What The Good Wife gets so brilliantly right about American politics

The Good Wife is ostensibly a show about the law. It's set in a law firm. Its characters are lawyers. Each episode features a legal cliffhanger that's solved in 48 minutes of fine television writing.

But the show, at its heart, has always been about politics. Its name comes from the iconic image of protagonist Alicia Florrick standing mute at a press conference next to husband Peter, the powerful state's attorney in Cook County, who has just admitted to having an affair with a prostitute. Shades of Eliot Spitzer.

As the wronged woman who must start her career anew to take care of her family while her husband serves his jail time, Julianna Margulies has created one of the most endearing and profoundly powerful, principled characters in television drama, even as she defends drug dealers and murderers and sleeps with her boss. She is an anti-heroine of Shakespearean stock.

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In season six, Peter Florrick redeems himself (at least publicly) and becomes the governor. Alicia is now the titled partner of her own law firm. This season, she is talked into running for state's attorney, the position her husband held before his loins got the better of him.

If you watched the latest episode on Sunday you would have learned quite a bit about the interaction between candidates and their campaign teams.

You'd understand how it is that stupid political ads, and I mean really stupid political ads — whether its ads with dead sheep, or, in this case, a dinosaur who wreaks havoc at a playground — actually find their way out of the Final Cut Pros of professional consultants. They're sticky. "Stupid is sticky." Ad-makers in politics would rather be known for stupid but effective ads than for unmemorable, graceful ones.

Alicia Florrick's opponent in the race, an effete television host turned candidate named Frank Prady, contacts her privately and proposes that they both abstain from negative campaigning. Alicia, being a woman of principle, is intrigued by the idea. Yes, she knows that negative campaigning works, but can't she be above that? It's a choice, right? And she's the boss. It's her campaign.

But as she realizes, almost from the get-go, it's not her choice. It's not even her campaign. It belongs to a trio of advisers who argue among themselves and then cajole her into accepting decisions that they've already made.

This is how campaigns actually work. There is no one boss, certainly not the candidate, and decisions get made without the candidate's permission all the time. In fact, here's an unwritten rule: campaign managers do not think they need the candidate's permission to do anything.

This is one reason why all political ingenues begins their races by promising, first to themselves, that they won't stoop to gutter politics. They're better than that. And yet, without exception, by the end of their campaign, they've somehow allowed the most vile, most effective images to be released under their own name.

Alicia wants to be good. She doesn't really trust Prady. She knows she's supposed to trust her campaign team, but we know she really doesn't: she thinks they're amoral cads. And the campaign team, in turn, doesn't trust the candidate.

And yet. Alicia lets them do what they do.

One other subtle bit of spot-on writing stuck with me.

There's a scene where Alicia insists that a negative ad implying Prady is a closeted gay guy never be shown the light of day, even after Prady's PAC has (supposedly independently) run a negative ad against her.

Her campaign manager, Johnny, responding to a journalist's question about why Florrick's campaign is taking the high road, explicitly tells the journalist that they had an attack ad ready but the candidate nixed it. He won't say what the ad was about and he won't leak it to the journalist. "This can never get out," he tells the journalist. "It's hot stuff. Hot stuff."

This is how campaign managers whet the appetite of the political media. The ad exists now; they know about it. They'll ask their sources inside the campaign what its content was. And eventually, because there's artificially created demand for the ad, it will leak.

Not to name names here, but most shows about Washington get electoral politics really, really wrong. And not even wrong-with-creative-license-of-a-writer, but just plain wrong, tonally and, crucially, in terms of cause and effect. These shows are about presidents, or vice presidents, or whips in Congress.

The Good Wife's candidates are running to be prosecutors in one county.

And still, in the care of Ridley Scott, Craig Turk, and showrunners Robert and Michelle King, and others, I think Margulies' Alicia Florrick inhabits the modern political candidate better than any actor on television. As a political junkie, I think The Good Wife is the most entertaining (and most accurate) show about politics on the air.

Long may it run.