CBS's decision to announce the cancellation of The Good Wife in the middle of the Super Bowl was strange but oddly appropriate. CBS's Chicago-based Emmy-bait legal drama starring Julianna Margulies as Alicia Florrick was always about the spectacle of American life. Though it never had huge ratings, it survived because it was relevant in a way that was new to television. The Good Wife was the beginning of TV torn from the op-ed pages, television-as-trend-piece.

The show occupies a place somewhere between Law and Order, which fictionalized real-life crimes with material torn from the headlines; and The Wire, which amounted to a series of lectures on sociology told through the stories of cops and drug dealers and politicians and journalists. But The Good Wife is neither as specific as the former, nor as programmatic as the latter. It began during a period when a lot of political wives had to stand in front of a lot of podiums and humiliate themselves while their husbands admitted to sexual improprieties. After seven seasons, that trend has long since disappeared, leaving a title that reads like an old Mike Myers bit: Margulies's Good Wife is neither good nor a wife. Discuss.

So the writers just moved on to whatever the world coughed up next. The show is only peripherally a legal drama; the law is mainly an excuse for looking into the niches of contemporary culture. The writers love tech stories in particular—they took on privacy and surveillance, Bitcoin, libel chill, and Anonymous. It makes exactly zero sense that a Chicago law firm would ever see such cases. But who cares?

Florrick is a walking, talking issue of The Atlantic. She quickly evolves from publicly shamed political wife to a highly successful lawyer who faces down a series of fascinating issues: What happens when children are more religious than their parents? What happens when women are attracted to their bosses? What happens when you are still financially involved with your ex?

The largest trend of all in The Good Wife was one that hit close to home for a lot of viewers: how do middle-age people recover from personal and professional disaster? In the wake of the 2008 market crash, when the jobs of a huge number of the Baby Boomer middle class evaporated and they had to rebuilt. It was one of the big trends of the Obama years: the struggle to rebuild a semblance of respectability after deep humiliation. The riches-to-rags-to-riches narrative. And The Good Wife reflected it perfectly.

But Alicia's struggles have to end some time. Every time she's built herself up, the world conspires to tear her down again. How many new relationships can you start and see founder? How many new businesses, new careers, can you triumph at and then watch collapse? After seven seasons, she deserves a break.

Stephen Marche Stephen Marche is a novelist who writes a monthly column for Esquire magazine about culture.

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