[There are some spoilers for The Good Wife down below, so proceed with all due caution-Ed.]
Last Sunday, The Good Wife ended with a bang or, more accurately, with a slap. This seems to be sufficient evidence that The Good Wife exists in the same universe as The Slap, and if you are here to poke holes in that theory, we don’t understand the question and won’t respond to it. If you have already plunged yourself into a The Good Wife mourning period full of red wine, statement necklaces, and pointed eye-rolling, fear not! Variety reports that it very well isn’t the real end for some of these beloved Chicago lawyers. CBS is in final talks to move forward with a The Good Wife spin-off centered on none other than the statement necklace queen herself: Diane Lockhart.
The spin-off would air on CBS All Access, the network’s streaming service. Christine Baranski will be at the center, but Cush Jumbo, who joined The Good Wife for its final season, is also in talks to reprise her role has Lucca Quinn. A series about both Diane and Lucca raises some pertinent questions for anyone who watched how both characters ended things on The Good Wife: Does this mean they’re going to continue to work together despite the fact that Lucca massively betrayed Diane at the behest of Alicia? Or is Lucca going to go solo again and start up a rival firm? Will Gary Cole be around or did the events of The Good Wife’s finale kill that marriage? Hopefully the writers of this spin-off will successfully make Lucca a more fully realized and compelling character than she became in the end of season eight, when she essentially turned into an overzealous and nosy Jason/Alicia ’shipper. One thing is for certain: Alicia will be nowhere to be found in the spin-off. Julianna Margulies has made very clear that she’s out of the network television game for good. And unfortunately, despite Josh Charles’s appearance in the series finale, it appears like this spin-off will not involve any Ghost Lawyers.
According to Variety, the deal is in negotiations for a straight-to-series order, which means that it very well could get canned completely. The Good Wife showrunners and co-creators Robert and Michelle King are expected to co-write the project with someone else from their Good Wife team, but they will only serve as executive producers of the spin-off and leave it to someone else to showrun. After all, they’ll be quite busy with their new CBS series BrainDead. And not everyone can be the showrunner of two shows at once (except for super-showrunner Shonda Rhimes). If the project does move forward, it’ll likely be a stronghold for CBS All Access, which will also be the host of the upcoming Star Trek series. And a green-light for the spin-off would also be the first step for what hopefully becomes a The Good Wife multiverse that rivals the Dick Wolf Chicago franchise. As a title for the spinoff has not been announced yet, we will just assume it’s Chicago: Diane Lockhart.