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I’m currently in the midst of rewatching The Good Wife; I’m a handful of episodes into the second season of the show. I’ve already loved returning to this show; my memory of so much of it is sketchy, and it’s striking to see how immediately well realised the show is. Whether it’s the ability it has to balance case-of-the-week legal drama with wider themes of the dark cost of compromise. and the heartbreak of thwarted ambition, or the incredibly powerful economy of language in the dialogue, The Good Wife comes out swinging and basically never stops.
But, less than halfway through the second season of this show - 30 episodes of a 156 episode show - I feel like I’m already noticing one of the things that The Good Wife struggled with. on and off throughout its run: Kalinda Sharma.
There’s a ton of behind the scenes baggage associated with Kalinda as a character; the relationship between Archie Panjabi, who plays Kalinda, and Julianna Margulines, who plays Alicia, the eponymous Good Wife, ended up being. a reason why, later on in the show, the two characters would never share scenes. But, less than a third of the way through The Good Wife, this hasn’t happened yet. Kalinda and Alicia remain one of the most interesting character pairs in the show - Kalinda creates a space where her more restrained friend can cut loose, and Alicia seems like one of the. few people around whom Kalinda can be something close to honest. At the end of the first season, a few tequilas in celebrating Alicia surviving the cull of first-year lawyers at Lockhart-Gardener, she asks Kalinda, bluntly, “are you gay?”
Alicia’s question seems to come out of nowhere, almost as if she’s asking it on behalf of the audience. In the first season of The Good Wife, we know next to nothing about Kalinda’s personal life. But one of the things that becomes clear about her is that she’s a character defined by, in one way or another, sexuality. As a private investigator, she flirts her way into information; colleagues, strangers, and former friends all seem drawn towards her uniquely standoffish charisma. In one tense, compelling scene, Kalinda and Lana, a female former friend/colleague/lover (it’s unclear, as it should be) who works for the FBI, have a brief standoff in a storage unit. The visual metaphor feels obvious now in a way that it didn’t the first time I watched the episode: it’s a closet. The two women keep stepping closer to one another, and Kalinda says “maybe I’m just confused.” The camera cuts away from the two of them, and, seen from the waist down, they step closer to one another, leaving us with the unseen, maybe even forbidden knowledge, that the two women kissed.
Kalinda answers Alicia’s question by saying “I’m… private.” The pause before private is what does the heavy lifting here; whether Kalinda feels there’s no word for her, or whichever one she might use can’t be uttered here, it lingers before she settles on her euphemism of choice. I remember finding this frustrating the first time I watched The Good Wife, in the hope that it might offer what we’d now call Good Representation. At the time, people engaged with representation in a different way: naming mattered, the idea of being Good (i.e. not engaging with negative stereotypes that would make a straight audience see all bi people as toxic palimpsests of a character like Kalinda) was what mattered the most. I remember seeing someone on Twitter say that the TV show Agents of SHIELD was good purely because of how representative it was. But now, over a decade after this episode first aired, it feels like the ouroboros that we call representation has lived and died many times.
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I remember it seeming like a big deal when Rosa Diaz, one of the characters in the ensemble of the zany, well-intentioned copaganda sitcom Brooklyn 99 came out. I remember there were whole pieces written about the episode in which it happened - I also remember that I didn’t pitch on any, that I didn’t know how to write through, about, or for myself yet - because she said the word. In a way that felt - and maybe even still feels - incongruous, Rosa Diaz said “I’m bi.” At the time, I remember it mattering a great deal. But now, looking back, it doesn’t.
Maybe this is entirely a personal thing; maybe because I no longer need to hear a certain word that has my sexuality inscribed onto it, the whole idea of representation feels a little hollow, more like a vague gesture than anything else. But I think there’s something wider going on here too; a change in how queer people understand representation in a way that creates more space for a euphemistic character like Kalinda, an amalgamation of so many negative stereotypes - deceitful, promiscuous, unable to “pick a side.”
Around the time that The Good Wife was airing, and just after it, there were constant rallying cries about how Representation Matters, and about how that representation only really works if characters define themselves. And maybe, for a time, that was true. But now, in a way that isn’t just about my own changing perspective, it feels like it does us a disservice. In an age where the social media accounts of corporations pander to queerness through memes and self-aware Tweets, representation - with concrete definition and non-threatening characters for everyone to relate to - feels increasingly less like something that matters, and more like something that can be commodified.
Rosa Diaz is an easy character to sell to a bi person. She explicitly defines her sexuality, doesn’t embody negative stereotypes, and goes through a narrative of familial acceptance that also tries to debunk assumptions and frustrating expectations. The story is well done, and even when Rosa is at her lowest, she’s told by one of the show’s other gay characters that “whenever a person says who they really are, the world becomes a better, more interesting place.” The quote is nice, it’s heartwarming, and fits in nicely with a sitcom that’s always gesturing towards Doing The Right Thing.
But it’s exactly because of things like this that a character like Kalinda becomes more compelling with hindsight; she isn’t an easy sell; she’s a Bad Queer; but she’s also one of the most interesting characters in a show that’s rammed full of them. I don’t remember where I first read about Post-Gay TV - the idea that audiences were ready for a wave of stories about queer characters where queerness and Difference weren’t the point, but merely incidental - but a media landscape that explodes with well meaning, positive queer characters are also the ones that tend to lean into stories that are, to put it bluntly, predictable or pointless (the contemporary comfort of Heartstopper, or the proliferation of blink-and-you’ll-miss-it queer kisses of big budget franchise films leap immediately to mind).
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I think there’s been an appetite for the comfortable, twee escapism that’s defined a lot of contemporary queer TV. As anti-queer culture wars seem to endlessly escalate, there’s something appealing about being able to switch off from all of that, as well as being able to have queer stories that - in whatever small way - might gesture towards trying to find acceptance within a mainstream that remains more hostile than we’d like to admit.
When I think about the real heavy hitters of queer storytelling over the last few years, I think of reality TV shows like Queer Eye and Drag Race. These are shows that offer comfort and catharsis to the viewer; in Queer Eye the group of eponymous queers descend on the lives of regular people like angels (I remember one episode where they even stop to educate someone’s dad about transphobia, and he talks in a stumbling, uncertain way about bathrooms), and Drag Race has gradually taken over the world, with enough international offshoots to form it’s own United Nations, with countless seasons constantly positioning the show as being at the forefront of queer culture in a way that’s palatable to the mainstream, as it continues to atone for its own historic missteps.
But, looking back at Kalinda Sharma, at the loaded way in which she whispers “maybe I’m just confused” in what’s obviously a giant closet - shame on my old self for missing this obvious metaphor - I feel a strange pull away from that mainstream, away from that need to use clear-cut language and tell stories that sand off all of our edges. If this is how the mainstream will always treat us - even in a post-gay, post-Queer-Eye world - then what do we have to gain from trying to exist exclusively on their terms?
My earliest response to the euphemistic way that Kalinda describe herself was frustration. I had the same reaction when I was watching the penultimate season Skins and Frankie - who we’d now probably label genderlfuid or non-binary, at least from the aesthetic of the first season she appeared in - who, when asked about her sexuality said “I’m into people.” In wanting these characters to contort themselves into definitions that I was looking for, I wanted them to try and smooth off the edges, to make whatever word(s) I might use feel more palatable to the people around me. There would have been a comfort in being able to point to a character on a TV show that everyone was watching - Skins was a big deal back in the day, especially since they shot some of the final season at the school I was going to at the time - and say I’m like that. Now, I like to think that my understanding of both language and of myself has changed in a way that gives space for euphemisms, for words that I’m able to define on my own terms, instead of searching for something that will only make sense to other people.