Will Gardner is Not Dead . . . In My Dreams

The Good Wife returns to CBS on 21^st September and, while I could not be more excited about the brilliant David Hyde Pierce joining as a regular, I am still grieving for Will.

   

I don’t believe that any actor, when they leave a series, does not, at some point, wonder if they have made the right move: not least on Monday just gone, when Josh Charles, who played the now dead Will Gardner in The Good Wife, saw his co-star Julianna Margulies pick up an Emmy for her role in the show as Best Leading Actress in a Drama.

   

Will’s death was a real GASP! moment, cleverly kept under wraps by cast and crew until the second we saw it on screen. But, for me, it is not too late to bring him back, and I appeal to the writers to put their heads together to do so.

   

In the 1985-86 finale of Dallas (doubtless the writers of The Good Wife were not even born then), Bobby Ewing died. Oh, we screamed! Not Bobby! The beautiful, divine, gorgeous Patrick Duffy, who was the only reason any of us females were watching in the first place.

   

Patrick, or the producers, or Bobby – whoever really knows the truth of these situations – decided that a horrible mistake had been made (plummeting ratings being an influential factor) and Bobby had to come back.

   

But: how to do this? They alighted upon a year’s episodes being nothing other than a dream of Pam, Bobby’s gorgeous wife who never took her make-up off before bed time in the show’s entire history.

One morning, having endured Bobby’s death, funeral et al, et al, she woke to hear the water running in the shower and a glistening Bobby emerging from it. I imagine that an even bigger relief was that the dreaded Oil Barons’ Ball (always a drunken disaster) had never taken place. That feeling was doubtless soon tempered by the realisation that it was still to come.

   

The show carried on as if nothing had ever happened, the only problem being that while Bobby remained alive and kicking on Dallas, the sister show, Knots Landing, continued to grieve him, with estranged brother Gary forever bemoaning the fact that Momma had never gotten over Bobby’s death (while Momma, by the way, happily continued barbecuing over at the Southfork ranch, sharing ribs with Lazarus Bobby).

   

I reckon that The Good Wife could bring Will back in much the same way and carry on as if his demise had never happened.

SCENARIO 1: Alicia decides to watch Psycho, falls asleep and, in her dream, pulls back the shower curtain to discover not multiple stab victim Marion Crane, but Will, surrounded by his briefs (geddit?). She wakes on the sofa to discover that the DVR has not recorded the ending.

SCENARIO 2: Will is naked in the shower. Sorry, but I haven’t got any further with this thought. It’s just something I want to see.

SCENARIO 3: Peter Florrick is in the shower with Carrie Fisher (keep up, I’m, mixing my genres here) and, upon hearing unusual water sport activity, Alicia decides to check it out. She walks to the bathroom, pulls back the shower curtain and comes face to face with a naked Chris Noth, who says “You’re the one” (I told you I was mixing my genres). Luckily, she wakes and realises she is in the middle of a deposition with Will.

I could go on. And on. And on. Because, the truth is, I want Will back, and he has barely been away yet. When James MacPherson, who played DCI Mike Jardine in Taggart (the UK Scottish crime drama) died, I was distraught for months (actually, I still am). I stood sobbing with the rest of the cast at a summer party, consolable only when the lead actor reached him on his mobile, to assure me of 
his mortality.

   

I don’t like change in TV, and Tweeted wildly, advising against Harver Specter’s relationship with Scottie, who, at the beginning of the latest series, was his love interest, after vowing to change his ways. Quite why anyone ever thought this was a good idea is anybody’s guess, though I sense a delicate female’s fingerprints all over it. Whoever it was, thank heavens they dropped the idea very quickly. Totally out of character. Totally out of sync with the backbone of the show.

   

So, I don’t care how you do it, dear writers of The Good Wife. I love you more than life itself, but you really need to perform a Lazarus and bring back our dear Will. Call me psychic, but much as I adore David Hyde Pierce (who is a genius), I don’t feel I’m going to be getting into a lather about him in quite the same way as I did about Will.

   

Which brings me back to that shower theme . . . Come on, Will. Get yer kit off. 

Even if all turns out to be a dream.

   

Loving Jaci's Box

What a great week. 

Standing in for the Mail on Sunday’s TV critic (a job I once held for nearly 10 years – and you can catch my review in this Sunday’s edition, btw!), I was reminded again of why I love the medium and why, despite difficulties elsewhere in life, when it comes to work I have never doubted the path I took. I am truly blessed in loving what I do and, by whatever chance (and, despite the hard work, at the end of the day it really IS chance), being given the ability to do it.

   

Monday night’s Emmys had to have been the strongest line-up of shows ever to feature in an awards ceremony. How do you even begin to choose between House of Cards, Mad Men and Breaking Bad, or Kevin Spacey, John Hamm and Bryan Cranston? Category after category had me gasping in awe at the quality of the shows and nominees on the screen and, while I didn’t agree with all the results, everyone deserved to be there (and you can’t always say that about British awards shows - nor the Oscars, come to that).

   

I never watched much TV as a child, apart from when I was sick. Then, my favourite screen event was watching the second hand on a giant 60 second clock dispense with individual white lines as it counted down to the next show (I was easily pleased). I quite liked Tales of the River Bank (fluffy animals), hated Dr Who (too scary) and never saw Peyton Place because my parents went into moral panic overdrive and frantically sent me to bed every time it came on. I preferred living in my imagination and rarely left my bedroom.

   

As a teenager, my parents used to tell me off for being in my room working, always with a pen and paper in hand. “Why aren’t you downstairs watching television with the rest of the family?” was an ongoing admonishment. These days, the refrain I say to myself is: “Why aren’t you sitting at that desk working, instead of watching another Law and Order: SVU marathon, with shows you have seen a hundred times before?”

   

I once had a tax inspection and, in the interview, was asked to run through my average day. To summarise: I get up, watch TV; then I have my lunch and watch Diagnosis Murder, even though I am not reviewing it. Then, I watch more TV. Then I write about it. Then I watch TV . . . “ You get the gist of it? The tax man flicked through my accounts and looked at me suspiciously: “Do you have a boat?” A boat? A flamin’ boat? When would I have the time to run a boat, and why would I want to, when I can watch them on A Place in the Sun and not have to shift my backside from the sofa?

   

The first time I recall being overwhelmed by the power of the moving image was, in fact, from books my parents gave me: old copies of Maurice Speed’s Film Review. My favourite picture was of a woman tied to the railway tracks in the path of an oncoming train. I recall feeling thrilled, terrified, all my senses alert to the excitement and danger of the situation – and I also recall the relief when I read beneath the picture that, for those of us of a nervous disposition, we need not worry because the train stopped in time.

   

I always found it easy to live in my head and, as an adult, that hasn’t always been a good thing. I see high drama where other people see the mundane. I always have. I remember when Durham Road Junior School was broken into when I was eight and, lined up with my class in the hallway outside the crime scene (you see what I mean?), remember the thrill of seeing a jar labelled “POISON” in the cupboard. Had the thief planted it there? Was someone already dead? Were we all about to die?

   

I think I watch TV to take me away from the drama and chaos that is the long-running, never-ending series in my head. There are very few things I could not live without, but PG Tips and TV definitely top the list. My worst nightmare would be to have my TV taken away from me. Never mind that Law and Order are making programmes at a faster rate than I can watch them, nor that I have seen every episode of Frasier at least 20 times (and still watch at least two a day). This is my life. And, when reality sucks, as it has done of late, it’s my world.

   

While there is Suits on the telly, there is hope.