Would You Rather: Peter Florrick Or Will Gardner From ‘The Good Wife’

Life often presents us with tough choices, but we’re here to help work them out. Each week, we discuss two attractive men, weigh the pros and cons, and decide, once and for all, which one we’d rather have sex with. In this week’s Would You Rather, we discuss the two men embroiled in one of the most intense love triangles on television: Peter Florrick (Chris Noth) and Will Gardner (Josh Charles) from The Good Wife.

Tyler: Joel, we have had many private conversations — texts, GChats, DMs — in the last month and a half while I watched the first five seasons of The Good Wife, which, as it turns out, is the best show on television and one of my current obsessions. This show is so phenomenal because it’s a perfect mixture of the best things: great acting, fantastic clothes, awesome guest stars, and the occasional quirky legal case. But at its center is a very strong and complicated love triangle that I can’t stop thinking about.

Joel: The Good Wife is one of those shows you feel stupid for waiting so long to watch. It has so much going against it — ”Sunday night legal procedural on CBS” doesn’t exactly scream “prestige television,” after all — but despite that it remains one of the most well acted, best written shows with one of the best scores on television. Do you feel stupid for waiting so long to watch?

Tyler: Nothing has made my mother more pleased as when I said to her, “Mom, you were right. The Good Wife is awesome. Also, maybe I should be putting a larger percentage of my paycheck directly into my savings account.” The Good Wife is so good that I don’t even know who my favorite character is. Alicia? Maybe: great hair and killer fashion. Kalinda? She could beat the shit out of me. Diane Lockhart? Probably. She knows how to accessorize.

Joel: Grace?

Tyler: Bless her heart. But I suppose the most important part about The Good Wife is its INTENSE LOVE TRIANGLE. Alicia Florrick is tested, weekly, with remaining faithful to her politician husband who cheated on her with prostitutes. And she is tempted, often, by Will Gardner, the best friend from Georgetown who swooped in and saved her life by offering her a job after her husband’s disgrace — and whose brilliance and cocky charms are constantly baiting her into falling in love with him. Oh, Joel, this is such a hard one for me, honestly.

Joel: It’s a hard one for Alicia, too, and you understand why. That’s what I find so fascinating about this show: even if you have a Will/Peter preference (and I certainly do) the show forces you to reexamine these relationships constantly. It would be easy for a show whose premise rests on a cheating, philandering spouse, to paint Peter as completely irredeemable and Will has the heroic savior, kept from Alicia because of circumstance. But the show grows beyond this and for five seasons manages to make Alicia’s choice seem like an emotionally rich, complicated question. Both of these guys have their faults, and both of these guys can make her come like crazy. Knowing that, which of these two dudes would you choose?

Tyler: I’m just going to cut to the chase, because I have had this debate inside my head many times in the last two weeks. I’m going with Will. It’s Will! I love Will!

Joel: Which is crazy, because you literally sent me a flurry of texts but one week ago that you hated Will. You hated Will a lot at the time. Pray tell: what’s changed? Was it you or was it Will?

Tyler: I hated Will at a time. I think people might remember the episode that drove me nuts — and made me momentarily hate Will. It’s the one where he’s up against Alicia’s new firm because her former client, that quirky rich guy who always played classical music during his meetings, left her some ungodly amount of money — something like $12 million? It was that scene where he prepared to cross-examine her, planning to ask her about jokes she made while they were having sex — a joke in which she could convince that former client to do whatever she wanted because he was in love with her. The episode was SO INTENSE because the pair, now professional enemies, were planning to emotionally manipulate each other. By the end of the episode I had forgiven Will because I could see how it was too hard for him to go through with the whole ordeal. And it pretty much nails what I love about his relationship with Alicia: it’s intense because there is so much passion there, so much that is just under the surface that they are both desperate to avoid.

Joel: I have to say, I’m not sure I ever recovered quite as quickly as you did. I can’t believe I’m really going to take it here (I actually had to get up and take a walk because I was so sick over what I’m about to say), but I think that last season really ruined Will for me. I mean I guess it literally ruined Will for the show because he dies, but in terms of his prospect as a fictional love interest for me, I just don’t think I could take him. Throughout the early seasons you always saw flashes of his immaturity, but they really became astonishingly pronounced in his last season and the emotional manipulation you described above was really just one of the many examples of the ways he messed with Alicia’s head. Sure Peter fucked around, but in the grand scheme of things, maybe I care less about monogamy and a bit more about emotional stability. Which, compared to Will at least, Peter seems to represent out of the two.

Tyler: I know what you mean: Peter is a total prick at time, but at his root he is completely devoted to Alicia. He knows he fucked up by cheating on her (and how he cheated on her), and, sure, had he not gotten caught publicly and served time in prison, would he still be devoted to Alicia. (If arguing about a fictional TV plot line isn’t dumb enough, arguing about hypothetical situations is even worse.) He took Alicia for granted, and that sucks, but he worked hard at gaining her trust back — but ultimately, it was too late and Alicia finally took that dive with Will. I think that’s so hard about this debate, for me, is that I see the good in Peter, too: he provides for his family, he deeply loves his wife and his children, and he has learned from his mistakes and wants to be a good person. Will, on the other hand, serves one person: himself. Most of the time he is doing the right thing, but he has a tendency to bend the rules of ethics in order to reach the solution he wants.

Joel: A lot of people talk about the elevator scene that capped season two as one of the romantic moments on the show, and they’re not wrong. It’s great. I could watch Josh Charles finger Julianna Margulies in an elevator, or wherever else the Kings deign to let him finger her, every goddamn day. But for me, the scene that really sold me on what I find to be the show’s most interesting relationship was when Peter rushed out of the apartment after Alicia despite his Lindsay Lohan ankle monitor. It was one of the first moments I can remember finding this show truly thrilling, and he earned a lot of good will from me in that moment. It’s probably really retrograde of me to admit, but I find big, reckless romantic gestures like that really fucking erotic.

Tyler: Despite being Team Will, I will admit that the sex between Alicia and Peter is SO HOT. Like, that’s the kind of sex that I want to have. Sure, Will and Alicia are sneaking off to fuck in his office bathroom, adding an added danger to their affair (what if David Lee catches them?!), but the intimacy between Peter and Alicia is a force to be reckoned with — and that’s what I really want in my life: intimacy. Of course, the passion between Will and Alicia is also sexy as hell. I mean, if I were Alicia, I honestly would not know who to go after. If I were caught in an incredibly frustrating love triangle, I would only hope that Hunter Parrish would swoop in and make my decision for me by shooting one of them.

Joel: The intimacy is the thing here, isn’t it? Despite the fact that Will and Alicia are supposed to be great college buddies, I never once got a whiff of friend chemistry from them. From the word go, you know these two people are going to fuck and it’s going to be hot and it’s going to end terribly. Can anyone point me to a really great example of these two being “friends”? I’m not sure Will is capable of friendship with any woman (or in this case either of us), even his interactions with Diane were fraught with sexual tension. Peter and Alicia’s relationship, while complicated, has so many more dimensions. Peter, especially as the seasons progress, seems to be genuinely capable of taking a step back and being a friend to Alicia when she needs one. Isn’t that the ultimate goal too? Someone who can gab with you over a glass of red wine and fuck you with all your clothes on while all of your co-workers are scurrying around in your living room?

Tyler: I never saw Will’s friendship with Diane to have any sexual undertones. After all, it’s not even platonic — it’s strictly a business relationship (which is why Diane breaking down in tears after he dies was so effective — until then, she keeps her emotions at bay from him). Ditto with Kalinda. Besides, they’re both too old for him anyway, because he is a manchild in a nice suit. He’s been carrying a torch for Alicia since their law school days, so his feelings for her were dormant for so long. He’s starting where he left off, which is, what, at 25? 26? I don’t know if if they would have crashed and burned had they stayed together; I also think her relationship with Peter ran its course. Peter’s indiscretions allowed Alicia to break out on her own, and she realized she was much more than just a politician’s wife. I think Alicia and Will had a lot in common, too; we forget that the people we work with are the people we spend the most time with. And they’re lawyers, so they’re not doing a strict nine-to-five. I think a lot of their friendship, like Will and Diane’s, was unspoken. Which is also why Alicia leaving the firm felt like such a betrayal to Will, and why he lashed out the way he did. He didn’t have the steely resolve that Alicia did when Peter cheated on her.

Joel: Okay first of all, possibly the wrongest thing you’ve ever said in this column is “I never saw Will’s friendship with Diane to have any sexual undertones.” But I’ll let that slide so I can take a moment to agree here. I think Alicia’s relationship with both of these men has run its course, and the show, especially by the end of season 6 seems largely to have grown beyond it. And isn’t that refreshing? A lesser show might have clung on for dear life to these two guys, and their relationship to Alicia, but I guess that’s why those shows aren’t the best shows on television.

Tyler: Look, I’m not denying the sexual prowess of Christine Baranski. She’s practically on a different plane. But never during the show did I think, “Oh, uh, is this gonna happen?” IF Will and Diane were to have sex, she would immediately and literally chew his head off afterward. And he knew that! She is too much for him, and he respected that.

Joel: You bathe daily in your wrongness and it’s disgusting.

Tyler: And you bathe daily in Cary Agos’ hair gel.

Joel: Cary, and his rock hard hair/abs combo don’t do it for me. But plenty of other men on the show do! Do you have any other preferences where Alicia’s potential love interests are concerned? Truth be told, both Peter and Will come in second and third place respectively to another suitor that appears in season 6.

Tyler: I haven’t gotten there yet, but I could tell from a mile away who it was gonna be. Who is the bald ASA who’s always giving the defence attorneys grief? I’d go with that guy. Or maybe the Chumhum guy, because apparently Chumhum money is the only thing that’s important in the fictionalized version of Chicago that looks a hell of a lot like Greenpoint.

Joel: Ok, I will say out of the men in Alicia’s orbit in Season 6 my favorite is the sort of vaguely sketched Johnny Elfman. You’ll get there, Tyler. But let me just say for all those in the know: it totally seems like Alicia would end up pegging this dude, and that really does it for me. But outside that, moving outside of Alicia’s sphere, the main object of my lust is definitely Kalinda’s crazy ex-husband Nick. Remember when he fingered her at the ice cream parlor and then put it in her ice cream cone? I really dug that.

Tyler: I stay away from any man who would get a tattoo for me.

Joel: So boring. You are the Archie Panjabi to my Julianna Margulies.

Tyler: Ugh, you’re the Jackie to my Veronica.

Joel: You’re the Martha to my Caitlin.

Tyler: I respect that deep cut. This is why I keep you around.

Joel: Let’s be honest, we’re both Marthas.

 

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Photos: CBS