Digital Spy presents Remote Patrol - the weekly column from New York-based TV critic Bruce Fretts, taking a look at what's hot right now in US television.
Fretts is a veteran of both Entertainment Weekly and TV Guide Magazine, where he penned the wildly popular 'Cheers & Jeers' column for ten years.
The Good Wife and Madam Secretary: Women On Top
Amid all the recent controversy about domestic abuse allegations against NFL players, one statistic has been thrown around quite a bit - 45% of American football fans are women. That must explain why CBS has loaded up its post-game Sunday lineup with a pair of dramas featuring powerful females: The Good Wife, which kicks off its sixth season on September 21 sandwiched between dual airings of the pilot for Téa Leoni's foreign-affairs saga Madam Secretary. (Téa for two, anyone?)
To me, The Good Wife has never been better. I know some fans were upset by - SPOILER ALERT, if you haven't seen last season - the sudden death of Will Gardner (Josh Charles), but he always struck me as the show's weak link. Maybe I'm speaking out of my you-know-what as a straight man, but did this snivelling weasel ever really stand a chance of winning the heart, among other body parts, of Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies)? Not when the competition was her husband, Mr. Big himself, Governor Peter Florrick (Chris Noth).
Something happens in the opening minutes of The Good Wife's season premiere that I've been asked not to reveal, but which makes discussing the episode very difficult. Suffice it to say it's shocking, but not as shocking as Will's death, and it involves the arrest of a major character. It also flings all of the pieces on the Lockhart Gardner vs. Florrick Agos chessboard up in the air, right where they belong.
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Will Alicia chuck it all and run for State's Attorney? Will Diane (Christine Baranski) defect and leave Lockhart Gardner with neither Lockhart nor Gardner? And how will the return of the canny Louis Canning (Michael J. Fox, whose underrated NBC sitcom was sadly cancelled) shake things up? It's all good stuff.
Madam Secretary is chock-full of good stuff, too, starting with Leoni's performance as Elizabeth McCord, a CIA analyst turned UVA professor (my alma mater!) turned US Secretary of State. Leoni projects the right mix of gravitas and world-weariness, even when the script doles out clichés like: "You don't just think outside the box. You don't even know there is a box."
That's the President of the US (Keith Carradine, who'd get my vote after his winning performances on Deadwood, Dexter and Fargo) recruiting Elizabeth for the job after the former top diplomat's plane goes down under mysterious circumstances. Hmm, sounds like a case for Leoni's real-life X-husband David Duchovny as Fox Mulder.
Like a real-life Cabinet member, Madam Secretary is only as good as her support staff, so Leoni is lucky to be surrounded by such reliable character actors as Tim Daly (as her impossibly patient religion-professor husband), Zeljko Ivanek, Geoffrey Arend and Bebe Neuwirth (sporting an unflattering perm).
The storylines, so far (I've seen three episodes), seem less ripped-from-the-headlines than pulled straight off the internet. The premiere involves a pair of Americans imprisoned in Syria and the prospect of sending in US military forces to rescue them, and post-Benghazi embassy security and WikiLeaks-like information dumps figure into future installments. Creator Barbara Hall penned a couple of scripts for Homeland as well as running more mainstream CBS shows like Judging Amy and Joan of Arcadia, and Madam Secretary feels like a nice synthesis of network and cable sensibilities: smart but not too smart to attract a broad audience.
Then again, The Good Wife has never been a breakout ratings hit, and it's managed to stay on the air for six seasons, thanks to its status as Network TV's Best Drama. Not that there's much competition from the procedurals that overpopulate the rest of the broadcast nets' schedules. Now The Good Wife has a rival for that title in Madam Secretary. May the best woman win.
