‘The Good Wife’ creators do themselves no favors discussing Kalinda – Alicia’s final scene controversy

At this point in time, we are starting to feel like there could someday be an entire episode of “Unsolved Mysteries” all about what really happened behind the scenes of “The Good Wife” with Julianna Margulies and Archie Panjabi. Their final scene together was basically a camera trick, designed to make it look like the two actors were filming together when in fact they were not. They filmed at separate times, and for reasons that nobody will directly address.

For the first time today, creators Robert and Michelle King did open up (sort of) about this final scene, saying that farewell to Kalinda was never meant to “dupe” fans in an interview with TVLine. Still, they could not bring themselves to actually discussing the main source of the problem. Here is one such deflection from Robert:

“We fake everything in the show, so I can address this on a storytelling level that there was no intent ever to dupe the viewers. We’ll be an open book there. But when it attaches to gossip, part of the privacy of the set and the privacy of what we do on the set, allowed us to keep secret the fact that Josh was leaving for almost a year before we showed that episode. Part of the shock was that we had such a tight, close-knit set … [everyone one the show knows] the difference between storytelling and who we are as human beings. And we benefit from that because we’re allowed to have reveals be secretive … the only thing I will address is the storytelling. The mechanics of how we do our show is its own thing and we’re usually an open book about it, until it comes down to gossip.“

We do want to be clear here on one thing: We really do not think that there is a way to handle this where everyone wins. If they were just to come and reveal that Panjabi and Margulies did not get along (which is by some measure the prevailing theory as to why this situation is like this), they would be continually peppered with questions about it. There still does have be some middle ground here, where they can at least discuss in general terms the reason behind the turmoil without getting into details. For the most part, what we have here comes across like condescending conversation, and there is something wrong with fans for feeling like these two actors should have filmed their final scene together and wondering why it didn’t happen. It’s a pretty reasonable question to answer.

In defense of the Kings, what we will say is that we do to a certain extent understand not wanting to air any dirty laundry. This allows for the cast to continue to trust them that what happens on set will stay on set. It may ultimately be up to the individual actors at some point to touch on this further.

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