Spin-Off Goals: Should ‘The Good Wife’ consider show for Michael J. Fox’s Louis Canning?

At this point in time, the reality is starting to (finally) settle in that there is no more of “The Good Wife” after the seventh season comes to a close. Yet, at the same time, isn’t there still some hope for the future? In a recent conference call executive producers Robert and Michelle King took a never-say-never approach to doing a spin-off someday, and if there was ever a perfect time to implement this into one of our Spin-Off Goals features for the month of February, this is it.

The only real challenge for the sake of this article was trying to figure out the right person to choose. We’re going to take a look at Michael J. Fox because we find Louis Canning so fascinating, and we’ll do our best to expound upon that below!

Why Louis? – Maybe Jimmy McGill shouldn’t be the only attorney with a skewed moral compass on TV. Canning’s an interesting guy given that you want to have sympathy for him just because of his condition, but then he uses it at times to his advantage in the courtroom and you become almost instantly annoyed with him. He’s shrewd and incredibly manipulative, but at the same time we’ve seen evidence with his clients that there is a heart in there. He’s got layers, and you don’t want to have a story that doesn’t quite make all of these clear.

Also, logistically it’s easy to see how this move could make some sense. It’s hard to move an established cast member away from Chicago, but it may be easier with Louis because he’s only reasonably connected to other people. You could venture over to his own firm, or move him somewhere else so that he could start practice anew.

The idea – Our favorite idea at the moment would be to see a story that is more about Louis’ redemption after his stint in the hospital, one where he realized that he wanted to find more ways to do good for his clients and not be so quick to take advantage on anything he possibly could in the courtroom. Redemption stories can always be entertaining, and Canning has a lot to redeem when it comes to some of his past tactics. We don’t want to say “ship him to a small town” since that’d be an obvious trope, but we’d like to see him in somewhere other than Chicago.

Could it actually happen? – The reality here is that Fox is successful enough that he really doesn’t have to do anything else unless he really wants to since he’s been successful enough. We could see this working well, if he’s interested, as a thirteen-episode trial series for the upcoming season. We’re of course just creating our own little dreamboard of ideas here, but a Louis spin-off is at least not completely out of the realm of possibility.