It’s not every day you come across a successful 30 year marriage, let alone one in which a husband and wife work together. Even rarer is that the same couple are one of TVs most successful writing duos: Robert and Michelle King are masters in the art of combining home and work life. They’re the husband-and-wife team who created and wrote The Good Wife, making them one of the most lauded writing partnerships today.
With its snappy scripts and complex characters, The Good Wife was a new take on the classic courtroom drama. It seamlessly melded procedural and serial, becoming a runaway critical and audience success. It ran for 7 seasons, and the duo won a heap of writing awards, including the Writers Guild of America Award for Best New Series, and tonnes of critical love. The Guardian called it a "", and some critics went so far as to say the .
One of the reasons for their success, they admit, is that they genuinely like working together. “If it weren’t fun,” Michelle , “we wouldn’t be doing it.” Robert agrees; “Our personalities are close enough and yet they're not mirroring each other.” They make it work by carving up their tasks; “We split up the division of labour right down the middle,” he says. While Robert is “in the editing room and galloping ahead on scripts”, Michelle looks after production design and casting.
SBS podcast The Playlist spoke with The Good Fight creators Robert and Michelle King:
So when The Good Wife finished, what were TV’s most popular writing team to do? Sit down together to write another series, of course. Their latest undertaking is The Good Fight, a spin-off series about one of the series best-loved characters, Dianne Lockhart, moving to a new legal firm.
Source: SBS
With such pressure to stay on the ball, how do the husband and wife manage to keep work-life balance? They don’t have strict rules about work-talk in the house. “We've had some disasters in our personal life. And the show offers a healthy distraction sometimes from that, where you feel like we can't let that eat away at us because we have this deadline,” . “The deadline, as awful as it is, makes you get over whatever personal problems there are. I would say in that way it has been an improvement on [our] marriage.”
The Good Fight airs every Wednesday at 9:30pm on SBS. Episodes are also available on after each episode airs.
