The Good Wife’s cheating husband’s former campaign manager

Boy, what a difference a year makes. It wasn’t too long ago that Alan Cumming’s Eli Gold was one of my least favorite characters on The Good Wife; now I think he’s being shortchanged on material. There’s only so much time the title character’s cheating husband’s campaign manager can get in the first place, so when the campaign’s over and he no longer has a role to play?

Which is why I’m really glad to see Eli tucked into a corner where he can be ever-present, even if I do maintain that the show has to work hard to ensure that his stories aren’t dumb. So how about last night’s new client? Well, first of all, I think I liked seeing Eli and Kalinda together. I can’t even imagine how he’ll react when he realizes who she is, and she is still herself so that’s not great, but with the right kind of tweaks Eli and Kalinda could likely recreate some of the great chemistry that Eli had with America Ferrera’s Natalie Flores last season … you know, hopefully minus the creepy sexual undercurrent (although you never know with Kalinda).

As for his client Mickey Gunn (Sopranos alum Michael Kelly), I think it would a lot of fun watching Eli work on a campaign that’s not Peter’s. I don’t know if the writers can pull off the logistics of inserting a fictitious character into the Republican presidential nomination process — as far as publicity goes, it would be pretty ingenious of a real contender to let the show use their name, but that’d never happen — but whatever they come up with will certainly beat having to watch a guy like Eli work for a guy like Peter. Plus it’s a story that could technically be continued for the next thirteen months, which would be very cool.

Still, I wonder if the writers are making Eli a tent pole of the show, or just giving him something to do while he waits for Peter to run for office again. Beggars can’t be choosers, and either way Eli’s definitely a highlight, but the latter would imply more dinky stories ala last week, while the former … well, that would be awesome. We shall see.

Meanwhile, what kind of ridiculous notion is it for the State’s Attorney’s office to even be considering Lockhart/Gardner as potential outside counsel (see last week’s review title and multiply by a thousand)? I’m willing to believe there’s no common sense floating around the halls of either office, but is there also no oversight in the legal community?

But putting that aside for a moment, why would Diane even consider going through an audit process to land the account? It doesn’t matter why Peter’s insisting on it; it’s ludicrous. I realize it was kind of all to set up that final moment between Will and Diane, but she’s crazy for not passing as soon as it was mentioned the first time. For a twenty million dollar account? No way.

Oh, and there was also a boring case about libel and mountain climbers. Eddie Izzard stopped by, as did John Doman (William A. Rawls on The Wire). British legal system meets the US? They could have done a lot better.

Clacked by Aryeh S.
on Oct 03, 2011 @ 12:00 EST5EDT