The Good Wife Season 4 Premiere: Kristin Chenoweth and Nathan Lane Join the Steamy Scandal

Culture

If you weren’t sure what a cliffhanger looked like on television, The Good Wife's season three finale in April illustrated how it’s done. Viewers of this popular CBS drama series were left with baited breath as their scrappy and wildly elusive investigator Kalinda Sharma (Archie Panjabi) sat silently in her dark apartment awaiting the arrival of her violent, estranged husband.

After five months of anticipation, tonight’s fourth season premiere — we hope — will provide answers to questions concerning Kalinda’s past as well as the firm’s impending bankruptcy. What has Kalinda been running from and why can’t her ex let her go? Can Lockhart Gardner survive the financially threatening challenges imposed by their misfit enemies, Louis Canning (Michael J. Fox) and Patti Nyholm (Martha Plimpton)? 

In addition to above-stated wrenches, we’re both worried and excited about Peter Florrick (Chris Noth) and the governorship; mother Jackie (Mary Beth Peil) and her potential illness, which she’ll most likely use a weapon against Alicia (Julianna Margulies); and the firm’s re-hiring of a more matured and less pragmatic Cary (Matt Czurchy). 

For a primetime series that’s become home to stage actors Christine Baranski (or, Diane Lockhart) and Alan Cummings (Eli Gold), it’s no surprise the star-studded ensemble will grow to include Nathan Lane (playing the firm’s appointed trustee, Clarke Haydon) and Kristin Chenoweth (cast as a nosy political reporter investigating Peter’s campaign). Not to mention Margulies’s former ER cast member Maura Tierney as Alicia’s friend and millionaire businesswoman, Maddie Hayward.

It goes without saying we expect a lot from Robert and Michelle King, the Good Wife’s creators and show-runners. They’ve proven themselves a collaborative and inventive team that has wrangled together an impressive crew of actors whose chemistry never ceases to delight the camera. In episodes that touch upon relevant and increasingly shocking issues that run the gamut from national security to technology and marriage, we’ve come to hold very high standards for a show that’s both conventional and innovative in its law-firm repartee.

Tonight at 9 PM on CBS, the curtains rise to reveal this award-winning show’s fourth season and you should definitely watch.