有几次，《傲骨贤妻》反而受到了本身优秀卡司阵容的妨碍。有谁能料到，这个自从体育之夜后被挤出一线小生的男演员，居然能出演如日中天的艾丽西娅的同事兼情人。当查尔斯表示想离开本剧时，制作人金氏夫妇为威尔设计了一个突发死亡，而后成为电视界的重大新闻，并从感情基调上引导了后续剧集的发展。

　　另外一方面，有些角色本可以有更多故事的：制作人找来马修古迪饰演芬恩·波尔马来作为A姐情人的绝佳替代，并为戴安这一角色的支线找来了杰出演员奥利弗·普莱特，但遗憾的是，由于演员的档期问题，这两条故事线都早早结束。

　　然而，尽管《傲骨贤妻》曾一度偏离主线，但它还是创造出了一个丰富、多面、复杂的群像世界。这让它在公共电视界独树一帜，形成了一种和《权力的游戏》、《绝命毒师》、《纸牌屋》这三部付费台电视剧平分秋色的成熟叙事模式。

　　The Good Wife will end its seven-season run on Sunday night, and I think its departure is more than just the shutting-down of an excellent show that gave a lot of people a lot of pleasure. No more Good Wife on CBS may signal something else as well: Is this the last great network drama? That is to say, is there another serious, hour-long show on network TV that measures up to The Good Wife now, and how likely are we to get another one as excellent in the near future?In retrospect, The Good Wife was a kind of stealth experiment conducted by its inventors, Robert and Michelle King. When it premiered in 2009, it had a couple of promotable elements. Its concept — wife standing by her philandering man — was often compared to Hillary and Bill Clinton’s marital life, and particularly to the prostitution scandal that ruined the career of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer. And The Good Wife marked the return of Julianna Margulies to series television in a role tailor-made for her strengths as the kind of strong-yet-sensitive character that she arguably hadn’t had since the role that first brought her to prominence, in ER.Prior to The Good Wife, Margulies’ TV career was looking iffy at best. She’d top-lined 2008’s Canterbury’s Law, playing a defense attorney. The Fox show was an attempt at quality TV produced by some talented people including Walon Green and Mike Figgis, but it was cancelled after six episodes. Before that, she’d had a nice, brief run on The Sopranos.The Good Wife changed everything, for Margulies, for the Kings, and for CBS. In the role of Alicia Florrick, was an immediate hit with the public and critics, won her two Emmys, and the show was hailed for its unusually sharp and unpredictable take on marriage, politics, and the politics of a political marriage. The show may have been initially perceived as being right in CBS’ wheelhouse — a courtroom drama, a case a week, with romance and guest stars, right? — but soon enough, we all realized it was something special. The Good Wife found novel ways of approaching not merely the subject of infidelity and careerism, but also developed strong, recurring storylines about national security issues, gun control, abortion, religion, and that most controversial of topics, the increasingly fraught relationship between Margulies’ Alicia and Archie Panjabi’s investigator Kalinda Sharma, both on-screen and off. There were times when The Good Wife was ham-strung by the very excellence of its casting. No one expected Josh Charles, who hadn’t had a first-rate TV showcase since Sports Night, to become such a worthy leading-man playing Alicia’s colleague-lover Will Gardner. When Charles expressed interest in leaving the show, the Kings staged a sudden death for Will that proved to be one of TV’s increasingly rare total-surprise events that also reverberated emotionally throughout the rest of the show’s run. On the other hand, there were roles that could have been so much more — the Kings had found a wonderful replacement for some good Alicia-lovin’ in Matthew Goode’s Finn Polmar, and they had come up with a corker of a role for Oliver Platt in a plot-line for Diane Lockhart, but in both cases, their storylines were cut short due to other commitments by those actors.Nevertheless, The Good Wife, even when it veered into a dud subplot, created a rich, multi-faceted world that mirrored life’s ambiguities and grown-up complexities. It stood apart from everything else on network television, achieving the kind of mature storytelling that we’d come to expect only from premium cable, basic cable fare like Game of Thrones,Breaking Bad, and streaming programming like House of Cards.

（编辑：何莹莹）