maybe not today, maybe not tommorow

The Good Wife is back - 5.01 - I love this show so much. I love how unapologetic it is about being about women, and about women being women, and being women in different ways, and negotiating different environments - as workers, as mothers, as partners, as political actors, as sex objects - in different, conscious ways. About femininity as this preformed and yet real nontheless thing. There's just so many of them! Women, doing things! It's like all the female characters from the rest of television ended up here. There's second and third and post wave feminists, women who are feminine in different ways, women who are, there's women who are mothers and women who aren't, who are lovers and who aren't, who are somebody's wife and who aren't. And they all have relationships with other women!

Anyway, last season had it's dodgy moments, but on a great note, and it seems to have picked it right back up. The last-minute dramatics with the main plot were a tiny bit cheesy, but they just about sold the pathos of it and there was a great undercurrent of pitch-black humor as well, which the show often does well. And I love that little mention from Peter that Alicia had always wanted to start her own law firm. It's an affirmation of that ambitious streak she has that sometimes seems to get buried under Alicia-the-saint, and she has a great conflict here, between ambition and idealism and a contradictory web of personal ties and professional responsibilities, and in the middle of all that she has to sit there and listen to a lecture about ethics.


I also watched Lucky 7, and it might be my favorite pilot of the season, after Sleepy Hollow. It's got heart and I actually care about all the characters, even if some of the situations they come in right now seem a bit generic, they manage to transcend them as individuals anyway. I have a feeling that what looks like the main story line - the two brothers - is not going to be my favorite, but the pilot also gave a fair amount of attention to everyone else, so i'm optimistic. Also, it's refreshing to see a whole, diverse cast of characters, all of whom are complex and flawed human beings, all the while virtually none of them are total assholes.

Woot, FTW. Canning being just-shy-of-sociopathic and yet strangely endearing, and Alicia and Kalinda being friends and Diane playing the game and Eli being flustered and Carey, er, smiling sheepishly. And Wendy Scott-Carr! I really, really adore her (and I think the actress is amazing.) She's got this mad layering of obviously affected sweetness and femininity-as-artifice, as a political tool, over genuinely ruthless drive and ambition over real dedication over personal stuff over self destructive obsession over probably low self-awareness over god-knows-what. 

And it's in a way that seems very convincing to me for a career politician with big ambitions, the impression these people give, especially in the American context. Like, I can see how she would end up being something like Mitt Romney in twenty years, having mercilessly whipped herself to get there and then waking up one morning with her hair not perfect for once and wondering where her life had gone and why everyone thinks she's cold and weird, she just meant for the best, after all. Characters driving themselves over the edge is like my bulletproof kink, so, yeah, Wendy all the way.