Wondering what’s going down on The Good Wife this season? Julianna Margulies for one. At least that’s how it looked when I got a sneak peak at the racy opening scene during a visit last month to the Brooklyn, N.Y. set.
We’ll find out if the provocative opener made the cut when the series returns tonight at 10 p.m. on CBS and Global. Margulies was pretty defensive about the move her character makes on co-star Chris “Mr. Big” Noth in the scene shown to a gathering of mostly New York critics last month in New York. “I think that is the first time network television has had an oral sex scene. No?” she asked the reporter. (The scene, of course, was not explicit.) The clumsy follow up question–“have you researched that Julianna?” was taken the wrong way. You might say Margulies blew it out of proportion.
Veteran Associated Press TV columnist David Bauder wanted to know if Margulies knew for sure a sexual taboo had been broken. Margulies took it as the kind of saucy follow up a scribe might fling at “Snookie” from Jersey Shore and was suitably outraged. Things got straightened out and order was restored in the courtroom.
Bottom line, The Good Wife is not going to turn into HBO after dark next season, but viewers will be in for more passion from the reunited leads.
How reunited? As Noth dryly noted of the couple’s brittle marriage, “I don’t think the stitches are out yet of the wound that never heals, but leaves a scar.”
More may have been at play with all this moral outrage at the press conference. CBS showed the clip, put the cast in front of reporters and let nature take its course. Margulies indignation got big play in the New York newspapers, especially The Post, which ran the headline, “Below the belt: Star gets hot & bothered about sex scene that’ll make history.”
CBS would love to lower the median age of the audience of The Good Wife, network TV’s oldest-skewing drama. While the series was a winner for CBS last season, the median age of the audience–58–is well outside the demo advertisers most like to reach.
So getting The Good Wife to go down would make CBS happy.
