CBSThe Good Wife's future is in question. CBS announced show runners Robert and Michelle King will not return should the legal drama return for season eight.
"The Kings did say they would not be returning after this year, but we have a deep bench on this show...we haven't made any determination," CBS's new president Glenn Geller told reporters at the 2016 TCA Winter Press Tour about the future of the Julianna Margulies series. "We haven't determined if there will be another season or not."
The Good Wife co-creators have several other projects in the works, including BrainDead, a new series on CBS starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Aaron Tveit and Danny Pino. The new show about aliens in Washington, DC is expected to premiere in summer 2016. They also have a show in development at Amazon.
The Kings and Margulies have long discussed the show's trajectory as a seven-year plan. When asked in 2015 if this season seven was being planned as the last, Robert told E! News, "Can we leave that unanswered for the moment? I think all will become clear very, very soon."
The Good Wife also currently stars Cush Jumbo, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Matt Czuchry, Alan Cumming, Zach Grenier and Christine Baranski. In May 2015, Nina Tassler, then president of CBS Entertainment, told reporters this about the Kings: "As long as they want to continue producing and writing, we love having that show on our air and are very proud of it."Morgan, who joined the show this year, has already booked a new gig: The Walking Dead. He'll play Negan, the notorious leader of another group of a survivors.
CBS boss Geller expanded on The Good Wife's limbo status. "They have an arc planned every year they pitch what the season's gonna be about. We haven't really discussed beyond this what the series would look like, what next season could be, because they've said this is the last year we're gonna be on the show. But it could certainly go on," he said. "I think you can see every year, the producers are able to reinvent what the show looks like, they add characters, some go away, some go on. The show looks very different than it did just there years ago."
So why are they leaving? "I think it's a combination of many things, one of them being they also want to work on new things. It's important to them. They have BrainDead. They have a few other things going. Development's important," Geller told reporters. "You know, creators like to keep creating. I think they've really enjoyed working at the show, clearly, for seven years and I think they are ready to move on." Geller made sure to reiterate to reporters that the show could go on without the Kings with executive producer Craig Turk stepping up to continue the show, should it continue.
In an interview with The Huffington Post, Margulies previously noted season seven could be the last season. "I have enough in me as long as they want to write," Margulies said before The Good Wife's fifth season premiere. "As long as the writing stays like this, I can keep going. [Robert King] told me a while ago … he said, 'I know I have seven in me. I'm not sure if I have more, but I definitely have seven.' If they'll have us, I think seven is a great number."
Request for comment from the Kings was not immediately returned. Robert told TVLine CBS is trying to make deals for season eight and they'd act in a supervisory role, but their stories "will finish in the seventh year." "That doesn't mean we're putting Alicia in her grave, because you couldn't do an eighth season after that. But to our minds, we have always written with the idea we could end this season a certain way so that it would make it a satisfactory [conclusion to the] series," he said.
The Good Wife airs Sundays, 9 p.m. on CBS.