What Happened to The Good Wife? Creators Explain How the Ending Changed and Where Alicia Is Now

Robert and Michelle King on where the character is now and what could've been

By Chris Harnick Nov 18, 2016 3:33 PMTags
The Good WifeCBS

The Good Wife's big ending—you know, the one where Julianna Margulies' Alicia Florrick betrayed long-time friend Diane Lockhart, got slapped in a hallway, missed her opportunity with Jason and realized she'd become everything she hated in her husband, Peter—wasn't supposed to be a sad one. No, in fact it was supposed to be optimistic, according to show creators Robert and Michelle King.

Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who played Jason on the series, was asked to come back and shoot an additional scene following his series wrap, but his commitments to The Walking Dead—where he was busy murdering your favorite characters—kept him from doing so.

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Behind the Scenes of The Good Wife Series Finale
CBS

"I know that I got a call two weeks later after we wrapped and I was already in Atlanta, and they were like, ‘We want to do a little bit of a reshoot,' and I couldn't do it. I was like, ‘I film tomorrow,' so there's no way I could get back in. I don't know what that would have consisted of. I don't think anything that would have changed the story dramatically or anything," Morgan told EW. "I like that it kind of brought her back to beginning — that slap —and it was a kind of a role reversal there. Selfishly, I would have liked to see Jason and Alicia have some sort of answers for the audience and themselves."

According to Variety, Robert King said at a recent talk that they worried about whether or not Alicia's fate was clear enough so they wanted Morgan and Margulies back to shoot a scene that would clear up the status of their relationship. It worked out for the better, Robert said, because a scene of Alicia "falling into the arms" of her lover would have been "too much of a cop-out."

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However, Robert said after the slap heard around the world, Alicia and Jason do end up together. As for the final scene with Alicia getting slapped and walking off into her future, it wasn't originally going to end like that. The Kings wanted to show to fade out on Alicia in tears after the slap, but they decided to add the walk to suggest hope.

"We thought it was more optimistic to suggest that Alicia could realize ‘Oh my god I've become him,'" Robert said regarding her transformation into Peter. "I don't think people wanted a sad ending to the Alicia story."

At the end of the day, "The education of Alicia Florrick was a tragedy," Robert said. "It's about a woman who becomes what she hates. She was willing to hurt someone in the same way that she was hurt at the beginning."

The Good Wife world isn't done. Robert and Michelle King are at work on The Good Fight, the new CBS All Access series centered on Christine Baranski's Diane Lockhart and Cush Jumbo's Lucca Quinn. The 10-episode first season premieres on CBS proper in February before making its move to the streaming platform.