Will Gardner is Not Dead . . . In My Dreams

The Good Wife returns to CBS on 21^stSeptember and, while I could not be more excited about the brilliant David Hyde Pierce joining as a regular, I am still grieving for Will.

   

I don’t believe that any actor, when they leave a series, does not, at some point, wonder if they have made the right move: not least on Monday just gone, when Josh Charles, who played the now dead Will Gardner in The Good Wife, saw his co-star Julianna Margulies pick up an Emmy for her role in the show as Best Leading Actress in a Drama.

   

Will’s death was a real GASP! moment, cleverly kept under wraps by cast and crew until the second we saw it on screen. But, for me, it is not too late to bring him back, and I appeal to the writers to put their heads together to do so.

   

In the 1985-86 finale of Dallas (doubtless the writers of The Good Wife were not even born then), Bobby Ewing died. Oh, we screamed! Not Bobby! The beautiful, divine, gorgeous Patrick Duffy, who was the only reason any of us females were watching in the first place.

   

Patrick, or the producers, or Bobby – whoever really knows the truth of these situations – decided that a horrible mistake had been made (plummeting ratings being an influential factor) and Bobby had to come back.

   

But: how to do this? They alighted upon a year’s episodes being nothing other than a dream of Pam, Bobby’s gorgeous wife who never took her make-up off before bed time in the entire show’s history.

   

One morning, having endured Bobby’s death, funeral et al, et al, she woke to hear the water running in the shower and a glistening Bobby emerging from it. I imagine that an even bigger relief was that the dreaded Oil Barons’ Ball (always a drunken disaster) had never taken place. That feeling was doubtless soon tempered by the realisation that it was still to come.

   

The show carried on as if nothing had ever happened, the only problem being that while Bobby remained alive and kicking on Dallas, the sister show, Knots Landing, continued to grieve him, with estranged brother Gary forever bemoaning the fact that Momma had never gotten over Bobby’s death (while Momma, by the way, happily continued barbecuing over at the Southfork ranch, sharing ribs with Lazarus Bobby).

   

I reckon that The Good Wife could bring Will back in much the same way and carry on as if his demise had never happened.

SCENARIO 1: Alicia decides to watch Psycho, falls asleep and, in her dream, pulls back the shower curtain to discover not multiple stab victim Marion Crane, but Will, surrounded by his briefs (geddit?). She wakes on the sofa to discover that the DVR has not recorded the ending.

SCENARIO 2: Will is naked in the shower. Sorry, but I haven’t got any further with this thought. It’s just something I want to see.

SCENARIO 3: Peter Florrick is in the shower with Carrie Fisher (keep up, I’m, mixing my genres here) and, upon hearing unusual water sport activity, Alicia decides to check it out. She walks to the bathroom, pulls back the shower curtain and comes face to face with a naked Chris Noth, who says “You’re the one” (I told you I was mixing my genres). Luckily, she wakes and realises she is in the middle of a deposition with Will.

I could go on. And on. And on. Because, the truth is, I want Will back, and he has barely been away yet. When James MacPherson, who played DCI Mike Jardine in Taggart (the UK Scottish crime drama) died, I was distraught for months (actually, I still am). I stood sobbing with the rest of the cast at a summer party, consolable only when the lead actor reached him on his mobile, to assure me of his mortality.

   

I don’t like change in TV, and Tweeted wildly, advising against Harver Specter’s relationship with Scottie, who, at the beginning of the latest series, was his love interest, after vowing to change his ways. Quiet why anyone ever thought this was a good idea is anybody’s guess, though I sense a delicate female’s fingerprints all over it. Whoever it was, thank heavens they dropped the idea very quickly. Totally out of character. Totally out of sync with the backbone of the show.

   

So, I don’t care how you do it, dear writers of The Good Wife. I love you more than life itself, but you really need to perform a Lazarus and bring back our dear Will. Call me psychic, but much as I adore David Hyde Pierce (who is a genius), I don’t feel I’m going to be getting into a lather about him in quite the same way as I did about Will.

   

Which brings me back to that shower theme . . . Come on, Will. Get yer kit off. 

Even if all turns out to be a dream.