Trivia / The Good Wife

• Actor Leaves, Character Dies: When Josh Charles decided to leave, Will was killed off suddenly in a courtroom shooting.
• Completely Different Title: Cantonese 法妻 -> Law Wife.
• Creator Couple: The series was created by the husband-and-wife team of Michelle and Robert King, who also served as co-executive producers.
• Fake American: Scottish-born (now a US citizen) Alan Cumming playing Eli Gold. Also Londoner Archie Panjabi playing Kalinda Sharma (though her in-universe nationality remains unknown, and she's shown to have an English husband).
• Hostility on the Set: A notorious example was the dislike between Julianna Margulies and Archie Panjabi during the later seasons, which led to them refusing to be on set together to the point that a pivotal scene in the show's finale had to be created using green-screen. No official word has ever been given about the cause of the feud, which has left it a hotly debated Riddle for the Ages among fans.
• On-Set Injury: Kristin Chenoweth (who played a political reporter on the show) received a skull fracture, broken nose, spinal and rib injuries, and cracked teeth when a piece of the lighting rig fell on top of her, which led to years of physical therapy.
• Playing Against Type:
  • Miranda Cosgrove guest-starred as Sloan, a Lindsay Lohan-esque singer.
  • To lesser extent, Sarah Silverman is a host of an Ashley Madison-esque site.
  • Wallace Shawn's role as Charles Lester is far more sinister than the neurotic characters that he's been known to play.
  • Michael J. Fox as an unscrupulous lawyer willing to use his disease to manipulate juries. Probably one of the only outright Jerkass characters that Fox has played in his career.
  • Matthew Perry was also willing to avoid playing it safe by taking on the role of slimeball Mike Kresteva.^note Though not for the first time: he’s appeared as a cutthroat weasel before in a guest appearance on Dream On, and even dropped a few F-bombs there!
• Referenced by... The Big Bang Theory, "The Lunar Excitation": Raj uses a telescope to watch someone else's TV. He explains that "The Good Wife is on. I tell you, this is my new Grey's Anatomy. When Howard wants to point the telescope back at the Moon, Raj says "Wait a second, the good wife is crying. Something's very wrong."
• Word of Saint Paul: Mike Colter, who plays Lemond Bishop, said on the After Buzz videocast that Bishop got his MBA before going into the drug dealing business. He simply saw the drug game as the best place to use his skills.
• Written-In Infirmity: Michael J. Fox plays a lawyer with a neurological disorder (tardive diskinesia, rather than Fox's own Parkinson's, but close enough) which he plays up to gain sympathy from jurors he argues in front of. This backfires against a paraplegic judge in one episode: the judge basically says, "Yeah, so what?" and tells him to get on with the case.

---