Season six promos began appearing online for The Good Wife last week. When the show ended last May, Alan Cumming’s Eli Gold asked Julianna Margulies’ Alicia Florrick if she wanted to run for State’s Attorney. The promos show Alicia turning down the offer and focusing on her law firm she started with Cary Agos (Matt Czuchry), who will add Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski) as a partner when the drama returns Sundays beginning on September 21st. Here are fifteen facts that you may not known about the popular CBS drama.
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1. The Good Wife is loosely based on the Eliot Spitzer prostitution scandal and the prostitution stories from politicians like Bill Clinton and John Edwards. Producer Michelle King describes how they came up with the idea by stating, “There had been this waterfall of these kind of scandals, from Bill and Hillary, to Dick Morris, to Eliot Spitzer, to name just a few. I think they are all over our culture. What’s interesting about a lot of these political scandals is that the women are lawyers. Hillary is a lawyer. Elizabeth Edwards is a lawyer. That got us thinking along those lines.”
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2. The Good Wife has been dubbed the, “most tech-savvy show on TV,” by Wired. Over the course of five seasons, the drama has explored the relationships between new wave technology and the law. Some of the storylines include NSA surveillance, voice control software, Bitcoins, virtual conferencing robots, and the international network of activist and hacktivist entities known as Anonymous. The fifth season of the show focused on Alicia’s new firm trying to woo a fictitious internet search company Chumhum. The company had been to court for selling users’ personal information.
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3. Over the course of five seasons, The Good Wife has ranked in the top 30 shows on network television. The highest ranked season of The Good Wife was season two. It was ranked at #16 and was viewed by an average of 13.00 million viewers. Though the first season had more viewers (13.12 million), it was the 18th most popular show of the 2009-2010 television season. There was a small dip in viewers in the third and fourth season, which saw a low of 10.98 million viewers. Fortunately, season five saw an overall increase of 500,000 viewers.
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4. CBS has been labeled the network that caters to the elderly. Shows like NCIS, CSI, and Blue Bloods have an average median audience age of 50’s – 60’s. Currently Blue Bloodes has the oldest audience on network television. There average viewer is almost 63 years old. The Good Wife also skews to an older audience. The median age during the first season was 56.8 years old. That number has climbed every season, most likely because every year the viewers who watched the season before are also getting a year older. The fourth season’s median age was 61.1.
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5. Julianna Margulies was not the first choice to play the main character Alicia Florrick on The Good Wife. Elisabeth Shue, known for her performances in Leaving Las Vegas and Adventures in Babysitting, was considered for the role. Shue turned the part down in order to spend time with her family. Margulies was interviewed by the Hollywood Reporter for an Emmy roundtable earlier this year and also indicated that Ashley Judd and Helen Hunt were both offered the role of Alicia but turned it down. Margulies was then offered the role and accepted it.
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6. It was revealed during a 2011 interview on the National Public Radio Show Talk of the Nation that the character Alan Cumming plays on The Good Wife is based on a real life person. Eli Gold is loosely based on the life of longtime political operative and mayor of Chicago Rahm Emanuel. Gold has a backstory that has not been shown yet on the series that includes being a former concert pianist and yearning to become a ballet dancer before making a successful career out of politics. Cumming has been with the show as a main character since season 2.
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7. Usually the writers for a television show will come up with a creative way to name the episodes of the series. On Friends, most of the episode titles began with, “The One Where” or “The One With.” Episodes of Grey’s Anatomy are named after titles of actual songs including “Kung Fu Fighting”and “I Always Feel Like Somebody’s Watchin’ Me.” Episodes of The Good Wife have the same amount of words as the season they are a part of like the season one episode “Threesome” and the season two episode “Double Jeopardy.” However, all of the episodes from season five have only three words.
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8. In 2012, actress and Broadway star Kristin Chenoweth made a two episode appearance on The Good Wife. She filmed her appearance during the month of July 2012. While shooting a scene, Chenoweth was hit by a piece of lighting equipment that fell on her. The blow left her unconscious and she was immediately rushed to the hospital. Chenoweth received a skull fracture and had continuous pain in her hip and ribs. Chenoweth was also unable to form complete sentences shortly after the accident occurred. It took the actress several months to fully recover from the injury.
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9. Julianna Margulies gave birth to her first child in 2008. She began working on The Good Wife one year later. She would spend 14 hours on the set five days a week working on the hit drama. Beginning in season four, Margulies made a deal with creators Robert and Michelle King. During court room scenes, Margulies would film all of her scenes first and any scene where she would be featured in the background. Once she completed these scenes, she would work on the rest of the episode and filming of the rest of the court room scenes would continue to be shot as well.
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10. The Good Wife and its cast has received numerous accolades during the five seasons the series has been on the air. Julianna Margulies has been nominated for a Golden Globe five times and would take home the award in 2010. Margulies was also named Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series in 2011 and 2014 at the Emmys. She has also won two Screen Actors Guild Awards Archie Panjabi would win the Emmy in 2010 in the Outstanding Supporting Actress category. The series was named TV Program of the Year in both 2012 and 2014 at the USA AFI Awards.
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11. It is typical for an office to have two employees with the same name, so it should hold true to characters on television shows working in an office too. Though it may be confusing for fans to remember characters with the same name it has been done on television. Ellie Kemper’s character on The Office was named Kelly, but went by the name Erin because there was already a Kelly in the office. On The Good Wife, there are two character by the name of Cary. Creator Robert King asserted, “It’s always this difficulty of confusion which is comic.”
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12. The fifth episode of season five of The Good Wife entitled, “Hitting the Fan, ” was the episode where Will found out that Alicia was leaving the law firm. This episode was considered the best episode of the series to date by critics. After the emotional episode aired, creator Robert King wrote Julianna Margulies telling her that she should do comedy because, “If there isn’t laughter, then what’s the point?” King’s favorite scene from the episode is when Alicia forgets to put her underwear back on after a quickie with her estranged husband.
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13. Prior to playing Cary Agos on The Good Wife, Matt Czuchry attended the College of Charleston beginning in 1995. He graduated in 1999 with a Bachelor Arts degree in History and Political Science. He attended school on a tennis scholarship and was a captain of the men’s team. He was even ranked as a NCAA player in the Southern Conference. Czuchry was named Mr. College of Charleston at a pageant in 1998. Czuchry has plans to continue his education and obtain a degree in law, but instead went into acting after scoring a recurring role on the drama Young Americans in 2000.
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14. Archie Panjabi, who plays investigator Kalinda Sharma on The Good Wife, participates in many causes all over the world. She was appointed the first Pratham USA Ambassador to represent the biggest education movement in India in recent time. Additionally, she was featured in a campaign to end polio and is a strong supporter in stopping violence towards women. She partnered with Amnesty International to eliminate the “no recourse to public funds rule” that can sometimes keep women stuck in an abusive relationship.
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15. Josh Charles, who played lawyer Will Gardener on The Good Wife for four and a half seasons, originally wanted to exit the show at the end of the fourth season. Julianna Margulies was the one who convinced him to stay for fifteen more episodes of the series. Charles’ character was killed off during a courtroom shooting. Charles knew his character would be killed off months before the episode was filmed, but no one on set let the secret slip. “You would have thought somewhere along the way someone would have slipped up. They didn’t because they knew the shock of it,” he explained.
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