Notes on Pop Culture: 'Good Wife' Stays Solid, 'Grey's Anatomy's' Parent Issues & 'Parenthood' Turning a Corner?

Good Wife Remains Solid

Okay Good Wife writers. You’ve got me.

My frequent complaint about your freshman drama has been that I’d prefer to see more scenes depicting the life of a political spouse/family in the wake of a humiliating sex scandal committed by the public official (a la the Spitzers, Sanfords, Clintons, Edwardes, et al) rather than load it up with legal procedural stuff. If I want to watch a garden variety lawyer show, I could go elsewhere. It’s not that I mind the legal cases, it's just that I didn’t want them to overwhelm the unique twist that makes The Good Wife different from other dramas.
That was the fear I had when The Good Wife seemed to be focusing more on getting to the truth about a criminal case or on how to deftly maneuver in the courtroom in order to secure a particular judgment.

But, overall, I have to say, the writers have done a good job of balancing the law and the personal life. Even though the latest episode “Doubt” – in which the disgraced, house-arrested Peter Florrick (Chris Noth) did not even appear – focused largely on a murder case, it did so in a way that was smart and intriguing by looking at the case from the perspective of the jury. Gold stars for not ending the episode in a rosy, optimistic note for Julianna Margulies’ Alicia Florrick’s team.

Grey’s Ponders Mixing Maternity & Medicine

Mixing maternity and medicine has been a semi-regular theme on Grey’s Anatomy since day one. We’ve known from the first handful of episodes that Meredith Grey sustained emotional damage from a childhood in which her parents divorced, her father essentially abandoned her and her mother, a successful surgeon, virtually blew her off and always chose medicine over Meredith.

In a 2007 episode, Meredith was assisting in an operation on a child both of whose parents were career-oriented and hardly ever at home. As a result, the girl bonded with her nanny more so than with her own parents. Meredith remarked that people with big-time careers should just get a cat instead of a kid because the kid needs time and attention from a mom or a dad. However the lead surgeon in the room, Miranda Bailey, a new mom, took umbrage.

Years later, Bailey, who’s now a divorced mom, has had her ups and downs with the child/career thing but seems to be in a good place right now just as other characters with high-pressure careers -- Callie Torres, McSteamy, McDreamy and Meredith -- are contemplating parenthood. I explored how Grey’s has been handling the issue of doctors having kids in my weekly Pop Culture column on Mommy Tracked.

Dr. Hahn Out of 'Grey's'

What a huge bummer.

Entertainment Weekly is reporting that the Dr. Erica Hahn (Brooke Smith) -- who recently commenced a relationship with Dr. Callie Torres (Sara Ramirez) on Grey's Anatomy -- will only appear in one more episode of the Thursday night drama. Following on the heels of the intensely moving scene from last week's installment, where Erica said she never realized she was gay (the "you are glasses" monologue), ABC execs apparently got cold feet about the character, according to Michael Ausiello who wrote:

"I'm told this was not [show creator] Shonda Rhimes' decision but rather an order that came down from the network. According to one Grey's source, the suits 'had issues' with both the explicit direction [Erica and Callie were] taking . . . and, more importantly, with the Hahn character in general."

I was fond of Erica's take-no-prisoners attitude in a world inhabited by thin-skinned egomaniacs. She was the only character who didn't seem, in any way, to be flaky or whiny.

Hopefully this doesn't mean that Callie will now be portrayed as someone who's floundering around, unsure of what or who she wants. Callie used to be a strong, maverick character, living and dancing in the hospital basement with abandon, until writers decided to make her rich and living the high life in a hotel, marrying George O'Malley on a whim.

Image credit: ABC.