The Televangelist: ‘The Good Wife,’ Season 3, Ep. 13
This week focused on bitcoin, which I’m positive that 95% of “Good Wife” viewers have never heard of and will unlikely think of ever again.
- CBS.com
- If I just sit here quietly, maybe they won’t ask me what bitcoin actually is ...
Bitcoin. A Kalinda-centric episode. Zach’s love life. The End.
Yawn.
“The Good Wife” inserted another one of its “ripped from the headlines” stories this week by focusing on bitcoin, which I’m positive that 95% of “Good Wife” viewers have never heard of and will unlikely think of ever again. The only reason why I have a passing familiarity with it is thanks to an engaging New Yorker piece from a few months ago (only the abstract is available now online, but there are plenty of bitcoin articles commenting on it if you employ some Googling), and even then I’m still not entirely sure what it is or if I should care or not. What “Bitcoin for Dummies” taught is that, in the eyes of the court and the U.S. Treasury, bitcoin is considered a currency rather than a commodity which makes it illegal. Though the New Yorker may have come as close as anyone to uncovering who the creator of bitcoin is, his or her true identity is still not officially known. “The Good Wife” uses some Micky Mouse investigatory work by Kalinda - by that I mean she just walks into a convention and says, “did you create bitcoin?” to varying degrees of success - to create the possibility that bitcoin was created by a triumvirate that includes a chippy lawyer, a hot geek woman and a Chinese university professor. It sounds more like a CBS comedy than the plausible creators of the world’s most mysterious online code, but what do I know?
The bitcoin court case was minimally engaging, and included yet another “quirky judge” who, like most of the quirky judges, seemed to mostly side with Alicia and the defense and not Mr. Hicks and the stuffy U.S. Treasury. That is, actually, exactly the formula that Wendy Scott-Carr is attempting to suggest proves that Will - through a bookie friend - is friendly with these judges in a totally illegal way. It’s typical in crime shows and courtroom dramas for the characters around whom the show is built get all the luck, and I actually really like the meta-commentary that “The Good Wife” in engaging in that basically says “isn’t it a little weird how Lockhart-Gardner win almost all of their cases?” Yes, it is. But is it criminal? The more interesting moments of “Bitcoin for Dummies” involved the several twists and turns of Wendy Scott-Carr’s investigation of Will, and the very best moments were when Wendy went up against Elsbeth.