Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.
IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: May 25, 2010
PROGRAM ORIGINALLY AIRED ON THIS DATE: The Good Wife, “Running” (Season 1, Episode 23). [Stream on Hulu.]
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: The great thing about serialized drama is that one event from an early episode can ripple out far and wide throughout the history of the show. Nowhere was that more apparent than on The Good Wife, where in its first-season finale, Alicia Florrick and Will Gardner play a bit oh phone tag, resulting ultimately in a voice-mail message that lingers over the space between seasons 1 and 2, is ultimately deleted by Eli Gold (for selfish political reasons), and proceeds to haunt the show for literally the rest of its run.
That missed voice-mail represents an ocean of what-ifs in The Good Wife‘s universe, and its implications were far-reaching. Alicia never got the message that Will was all-in on a potential relationship, so Alicia stayed with Peter, which ultimately pushed her closer to a political life of her own. Meanwhile, things between her and Will were strained for a while. As events spun further out, betrayals were revealed, tragedies unfolded, and through it all, that missed voice-mail floated just above it all.
What makes the missed call even more interesting is that the scene that preceded it, where Alicia challenged Will to come at her with more than romanticism, is such a corker.
“Show me the plan,” Alicia told him. “I get the romance. I need a plan. I have two kids that mean the world to me. I have the press; they’re just waiting for the whiff of a new scandal. And I have my husband. So if you want to cut through all that noise, show me a plan. Poetry is easy, it’s the parent-teacher conferences that are hard.” It was a scene that showed off the best of what The Good Wife could do in those early seasons: blend the romanticism of what we expected from a TV drama with the nuts-and-bolts of what these characters would actually be going through. And it left viewers on one hell of a cliffhanger.
