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Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.
IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: February 17, 2013
PROGRAM ORIGINALLY AIRED ON THIS DATE: The Good Wife, “Red Team, Blue Team” (Season 4, Episode 14) [Stream on Prime Video]
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: On a network legal drama like The Good Wife, with a large cast and plenty of guest stars, the basic structure of the show dictates that the cast will be separated; different cases, different subplots, few crossover opportunities. Which is why episodes like “Red Team, Blue Team” are so special. With both Diane and Will working on a big case, they need to run a mock trial, and so they bring on junior associates Alicia and Cary to run the opposition. All of a sudden, this episode becomes the rarest of the rare: an intramural legal battle between our four major characters! Five, once Kalinda joins up on Alicia and Cary’s side.
The action in “Red Team, Blue Team” is fun and intense, especially once the stakes get kicked up several notches after Cary and Alicia find out that they’re getting screwed over with their partnership offers. Mock trial gets very real.
The best moment of the episode? When Cary hires an actress to play his team’s witness, only to cast a woman who goes WAYYYY overboard.
There’s another reason — besides its self-evident quality — that “Red Team, Blue Team” is a historically significant Good Wife episode: this is the final episode where Julianna Margulies and Archie Panjabi appeared in a scene together. We’ve since gone through years of speculation about whether the two women had a rift that kept them separate in front of the camera, but no one’s said anything thus far (though Panjabi left the show before its final season). At the end of season 6, in Kalinda’s final episode, she and Alicia shared a scene together, but Panjabi and Margulies weren’t filmed in the same shot together. Perhaps one day we’ll get to the bottom of this scandalous situation. Until then, we’ll always have “Red Team, Blue Team.”
