Conterminously, attention was being paid to the relationship between marital ethics and political futures in the run up to the Republication presidential primary: hopeful Newt Gingrich is a known adulterer and thrice married, and (yet unannounced candidate) Indiana governor Mitch Daniels is remarried to a woman who previously divorced him and left their four children in order to marry another man.

Finally, the same week of the Shriver/Schwarzenegger bombshell, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the IMF and assumed frontrunner for the French presidency, was jailed after being accused of sexual assault by a housekeeper at an elite Manhattan hotel. His wife, Anne Sinclair, staked his $1 million bail and is reportedly bankrolling his expensive house arrest.

This season of The Good Wife seemingly referenced all this and more (the episode titled “VIP Treatment” literally featured a liberal Nobel Prize winner accused of assaulting a masseuse in a high end hotel), and continues to use both its cases and its characters’ private lives to articulate the myriad intersections of publicity, performance, and pain that comprise political unions. Yet, if season one of The Good Wife was patterned most blatantly after the Spitzer scandal, season two has inadvertently yet presciently refracted through the Schwarzenegger one. Consider the following coincidences between life of the fictitious Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies) and the Shriver ordeal: in each, professional women “opted out” of careers in the name of their husbands’ political aspirations (Shriver abandoned a post as an NBC reporter when she became California’s first lady; Alicia previously gave up her career as a lawyer to support her husband’s job as State’s Attorney).  Revelations emerged of male misdeeds long in the past but never divulged to the wronged wife (Schwarzenegger’s affair with a household staffer allegedly occurred over a decade ago; Peter’s one night stand with Alicia’s co-worker Kalinda took place before Alicia knew her). An implied association exists between the wife and the “other woman” (Shriver allegedly lived with the female housekeeper who bore her husband’s child; Alicia recently called Kalinda her “best friend”). In the course of contentious campaigns riddled by sexual scandal, both women helped their husbands win by publicly asserting these men’s essential decency (Shriver’s “Remarkable Women Tour” began days before the governor’s recall election; Alicia’s “Hail Mary” interview was televised on the eve of Peter’s bid for reelection as State’s Attorney). Their marital meltdowns were paradoxically both years in coming and vertiginously abrupt (The announcement of the Shriver/Schwarzenegger separation and the revelation of the “love child” came in the course of one week; Alicia packed up Peter’s things and found him a new apartment in the span of one night). Finally, both narratives testify to grief that is less a wife’s than it is a mother’s (Alicia’s only real breakdown occurs when she tells her children that she and Peter have separated; Shriver’s public statement reads, “This is a painful and heartbreaking time. As a mother, my concern is for the children”).

These stories make clear truisms we have long known, particularly that marital sexuality serves as a metric of morality, and that for public figures there are myriad benefits to having a good marriage, and even (if not more) dangers in not. Related is the role that, in a still largely male dominated political arena, wives play in maintaining a requisite image for the men whose lives, campaigns, and children they support. The political stories of the last weeks also throw into relief a reality of marriage that is not unique to politics, particularly the slippery nature of love, loyalty and sexuality. Though the institution of marriage overlays these vagaries with convenient and predictable scripts of enduring fidelity, their far more untidy underlying truths reemerge at moments like these. Yet because marriage frequently registers in our national consciousness only in times of crisis, these conversations do little to furnish us with an adequate vocabulary to talk about real wives and their real world marriages. Instead, sexual scandals slot marriage’s messiness instead into tired scripts that have prevailed in American discourse since at least the nineteenth century wherein upper class women were regarded as the “angels” in the house, the gatekeepers of morality and virtue, in contrast to men corrupted by the supposedly amoral public sphere.

Tales such as the Schwarzenegger/Shriver breakup tempt us, unfortunately, back into similar binaries where “bad husbands” hurt “good wives,” simplistic schemas that tend to disempower the women cast as suffering angels. Yet, it is precisely such well meaning but ultimately damaging mythologies that The Good Wife might help us to resist. As the season finale concluded with the closing of a door to a high end hotel room, where a still-married woman entered with a man who is not her husband, but rather a longtime friend, boss and object of desire, with the promise of nothing more than one hour of “good timing” it became abundantly clear that wife Alicia is, at least, no angel.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YbgfZucQ6k&feature=youtu.be

The fourth season so far has been sans so much—central characters, prestigious jobs, any real sense of innocence—that the show’s agonies are a fitting reflection not only of the show’s relationship to its network, but also to an American nation slogging through its own disappointing economic realities and a seemingly never-ending war. These are depressed and depressing times for the heartland and elsewhere, and a prevailing sentiment of resignation has permeated every plotline on offer this season. Eric’s transition to a difficult coaching position at a newly reopened East Dillon High, the ugly, underfunded stepsister of the flagship school Dillon High, has highlighted the easy overconfidence of that formerly prestigious institution–once the show’s centerpiece, Dillon High has been recast as cocky, overvalued, and corrupt, a tonal shift meant perhaps to invite comparison with the smug bravado that once characterized the American economy. Similarly difficult has been the death of Matt Saracen’s (Zach Gilford) absent soldier father, Buddy Garrity’s (Brad Leland) self-inflicted excommunication from the bloated booster club, and the capricious return of no-longer star Tim Riggins (Taylor Kitsch), who ditches a college scholarship only to find that the place he once called home ceases to be quite so hospitable. Watching the first episode of the season, which ends with Eric conceding an unwinnable game before its end for fear his battered, inexperienced players will sustain serious injury, a friend pointedly asked me, “didn’t this show used to be more fun?”

Well, no, not really, if we recall that the season one opener featured the shocking on-field paralysis of the team’s likeable star quarterback, Jason Street (Scott Porter). But the show’s current tone is more melancholy than melodramatic, an emotional resonance related to the fact that its unstable production and narrative history mirrors that of its national moment. Never allowed to be comfortable in its privilege, the show has taken class consciousness to a new level this season, with a willingness to engage seriously and painfully with the state of a bruised America. The class disparities that always informed the show now elbow into center frame—it is not so much sport, or sports, that drive the show, but rather images, such East Dillon’s barren, patchy playing field, its dilapidated buildings and its disaffected students. In response to such neglect, nihilism encroaches. Flashier narratives, including sport triumphs, puppy love, and jocular humor now read as luxuries of a previous time of youth (and previous seasons), replaced by often brutalizing grief. In this respect, the show is both recasting its history and mourning its losses, as we, its American viewership, simultaneously mourn and recast our own. If one accepts that this was once at least in part a show about adolescence, Friday Night Lights seems to be growing up fast.