Michelle and Robert King

When Michelle and Robert King came up with the idea of a wife whose husband is an elected official convicted in a sex and corruption scandal, they crafted an intelligent show that offers a realistic portrayal of women, men and the pursuit of power. The Good Wife is one of CBS’s top-rated series.

 

WS: Where did the idea for the show came from and what served as inspiration for it?

MICHELLE KING: We’ve always loved raw shows and raw films. There were a number of political sex scandals that happened one after another and we noticed that really the most interesting person in the frame was not the politician who had sinned, but his wife, who was forced to stand next to him at every press conference. We just started wondering, “What is this woman thinking?” and that spurred us on.

 

WS: You have several strong women in the show who have made very different choices in their lives. Does the show want to say anything about the state of women today and the state of feminism?

MICHELLE KING: It was absolutely a deliberate choice to have the women in the show—and we liked the idea of different generations—[have] different points of view on what were appropriate choices for a woman to make.

ROBERT KING: Part of this came from the Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama primary when there was this very interesting generational gap between older feminists and younger feminists. The older feminists thought, “Oh, this is our first chance to get a woman in the presidency,” and other, younger feminists who said, “Yeah, but I’m voting with my heart.” It dramatized the differences in attitude toward women in power. Another thing we’re having fun with—and I would say this is maybe more comic than dramatic—is that women grasp for power as much as men, the show is just exploring the other ways that they do it.

 

WS: How do you use very full female characters to drive the narrative of the show?

ROBERT KING: Even though there are a lot of strong women on our show, we don’t really differentiate their function. We don’t say, “Oh, this is the male portion of the show or this is the female portion.” We do try to write the women from the female’s perspective because on so many shows that involve women, it feels like you’re on the outside, not on the inside. We’re very much a point-of-view show. In any scene in court, or working on a case, we’re always telling the directors to shoot it from [the protagonist] Alicia’s point of view, even if she has the fewest lines in the scene. We want to see how Alicia is judging the situation to compare it to how we’re judging the situation.

 

WS: Is it unusual for the two of you to be in Los Angeles and for the show to be produced across the country in New York? How do you manage that?

MICHELLE KING: It’s unusual; it’s not unheard-of. I know that Law & Order is that way and I think Damages is, too.

ROBERT KING: For every episode, we meet with the director for a marathon eight-hour meeting. We’re on a Polycom system—a video-conferencing system—and we discuss basically every second of the script. We are in constant touch with the actors, by e-mail, phone calls and Polycom, to tell them where they are in a legal case, where they are in their lives. And we have a very good relationship with Brooke Kennedy, who is another executive producer, who is our eyes and ears out there. As she says, “If we cough out here, they sneeze out there.” We sound like Mussolinis, but no, it goes both ways. If they do something really swell in the dailies, then we start writing toward it.

 

WS: Do the actors add something of their own?

ROBERT KING: We’re constantly surprised when we have a line that we thought meant A and they take it in the direction of B. It’s as if you’re an artist and suddenly the painting starts moving in a different direction. You have to react to it. We’re finding that the actors have their own minds, all to our benefit. Sometimes they improve on some very bad lines!

 

WS: I imagine you wanted this show to be successful, but this one really went through the roof. Did you expect that?

ROBERT KING: No. Not in a million years. It felt very specific and very limited in its appeal because we have a woman lead [who] is in her early forties. A mom show, there hasn’t been a really successful one for a while. The only thing we felt we had going for us is that CBS is very, very smart at launching shows. They have it down to a science and it’s really cool; it’s like having the biggest guy on campus on your side.