Does Troy Patterson seriously have to ask why The Good Wife is a hit? It's entirely bizzare to me that he takes until the very end of his piece on the top-rated (other than NCIS: Los Angeles) to reach the eminently obvious conclusion:
With the drama so thin, it must be the richness of Alicia's situation that makes 13 million people a week want to enjoy her company. She hasn't left Peter—and smart money says she won't—but her anger at him is tempered by a tentative loyalty. She has it both ways, standing by her man while rushing toward a new sense of self, existing as an operatically suffering wife and a high-functioning single mom. "You identify with too many clients, you burn out," someone says to this avenging angel. And if you get enough viewers to identify with your heroine, you've got a relative hit.And it seems to me you could put it a good deal more strongly than that. Americans have been utterly fascinated by the steadfast wives of straying politicans for decades at this point. They're incredibly creepy--stone-faced, brittle, standing by their man even when said man is clearly a total dog--and utterly relatable. They are the paralysis in all of us, the fear that we won't be able to stand up for ourselves, the terror of being alone, of losing our respectability. Jenny Sanford is the only one I can think of who's risked disapprobation, who's totally moving on, but then, what she was faced with seems to have been love, rather than just sex. A lot of the time, we want these ladies to get mad, to get everything, and to get on with their lives, and we're puzzled when they don't. I sometimes wonder if Hillary Clinton would be president if she'd packed some bags, taken off with Chelsea, and left Bill on his lonesome. Probably not, but it's an interesting hypothetical, something that would have seemed totally uncalculating and spontaneous and emotional, but also totally reasonable.
I imagine most of us say we'd behave differently if we were cheated on, but I think it's hard to know what we'd do. The power of The Good Wife is that we get to see the compromises the wives who stick make, and the struggles they go through. Granted, most wronged ladies' husbands don't get carted off to the pokey, leaving them to bring home the bacon. But they've got to make huge decisions about their identities and the centers of their world. We've always wondered what that would be like. Now we get to watch it happen.