By Mickey Friedman
July 9, 2014
We Americans love TV. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, American men watch 2.69 hours each weekday and 3.67 hours a day during weekends and holidays. Women watch 2.45 hours a week day and 2.84 hours on weekends and holidays.
And, in case you’re wondering, men read 15 minutes a day; women just a bit more.
So about 10 million Americans watched Will Gardner get shot on “The Good Wife.” A death so sudden and shocking that many viewers took action. Tweeting like mad. Some couldn’t imagine continuing without Will. They vowed to abandon the show. Some, engulfed by grief, turned to therapy.
In reaction, Michelle and Robert King, the show’s creators, swiftly blogged on CBS.com that while Will Gardner might have died, Josh Charles, the actor who brought Will to life, still walked the earth: “We, like you, mourn the loss of Will Gardner. And while Will is gone, our beloved Josh Charles is very much alive and remains an integral part of our family …”
But to put the blame where it surely belonged, and hopefully make some lemonade from Josh Charles’ lemons: “The Good Wife, at its heart, is the ‘Education of Alicia Florrick.’ To us, there always was a tragedy at the center of Will and Alicia’s relationship: the tragedy of bad timing. And when faced with the gut punch of Josh’s decision, made over a year ago, to move on to other creative endeavors, we had a major choice to make.
“The brutal honesty and reality of death speaks to the truth and tragedy of bad timing for these two characters. Will’s death propels Alicia into her newest incarnation.”
Bad timing: adultery. Good wife: not so much.
Alicia Florrick, for those of you who don’t know, is played by the extraordinary Julianna Margulies. Alicia is the attorney wife of Great Barrington’s part-time Chris Noth, who doesn’t get anywhere near enough credit for his richly-textured, self-involved, sometimes loving husband/father but always shrewd and often diabolical Governor of Illinois, Peter Florrick.
Now I am a devoted fan of the show and its always skillful ensemble acting. And I, too, will miss gut-punching, Emmy-winning Josh Charles’ Will Gardner. But I like to think I took Will’s death in stride. Finding imaginary solace in the imaginary arms of the imaginary, smart and lovely private investigator Kalinda Sharma, the real Archie Panjabi whom I’ve never met, yet love with all my imaginary heart.
So just maybe I’m a bit too cavalier about all this. Too quick to move on, to skip too quickly past the message. Because the lesson in all this, according to CBS and the Kings is that, “It’s terrifying how a perfectly normal and sunny day can suddenly explode with tragedy. Television, in our opinion, doesn’t deal with this enough: the irredeemability of death.”
They have a point. And while all of this drama was going down in an imaginary Chicago (though filmed in a very real Queens, New York), we were witnessing what some believe is the end of Iraq.
Remember Iraq?
Operation Iraqi Freedom?
Remember when we invaded Iraq in 2003? “Our cause is just,” President Bush assured us, “and our mission is clear, to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, to end Saddam Hussein’s support for terrorism, and to free the Iraqi people.”
Saddam Hussein, despicable creep and dictator that he was, didn’t support terrorism. He had no weapons of mass destruction. There was no al-Qaeda in Iraq. And our attempt to free the Iraqi people, has in fact, made their lives so much more miserable.
So why is it that more Americans seem to mourn the loss of Will Gardner than Iraq?
Estimates vary but costofwar.org believes the Iraq War, including medical and disability costs for our veterans, will end up costing $2.2 trillion. American dollars down the drain, or into the pockets of those who make the materials of war.
4,489 American military were killed. 3,455 military contractors died. The Pentagon lists 31,945 wounded in action. And as of March 2014 there have been 970,000 disability claims made to the Veterans Administration. The suicides. The Iraqi dead uncounted.
Along the way we disconnected; didn’t want to know. Ours is a volunteer army and if you didn’t, or don’t have someone you love in harm’s way, it’s easy not to know.
And that’s created such a tragic world for those we sent. For those who sacrificed so much. For some, their lives; for so many, their bodies and minds.
So for yet another generation of warriors, yet another disavowal. Yes, there’s the patriotic patter: the introduction at ballgames, the Memorial Day speeches, the blah-blah-blah of appreciation. Posturing, because we don’t really want to know where they’ve been and what they lived through.
Our gift to the Iraqis: a never-ending terror. And where once Shia and Sunni lived next door, and intermarried, a ceaseless sectarianism.
Goodbye Will. Goodbye Iraq.
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Extra-added Information:
My fellow Red-Crower, Bill Shein, is worried there might be more readers who have no idea what I’m talking about, because they too have abandoned their televisions for duck-farming.
Here, according to IMDB. Wikipedia, and TV.com are short summaries of the CBS TV hit show, “The Good Wife.”
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1442462/?ref_=nv_sr_1
Storyline
Alicia Florrick is the wife of a former state’s attorney for Cook County. He has been imprisoned after a sex and corruption scandal. Alicia must deal with the public humiliation. She must also fend for her two children. After years of being a housewife and mother, she returns to work as a litigator at the law firm Stern, Lockhart & Gardner. She must now prove herself in the courtroom.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Wife
“The Good Wife is an American television legal and political drama that premiered on CBS on September 22, 2009. The series was created by Robert King and Michelle King. It stars Julianna Margulies, Josh Charles, Christine Baranski, Archie Panjabi, Matt Czuchry and Alan Cumming, and features Chris Noth in a recurring role. The current executive producers are Ridley Scott, Charles McDougall, and David W. Zucker. It is a heavily serialized show with season-long story arcs that also features stand alone procedural story lines that will be resolved or concluded by the end of each episode. This is a rarity among The Good Wife’s broadcaster CBS as most of their shows are procedural. The show has received great amounts of critical acclaim and numerous awards.
On March 13, 2014, CBS renewed the show for an upcoming sixth season.”
http://www.tv.com/shows/the-good-wife/
The Good Wife is a female-driven drama about a politician’s wife who pursues her own career as a defense attorney after her husband is sent to jail on charges of political corruption. Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies) will not only have to deal with her career but also with keeping her family together by providing a stable home for her two children.