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JULIA: Our topic is basically men and women and adultery, especially famous men and women in adultery. I bring this up because, this past week, "The Good Wife," a drama starring Julianna Margulies, aired last week and it’s being hailed as the best drama of the fall TV season. Now whether you agree or not, and I do – I’m a TV junkie and I love this show – it is certainly timeless. The opening scene of the TV show is a tableau that we are now all very familiar with – the shell-shocked political wife in a suit and a string of pearls standing dutifully by her husband at the podium, while he announces some failure of judgment, and her life blows up in her face while we all watch on TV. Now, what makes this interesting, I think, is that it explores the biggest unanswered question that most of us have when that scene is played out on television – what is that woman standing there – like the good wife – what in the world is going on in her head, and why is she being used as a prop? Do you all have any thoughts on that? Sheila?
SHEILA: Are we sure she’s a prop?
JULIA: Well that’s the thing –
SHEILA: Are we sure she didn’t know before? Are we sure she just discovered it that day? Are you sure she didn’t maybe allow it? Are you sure she doesn’t give a damn?
I Was the Other Woman
JUDITH: You think he said, "I’m going to make a little announcement, honey, and it’s going to be a surprise"?
SHEILA: No, I don’t think that at all. But I think that in a marriage, a long-range marriage, people know each other so well. I mean, you know when your husband had a bad tennis game, and you can tell by the way he walks in the door. You just know things. You can’t tell me that these women discover, whether it’s Ted Haggard’s wife or, you know, whomever – you can’t tell me that this person discovers it at that moment. They may pose discovery, but the fact is I don’t believe it. I don’t believe that that’s the good wife. I think that it’s the smart wife who’s going to play along. in most of these cases either write a book or do whatever, and has known this all along, and prefers to be with this person, possibly, than to not. Which one has left? If they leave they leave to write a book. I mean, they’re not victims. We think they’re victims because they’re wearing pearls.
In Praise of Younger Men
JULIA: Well, it’s certainly true that few of them, so far – and especially in recent memory, within the last year there has been a huge cast – have left. I mean, Silda Spitzer stayed. Jenny Sanford is notable mainly because her husband announced that he was sort of like, "This is an affair of the heart."
SHEILA: Right.
JULIA: He wasn’t just, you know, paying a hooker. And she rebounded. She posed on the beach for Vogue.
SHEILA: So how deep was her suffering?
JULIA: Exactly. She seems to be doing pretty damn well. She’s got this big book deal where she’s going to tell us all how to cope in difficult times. But I still have the question. Judith, what do you think? I mean, Silda Spitzer, you know, obviously a few days before she was standing on that podium was told what was going on. But do you really think she thought old Eliot was having sex in his socks in the Mayflower Hotel with gorgeous hookers?
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[Photo Credit: The Good Wife"/Jason Bell/CBS ©2009 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved]
