alan Cumming.)

Butttttt I really wanna see all there is to see of amazing Elsbeth so???
I used this excellent article to help me cherry pick the Elsbeth episodes, before I got far enough in that I wanted to watch the actual show:

Essential Elsbeth Tascioni Episodes To Watch Now That She's Joined The Good Fight

[dirty_diana]

- Last time, I stopped watching before [spoiler]'s death because I wasn't enjoying the show enough to invest in a sad thing, but now that I've seen it, it was as terrible and wracking as it should have been.

Yes I've never seen it because that season was boring me so hard. But the whole TGW cast was always amazing.

- Peter Florrick is so much darker than I thought. He's menacing and narcissistic and I find the way he is protective of Alicia to be really scary.

This was one of the interesting parts of the conceit of the show imo, that neither Peter or Alicia were necessarily good people. They both let ambition and other wants lead them wherever sometimes (which I guess is maybe the point they were trying to make with the bookended slap, as forced as it was. That Alicia got screwed over by Peter but she was never the tragic saint she was often perceived as, in-universe. But we all already knew that, we'd been watching her dig up her sketchy side when necessary for 7 years.)

All the recurrings were so great, with all their different shades of savagery. Louis Canning, it was such a joy to watch him work his cons.

I'm not sure I'll ever watch The Good Fight though, because I am so lazy about having to actually search and wait for things to *ahem* to my computer unless I'm already invested in the story.

[st_aurafina]

that neither Peter or Alicia were necessarily good people.

I have loved this gradual reveal - Alicia is so ambitious, and we get to see it more in the later seasons. And Peter is an arse, but not in the way we see early on, more in the looming threatening way we see later. Such good storytelling.