It's a rare show that starts to come into its own in the middle of its fifth season, but somehow CBS's The Good Wife has managed to do it. This season has been among the strongest I've seen, and the last two episodes may be the best television produced this year. (And yes, I'm aware we just got through the final season of Breaking Bad.)

The Good Wife is dressed up as a simple legal drama, but it has become one of the most intellectually ambitious shows made by a major network. It started off ripping headlines from the news—like Law and Order—but somewhere around season two, morphed into an entirely novel kind of television show, one whose stories were ripped from ideas and trend reporting rather than hard news. It's the only major show, for instance, that regularly deals with technological changes, like e-commerce tax avoidance, or Anonymous, or Bitcoin. And despite the extreme unlikelihood that such issues would ever cross the desk of a Chicago law firm, or the governor of Illinois, these timely storylines are refreshingly current.

This season, The Good Wife has taken this unique approach to the next level. Ordinarily, the trends discussed on the show take up one episode, or maybe a two- or three-show story arc, with a few recurring characters, like Chicago's biggest drug dealer or the owner of Chumhum, an online search engine. When Alicia Florrick and Cary Argos split from Lockhart Gardner, it set up a war between the two firms which one assumes will consume at least the rest of this season. These two firms are defined by very marked characteristics. Lockhart Gardner is old and established. Florrick Argos is young and hungry. The young and hungry firm split with the old established firm essentially because the latter got greedy and delayed the promotion of fourth-year associates to partnership. In other words, The Good Wife is now a show about intergenerational warfare.

Intergenerational warfare is real and its effects are profound. In a recent New York Times column, "Sorry, Kids. We Ate It All," Tom Friedman quotes investor Stan Druckenmiller who is on a college tour trying to describe the financial carnage that intergenerational warfare will eventually bring with it. At these engagements, Druckenmiller frequently finds himself challenged by seniors who accuse him of trying to start an intergenerational war. He has a ready reply: "No, that war already happened, and the kids lost. We're just trying to recover some scraps for them."

The situation is getting worse. The wealth gap between the old and young has never been higher. The federal government spends 2.4 dollars on Americans over sixty-five for every dollar it spends on children. Cuts to federal programs overwhelming affect younger Americans, since nobody, not Democrats and certainly not Republicans, wants the over-65 crowd to feel any sting of government cutbacks. Public institutions have decided that the young will have to find their own way. Law school tuition increased by 314% between 1989 and 2009. In the private sector, a recent series of studies showed that the battle between the young and old for jobs more or less goes one way. "The workforce is aging. For American lawyers, the average age jumped from 39 in 1980 to 49 in 2005. For elementary and high schoolteachers in the United States, the median age rose from 41 in 1987 to 55 in 2005. In universities across the world, most every professional journal has noted that part of the reason for the crimped job market is due to delayed retirements."

The gerontocracy is triumphant. Increasingly, the daily experience of worklife is waiting around for the old people to die, or taking up arms against them, or on the other side desperately holding on to what has taken a lifetime to acquire. The Good Wife is betting that it's a trend deep enough, and resonant enough to ordinary viewers, that it can sustain the drama of an entire season.

Betting on intergenerational warfare is a gamble for The Good Wife, but it's a way to compete with the great shows on AMC and HBO. Breaking Bad and its predecessors were about characters whose struggles with good and evil pushed the boundaries of what we consider normal sympathy. A network show cannot be that focused, or that dark, or take such risks. But the creators of The Good Wife have found another way to make television fascinating. Cable shows give us how we might live, if pushed to the edge, but The Good Wife shows how we actually live now. And it's just as scary.

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

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