Good Wife Creators Give Unfulfilling Response to Rumors About Actress Feud

At this point, it seems fairly clear that Archie Panjabi and Julianna Margulies, who play Kalinda and Alicia on the CBS show The Good Wife, did not shoot the final scene their characters appear in together because of an unidentified issue between the actresses. Given all the evidence out there regarding this theory, Good Wife creators Robert and Michelle King come off pretty poorly in a new interview where they address the feud and the ramifications it had on the quality of their show.

The interview, conducted by TVLine’s Michael Ausiello—who had originally confirmed that Panjabi and Marguiles did not shoot the scene together—is a masterpiece of doublespeak.

Ausiello asks the Kings to address the fact that fans might feel “duped” by the way the Kalinda/Alicia goodbye went down. After her husband prattles on about Josh Charles leaving the show, Michelle (if I may call you that. I know we are not close but I adore your show) comes in with this:

But we’re making the show every day using tricks, like if you’re in a car and there’s green screen and it looks like Chicago out the window but that’s not exactly where we are. That’s an every day, run-of-the-mill thing on the show.

Yup. We know how TV is made!

Ausiello goes on to clarify that that viewers weren’t primarily upset that Archie Panjabi was leaving the show, but how it was handled: that the two actresses couldn’t get it together to film their final scene together, particularly because it came after seasons of them being kept apart perhaps because of issues they had personally, not because of the chosen plot line of the show.

ROBERT | Here’s what I will say about that without going into the gossip of it… We’ve had reporters in the editing room before and they can see the tricks we bring to [the show]. What I don’t like is how this connects itself to gossip.

What.

Robert (again, Robert, I know we are not close, but you and your wife have the same last name and that makes things tough when writing about the two of you) then goes on to talk about Josh Charles leaving the show/his character being killed again, and how they “fake everything in the show, so I can address this on a storytelling level that there was no intent ever to dupe the viewers.” But he doesn’t want to talk about “gossip” or fuck with the “privacy of the set.”

“I do know what you are going after, and the only thing I will address is the storytelling. The mechanics of how we do our show is its own thing and we’re usually an open book about it, until it comes down to gossip,” he continues.

So we basically know what we knew before: Archie Panjabi and Julianna Margulies do not like one another, they did not film their final scene together, and that “gossip” is bad. Wait, scratch that last part.