What The Good Wife gets so brilliantly right about American politics

The Good Wife
(Image credit: (David Giesbrecht/2014 CBS Broadcasting))

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.

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Marc Ambinder

Marc Ambinder is TheWeek.com's editor-at-large. He is the author, with D.B. Grady, of The Command and Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry. Marc is also a contributing editor for The Atlantic and GQ. Formerly, he served as White House correspondent for National Journal, chief political consultant for CBS News, and politics editor at The Atlantic. Marc is a 2001 graduate of Harvard. He is married to Michael Park, a corporate strategy consultant, and lives in Los Angeles.