Here's the Good Wife creators' explanation for 'the slap'

(Image credit: Screenshot/YouTube)

published 9 May 2016

Fans of The Good Wife may have mixed feelings about the way the series ended, but the show's creators say they had a pointed reason for wrapping things up the way they did. Creators Michelle and Robert King released a video after Sunday's episode aired, explaining that, to them, the slap Alicia (Julianna Margulies) received from Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski) in the show's final moments was a way to bring the series full circle. "To talk about the end of the series is probably to talk about the beginning of the series because we started with this feeling that it should begin with a slap and end with a slap," Robert said in a video shared by CBS. The show's opening scenes, as fans may recall, saw Alicia slapping her husband Peter (Chris North) in a hotel kitchen.

"This show is about a woman who becomes more and more confident and more and more cunning and excited about her ability and also about power, so that slap at the end is very similar to the slap in the beginning," Robert said. "We always had this idea of Alicia becoming more and more of something that she also was not liking in her husband."

Listen to the creators' full explanation of why they decided to transform the "victim" into the "victimizer," below. Becca Stanek