Thank you Naina for alerting me to this trailer! I find it fascinating. Not in isolation, but in comparison with the source material.
I watched the first season of The Good Wife because it is set in Chicago and I am such a localvore. It missed a lot of little details about the local scene, but it grasped the way political scandals work, and political wives, in this particular time and place.
Chicago is EXTREMELY progressive. If you want to be a male elected official here, it helps if you are married, and it helps if the person you are married to has equal progressive public credentials to you. One of the rising power couples in our local scene right now are both lawyers, and the wife works as the husbands campaign director. That’s what gets you noticed. We are so progressive that most of the rising couples in the local political scene right now are same-sex. But even with a same-sex couple, we want more than just being a spouse, we want the spouse to be interesting and hardworking and dedicated as much as the candidate.
The reason this show is so complicated, and picked this title that is so deceptively simple, is that a “Good Wife” in this particular progressive political scene is a really complicated balance. You need to be a unit, a strong marriage makes people feel safe, like the candidate can be trusted, has a support system. But you also need to be outspoken and independent and with your own interests, because the voters want to see that this is a marriage of equals, that your husband is strong enough to let you be your own person. And you need to be clear that you are not “trapped” in your marriage because of traditional social rules, you are choosing to love this person every day.
The start of The Good Wife, the original show, is struggling with this push-pull between feminism and morality, versus family loyalty, and public versus private. In the progressive world, a woman is not necessarily honored for being loyal to a husband who has done wrong, for “forgiving”. There are people looking at her going “that’s so weak, so wrong, she should leave him”. And she herself is feeling that way, and people close to her are telling her that. And people that are telling her she is doing the right thing are saying it for the wrong reasons, suddenly you are becoming a symbol of tradition gender roles you have always fought against. On the other hand, there is the reality that standing by your public husband will help your family as a whole, will help your husband stay out of jail, will be better for your kids.
From the start of the show, the showrunners knew that their “heroine” was going to end it as an antihero. At the start, a lot of other characters see her as a naïve innocent, a victim. But a few characters are already calling her out for playing it safe, seeing through her hypocrisy. And over the course of the show, that is the thread that is pulled on more and more. She is “playing” the good wife because it benefits her, not because it benefits her husband.
Okay, now we have the Indian remake trailer staring Kajol. This had the possibility of being AWESOME. India certain has it’s own concept of “good wives” who stand by their husbands. But the problem is, this trailer is backing away from the really complicated ethical questions and instead just leaning into the drama.
What the trailer doesn’t give me is a sense that anyone in society would think that Kajol SHOULDN’T stand by her husband. There’s no feeling that she is choosing to do something for selfish reasons that she doesn’t have to do. And there could be that feeling, there could be an an acknowledgement that Indian marriages aren’t all the same, that maybe people are telling Kajol not to be angry because men will be men, or that her feminist friends are telling her she is letting them down by forgiving him. But instead we just have “oh wow, Kajol is actually angry” as the big reveal. And all the character brought over from the original show have the similar flattening. I don’t get the Boss Lady MegaFeminist vibe from her boss, I don’t get the Charming But Possibly Weak from her other boss. I don’t get Spoiled Handed Everything Rich Boy from her work rival. And the Archie Punjabi replacement is bland-bland-bland. Where’s the Independent Sexual Unattached Unemotional vibe that contrasts so strongly with the quiet “Good Wife” vibe of the heroine?
The Good Wife is a seemingly universal story that actually was very VERY specific. And it worked because of how specific it was, how common graft is in Chicago, how the progressives versus more progressive balance works, all that stuff. And I just don’t think the writers of the Indian version were willing to dig into the specifics of how this would work in India, to actually build their own world.
What do y’all think?
