With Robert King, Michelle King makes procedurals that keep the case of the week and use it to watch a person change slowly. At its best, in The Good Wife, that is a long, cool study of a woman deciding how ruthless to be.
Fi1m perspective
It starts with a woman looking at a loose thread. In the first minutes of The Good Wife (2009) the top prosecutor in Cook County resigns at a press conference, and Robert King and Michelle King, who created the programme, keep the camera on his wife, Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies), staring at his sleeve. Somebody is talking and the programme is looking at somebody else. That is the habit, and it runs through everything the Kings have made since.
They write and produce as a pair, husband and wife, dividing the running of each series between them, so we will not pretend to know which choices are hers. Their first, In Justice (2006), did not last. The Good Wife did: seven seasons and 156 episodes, a case tried inside 43 minutes each week and, underneath it, a longer story about a marriage and about how much of her decency a humiliated woman is prepared to spend. Then came BrainDead (2016), political satire with alien parasites, The Good Fight (2017–2022), which took the Chicago firm into the news, Evil (2019–2024), which put the same weekly structure to work on faith and science, and Elsbeth (2024), built around a minor character from the original. Michelle King has directed episodes across several of these, and on Cupertino (2026) she is credited as director as well as writer.
What works is the refusal to let the format be the point. They said of Evil that "We want to avoid an exorcism of the week", and the same instinct is in the courtrooms: the case is solved on schedule and the episode was never quite about the case. We admit the slap in the corridor got us, one blow and no discussion, and we stayed on Alicia's side for seven years afterwards, which is a long time to hold a viewer on a weekly schedule. The look supports the writing. Fred Murphy, Tim Guinness and M. David Mullen shoot the law offices as glass boxes and the courtrooms in warm wood and low light, so a cut from one to the other is a cut from being watched to performing.
The weaknesses are the weaknesses of long television. The last two seasons of The Good Wife wobble and ask more patience than the first five. The complaint most often made about The Good Fight, particularly its fifth season, is that the topical material can feel forced and knock the tone off balance; we have not reviewed it and will not judge it at length, but we recognise the risk from the parent programme, which was always happiest when the world came in through a case rather than through the door. Evil ended after four seasons, sooner than its admirers wanted.
Cupertino puts her behind the camera rather than only at the desk. We are curious to find out whether the eye that found the loose thread was hers.
Biography
Michelle King is an American television writer and producer. She frequently collaborates with her husband, Robert King, as a writing and producing partnership.
The pair created the legal drama series The Good Wife (2009–2016), on which King is also credited as writer and teleplay author. They have since created and written for the spin-offs The Good Fight (2017–2022) and Elsbeth (2024–present), as well as BrainDead (2016) and Evil (2019–2024). King is credited as creator, writer and director on the forthcoming series Cupertino (2026).
