The Good Wife

My mother was an avid reader, growing up. It was thanks to her voracious appetite for serial fiction and seemingly unlimited teenaged babysitting funds that as a kid I inherited her Stratemeyer Syndicate collection. There were the Bobbsey Twins, insipid and seemingly shoehorned into a mystery format that even they seemed to resent. There was Tom Swift, whose gee-whiz plucky grin and can-do attitude made me a little ill.

And then there were her obvious favorites, the sparring teen detective titans: the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. The Hardy Boys always made me feel uneasy. Fenton Hardy was obviously the pushy type who was trying to plump up his sons’ college resumes, and resorted to withholding approval and affection unless Frank and Joe did him proud by figuring out the mystery of the sinister signpost. It was perfectly obvious that the Hardys were doomed to a life of solving mystery after mystery just for that one token of their father’s love that was perpetually out of reach. Nancy Drew, on the other hand was self-motivated. She and her gay band of chums solved mysteries for the love of it, sometimes in their clam-diggers! Nancy Drew had Ned Nickerson. Nancy had titian hair, and a roadster. Nancy Drew had Hannah Gruen making German pastries in the kitchen.

I was surprised to find a television show this fall that pushes all the same pleasure buttons as the Nancy Drew stories used to. I originally tuned into The Good Wife because it starred Julianna Margulies, a lovely woman whose performance was about the only thing I used to enjoy on ER. In The Good Wife she stars as Alicia Florrik, a woman whose husband has resigned as State Attorney after a scandal involving hookers and corruption. With her husband in jail, back to work she goes, for another favorite actor of mine, Christine Baranski, a senior partner who walks around the sets of her swanky law firm with a pole wedged firmly up her fundament. At first I must confess my heart sank when I saw that most of the show’s action was going to be within the law firm and in the courtroom, because courtroom procedurals are among my least favorite genres of television.

The show makes it palatable to me, though, by giving it all a citrusy, Nancy Drew-like girl detective twist. The character of Alicia, thanks to the public rigors through which her husband has put her, has a decided empathy with the put-upon pro bono cases to which she’s assigned as a junior associate. Like Nancy, she’s almost supernaturally observant, and always manages to spot the critical difference between an original memo and its photocopied duplicate that manages to thwart the evildoers trying to wring pension money out of mourning widows. With her chum Kalinda, played stubbornly and opaquely by the excellent Archie Panjabi, she snoops and detects and finds the loopholes in cases that others cannot.

The writers have given Alicia two adolescent children who have a detection plot of their own, as they try to figure out exactly who has been leaving mysterious photographs of their father with other women on their doorstep—and who exactly has been haunting their landing to take photographs of their apartment. Alicia’s son is a smart cookie armed with his computer software, his internet research, and his video-recording iPod; he and his younger sister are conducting their own investigations without their mother’s knowledge.

The cases on which Alicia works are not really any more complicated than the average Encyclopedia Brown mystery, but the acting is compelling and the way the series mingles Alicia’s personal afflictions with her everyday work is quite well done. Sure, Alicia Florrik is thirty years older than Nancy and much more worn and tired, and she may have swapped in her roadster for an SUV, but within her breast beats the heart of a true teen detective. When she’s sniffing around, she’s never more alert and alive.