The Televangelist: ‘The Good Wife’ Season 3, Ep 21

“I didn’t believe in hell, then I met lawyers and I changed my mind”

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  • CBS.com
  • “Yes, the awkward scheduling is a go”



I blame AMC for bandwagoning on HBO’s “Sunday night = Emmy night” programming schedule, causing an avalanche of other networks and cable channels to follow. How are we supposed to choose when there are six or more great shows all on at the same time across several networks? This is why the Nielsen ratings are bogus and why my Mondays are a deluge of feelings and why “The Good Wife” suffers from my “Game of Thrones” and “Mad Men” hangover this week. Was it a terrible episode? No, but could it contend with shadow babies and Roger taking LSD? Not quite.

This was the penultimate episode of a very drawn out and very inconsistent season for “The Good Wife,” which held some of its best and some of its most worthless episodes and stories of the series. I feel strongly, after watching last night’s lackluster “The Penalty Box” that the order of these final episodes should have been shifted. Alicia standing behind Peter at the podium would have been a fantastic and tantalizing ending to a season that saw Alicia come almost full circle from the show’s opening scene three years ago. Instead, the whole story seemed to gear down into neutral and focus on some of the ancillary characters - like Howard - that provided a few chuckles but slowed the thrust of the show to idle.

The Case of the Week, which has often been a low point in episodes this season, did set the theme of “conflict of interest,” which permeated “Penalty Box.” As Diane said to Will early on, “we face 50 conflicts of interest from here to the elevator every day,” but for once they seemed to matter. Will pulled away from his budding romance with Callie because he feared it would be an unfortunate repeating pattern for him, but she didn’t take the job not because of Will but because there was a better one out there. Kalinda’s ill-fated romance with FBI agent Lana interfered with a fragile relationship with the Avon Barksdale of “The Good Wife,” Lamont Bishop, while the judge Cuesta held out for a long time to testify or implicate his prosecutorial co-counsel from a 20 year old case because of loyalty, something that Cary and Peter are always working through as Cary moves to Lockhart Gardner.