Chris Noth

A few times a season, The Good Wife likes to do a “judicial gimmick” episode, throwing the attorneys into a fish out of water situation and watching as they flail, trying to adapt to something they simply do not prepare for in an average trial. “We, The Juries” is one such episode, throwing Will, Diane, Alicia, and Cary into a complicated single trial with two defendants and a bifurcated jury—one for each client. This complicates things not only for both prongs of the defense, but for the prosecution and the judge (played by the always welcome Victor Garber as an imminently decent, efficiency-minded jurist increasingly overwhelmed by the demands of the system he decided on to try the case).

When this season of The Good Wife began with Alicia still working at Lockhart Gardner, it seemed the show had missed an opportunity to leap forward, to start its fifth season with a bold new status quo in place. Yet this is not the type of show we are watching. The Good Wife is a show about how institutions get built, and how they can become slowly corrupted over time.