There is an emergency session underway within the writers’ room of CBS’s critically acclaimed drama, The Good Wife, which returns for its third season on Sunday, Sept. 25.

With 48 hours to go, the writers—overseen by husband-and-wife creators Robert and Michelle King—must rewrite the latest script and untangle a Gordian knot to come up with a new procedural case for hotshot lawyer Alicia Florrick (recent Emmy Award winner Julianna Margulies) and the firm to tackle.

In the second season of the critical and ratings hit, the personal loomed large for all of the show’s characters. Alicia gave into temptation and slept with her boss, Will (Josh Charles), after years of having bad timing. Kalinda (Archie Panjabi) went to great lengths to conceal a long-buried secret—that she had, years before, slept with Alicia’s husband, Peter (Chris Noth)—in a storyline that involved baseball bats, smashed-out windows, and assaulting rival investigator Blake (Scott Porter).

With its deft plotting and character-driven storytelling, The Good Wife—this season moving to a new night and time (Sundays at 9 p.m.)—is hard-hitting drama at its best. So it’s all the more surprising that the writers’ room appears almost serene, even as the clock ticks away. This is not your typical writers’ room, a litter-strewn battlefield where exhausted scribes butt heads, argue, and quaff vast quantities of coffee. Here, on a quiet studio lot in Culver City, coproducer Corrine Brinkerhoff—who runs the @GoodWifeWriters Twitter feed with Meredith Averill—stands at a whiteboard. Her neat handwriting is just one of many ordered particulars of the vintage room: color-coded notecards are perfectly positioned on a nearby bulletin board; whiteboards stand at the ready, bursting with plot details; and the writers—split equally between genders—around the polished mahogany table are taking turns to speak. Wait, this is an emergency meeting?

It’s midday and the staffers are calmly throwing out ideas for the case of the week of the sixth episode of the season, one that might involve sons of foreign diplomats, one a Taiwanese ambassador, and a date rape-murder case. The Kings are in attendance—Robert presides, his feet up on a nearby chair, as Michelle sneaks in to sit near him at the head of the table—and they interject to keep the discussion on track, as two writers’ assistants try dutifully to transcribe the conversation unfolding around them.

Today Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood provides inspiration; the writers use killers Dick and Perry as archetypes for the suspects in the episode’s legal case, but there is also a varied discussion of such topics as “stoplight parties,” Viagra side effects, Lady Gaga’s deal with Polaroid, exigent circumstances, All About Eve, prosecutorial bias, and the treatment of a body as a crime scene. Jean-Xavier de Lestrade’s 2004 true crime documentary series, The Staircase, about the headline-grabbing Michael Peterson trial, is invoked as well. Make no mistake: these are keenly intelligent individuals, but there’s a spirit of the collective here. As the day wears on, no cracks form in the exceedingly polite exterior of these intelligent scribes, who—against all expectations—apologize when interrupting each other. Despite the high-stakes deadline, it’s a case of civility trickling down from the producers.

“That’s very typical,” says Michelle King. “When we took our daughter to Canada for the first time, she was about 9. She looked around and said, ‘Oh my gosh, this is the first city I’ve ever been in where everyone’s as polite as we are.’”

This is not what you might expect from a tense drama like The Good Wife, particularly one in the midst of a story crisis. Although The Good Wife films on the opposite coast, the Kings keep their eyes on every detail. (The couple tries to get out to New York—which doubles on-screen as Chicago—once a month and keep in constant contact via a Polycom video-conferencing system for four- or five-hour “tone meetings”). Later, upstairs in the second-floor editing bay, Robert King oversees a cut of the third episode, featuring the introduction of Eddie Izzard as oily British lawyer James Thrush and the first meeting of Eli Gold (Alan Cumming) and Kalinda. He runs his hand through his hair as he focuses on every second unfolding, adjusting microexpressions, overlapping dialogue to create a naturalistic “Altman-esque” pattern, asking for a longer pause (a “mouth-pop”) before a character speaks. The messiness gives a scene a sense of verisimilitude; he instructs the editor that he wants “elegant movement” but not to “piss off the audience with too many details.”

“The audience is very forgiving with how much we do in procedural stories,” says King. But he feels as though it’s his job, and an almost holy mission, to make these courtroom scenes as interesting and lively as possible. He needn’t worry, really; the show’s devoted audience has fallen in love with the interplay of styles: at times a roman à clef, a political race, a legal showdown, a romance. It has imbued The Good Wife with an elegant unpredictability, as it smudges the lines between genres.

The personal, however, always trumps the procedural within the show. “The personal is hard to reinvent,” says Robert King. “The cases are easy to reinvent. There are so many things we want to do casewise, but Alicia’s story guides us … The only thing we’re probably a little aware of is having an equal number this year of criminal and civil cases because of the Cary (Matt Czuchry) and Peter component at the state's attorney’s office. I think we’re always following relationships, always following the personal.”

If that sphere often got sensationalized in Season 2, that was entirely intentional, says Robert King, who wanted the audience to imagine the absolute worst that Kalinda might have been capable of, only to pull things back to a decidedly personal level.

“The Blake thing got a little extravagant, but we wanted to go extravagant so people would think, Oh, with everything with Kalinda getting so operatic, it must be that she killed someone,” he says. “Then the reason she’s so frantic was very human and what was nice is that it was about Alicia.” For the Kings, however, it wasn’t an unexpected twist. “It was part of the DNA of the story,” says Michelle King. “The very first time we pitched it to CBS, that was part of the idea. We just held off for a long time in spilling it.”

But don’t expect the Kings to try to outdo themselves in the Kalinda department this season by coming up with an even bigger story for the tough-as-nails investigator. “Topping it could be on the human level,” says Robert King. “She was a bit of a superwoman in a lot of the first year. She’d just say, ‘Open the door,’ and people would open it because they were attracted to her ... In theory, once you finally reveal Kalinda is as human as anybody else in the show, she’s not the untouchable superwoman … A lot of the things that make her dark and make her who she is, we can now explore on the human side, and not as some super–Lara Croft kind of person.”

Thematically, the third season is about taking risks, say the Kings, both for the writers and the characters. “Because of where the economy is going,” says Robert King, “I think the audience will relate” to the idea of risk. Alicia will discover that keeping her home life and her work life separate is not as easy as she anticipated. And there will be consequences for Alicia now that she and Will have slept together. (“Hopefully, a whole season’s worth,” says Michelle King.)

Plus, the show won’t shy away from tackling weighty political, social, and technological issues. Just don’t expect The Good Wife to offer an analog for Dominique Strauss-Kahn this season.

“DSK was so familiar to an episode we did already, so chances are you’re not going to see it because they were ripping us off,” jokes Michelle King. “We try to avoid anything that is so specific that, when you see it three months from now when it airs, it’s going to feel like old news.”

Likewise, the Kings killed a plot that dealt with reality television, after the suicide of Real Housewives of Beverly Hills’s Russell Armstrong. “It was basically an explication of how reality TV slants reality,” says Robert King. “But [now] it’s almost an overheated current, where shows along the lines of Law & Order will probably do one. You just don’t want to be the last one in line to do the reality takeoff.”

Not that that’s dampened the spirits of the show’s writing staff, each of whom regularly brings in ideas that interest them for “filling the cupboard,” in the Kings’ parlance. Former House star Lisa Edelstein’s upcoming arc grew out of an idea Brinkerhoff brought in about two-room mediation. Other concepts percolating on the whiteboards of the writers’ room are just fun ideas, while others are based in the real world.

“A lot of the things we want to explore are esoteric and sometimes things in the news that we want to set a human face on, some involving the secret courts that are continued under Obama’s administration, [the] Muslim-Jewish conflict … racial profiling and racial bias in sentencing,” says Robert King. “We’re doing the Murdoch/News of the World thing but in a skewed way, which is about libel tourism: people going to England to sue on books.”

“We’re attracted to some medical advances that seem to have bad repercussions: you don’t think of human experimentation happening in today’s age, but to have these doctors who create something—a new pacemaker, a new heart valve, a new back-pain device—and just plant their own version into patients? We want to pursue that. Social networking is our bread and butter.” They’ll tackle the latter in an episode that looks at the growing battle between Facebook and Google+.

All of which serves to cement The Good Wife’s reputation as what some would call the “smartest drama on network TV,” implying somehow that network television as a whole is not that smart, or that cable programming is superior. Let’s be honest: it’s the smartest drama on television, period, but the Kings don’t waste a second dwelling on whether the description is a backhanded compliment.

“If anyone says anything nice, I’m delighted,” says Michelle King, sitting on the couch in the office she shares with her husband, polite as ever. “The last thing I’m going to do is parse a compliment. Please.”

One of the most buzzed about shows of the fall TV season doesn't have dinosaurs or singing contestants, doesn't go back in time and isn't a re-imagining of a classic TV series. "The Good Wife" stirs the pot week in and week out with its own unique blend of drama that is engaging merely because the series, starring Julianna Margulies, who took home the Outstanding Actress in a Drama Series Emmy this past weekend, knows how to tell great stories with characters you embrace and care about. Just before season three kicks off on Sunday, our Jim Halterman spent some time on the phone with series creators Robert and Michelle King to talk about the new Sunday timeslot, utilizing guest stars within the fabric of the show and tease what is to come for Alicia (Margulies), who at the end of last season took ownership of her life by ending her friendship with BFF Kalinda (Archie Panjabi), kicking hubby Peter (Chris Noth) to the curb and slipping into a hotel room for a long-awaited liaison with her boss, Will (Josh Charles).

Jim Halterman: Let's first talk the new timeslot. What was your initial reaction to the move to Sunday night and how are you feeling about it now?

Robert King: I couldn't figure it out. We're not complete novices but we're fairly new to TV and when you're working on a show you don't look up, you're just kind of racing ahead. So a lot of it was not really knowing what it meant and there were probably some things we thought we would want to avoid but that one just came as a curveball. Then, the more we both talked to CBS, they talked to us, we actually feel like it's a good fit. As much as we love the 'NCIS' people and they've been very good to us, there was probably a lack of flow on Tuesday night and what was nice is that there were some people who came from other places to watch the show at 10 but then there were a lot of people who dropped off. The only real issue [on Sundays] is the football question and that remains a mystery.

Michelle King: The other positive to me is not just the change in night but also moving up an hour. It seems that being at 9 o'clock will allow more people to come to it that by 10 o'clock are already done with their viewing for the night.

RK: The last thing that is good about it is that CBS has put a lot of money and effort into bringing attention to the move and you don't have that until you move.

JH: I'm always struck by how fresh the show feels in regards to how it tells stories. Can you talk about how intentional that is and how you go about dropping and then picking up certain characters and threads throughout the season and the series, for that matter?

MK: I'm going to start by saying thank you for noticing. It absolutely is intentional to try to do the episodes differently from each other so people don't feel bored by it and that makes it a little more challenging because you don't have a pattern to fall back on.

RK: Regarding the characters popping up, what we really wanted was a sense that in life, especially in the small world of Chicago, sometimes you keep bumping into the same people, For example, Carrie Preston ('True Blood') who we haven't seen since the first season will come back this season and there's an inevitability of why we end up back in her world but there is a sense that these people live beyond the borders of the episode they were introduced in.

JH: With your use of guest stars, which comes first? The character or the actor?

RK: We were looking for a character to come and place difficulties in Alicia's world and relationships early in the year and we kind of had a character worked out and then Lisa Edelstein ran into contractual difficulties with 'House' and became available. It's kind of the marrying of two things which is we need this character to be someone who plays a role of risk in Will's life and then once the actress became available you start writing with her in mind, especially when we found out [Lisa] might be available.

JH: Michael J. Fox is a great example of someone we're very familiar with but he doesn't overshadow his recurring role and then you also have another big personality � Eddie Izzard � coming up. How do you make sure the actor doesn't overshadow the role?

RK: We're not writing the role to flatter the actor or actress. That actor or actress is servicing the plot. It feels like that would be the difference than if it was 'Oh, this is the episode where we got Meryl Streep for something.' It's more what is the character's function in the plot and can the actor/actress support the need of that?

MK: The other piece of that is really we've been fortunate enough to work with such gifted actors. They are truly committing to the characters and they're not there to just draw attention to themselves. I think you're going to see that with the Eddie Izzard portrayal.

RK: Can I use an example of last year? There was a nanny scandal in California in the Governor's race and it just felt like an interesting way to knock one of the people running out of the fictional State's Attorney race on our show for them to have a nanny problem. Once we went down that road, we wanted to make it a very specific character who was a nanny but also a day trader. Then we found out America Ferrara might be interested so we found the function within the plot and then the character follows.

JH: Like Alan Cumming (who is now a regular on the show), America Ferrara is a great example of a guest star coming on the show for a few episodes and, as a viewer, you instantly want to see more of them. Let's see more of America or Rita Wilson or Michael J. Fox... I mean, it's not a bad problem to have, huh?

MK: We love the characters and we love the actors so then moving forward it's all about opportunity when they're available and what stories come after them.

RK: Also, an interesting dance for us as writers is you have Rita Wilson come on the show and blows the part out of the water and creates a very unique role in that. So, then, in future episodes there was another character but [Rita] was so good it was like 'Why create a new character? Let's just see if we can get Rita Wilson back' which makes the job slightly easier.

JH: So, let's talk specifics about the new season. After Alicia finally gets together with Will in the finale, she's not divorced, right?

RK/MK: Right.

JH: And the whole series began with Peter having had some relations outside their marriage and, yes, in a completely different scenario. My question is, then, is the fact that she's still married something that comes up?

RK: Yeah, it does. It is a concern. The bottom line is you so want to be in Alicia's point of view and people who do something wrong have a tendency to be in denial. There was a lot of fun in Alicia getting together with Will but in many ways the correlation with Alicia and Peter is not 100 percent...

MK: ... It's not even that... I think that there was active deceit on Peter's part and Alicia had said 'We're split. We're apart.'

RK: They're not divorced. Do you think there's a difference when they're divorced versus when they're separated?

MK: I think there's a whole big difference between married and separated.

RK: Alright, well, we disagree.

JH: So now that Alicia and Will have slept together, it would be easy to assume they'll be together but I'm guessing it won't be as easy as that. What's to come there?

RK: It won't be as easy as that. There's a whole thicket of issues there in how this plays out. Will is her boss and beyond that... Michelle and I may disagree on the first thing but I think for Alicia, this is a romance that was unconsummated but what do you do when you wake up the next day?

JH: The other relationship that really hit everyone last year was the fracture in the Alicia/Kalinda relationship. Can their friendship be repaired in any way?

RK: The difficulty that we face is that the friendship cannot return to what it was. It was a friendship of two unlikely women who had a meeting of the minds even though they're very different characters. The struggle that they're facing is how do you get over that betrayal and what is the nature of the friendship after that? I think that's the real question of this year is where do Alicia and Kalinda end up? I haven't seen that friendship on TV where you have betrayals of a friendship like a betrayal of a marriage. How do you survive that and can you survive it? They may not want to survive it since both of them start the year not really wanting to look at each other.

JH: Peter obviously is still going to be very present this season but what is the state of his relationship with Alicia at this point?

RK: I think the real interesting thing is that Peter has been put in a functional place. He is now the State's Attorney so he's Alicia's opposition on criminal cases. Also, there's an on-going investigation into Lockhart/Gardner that was started by Glenn Childs (Titus Welliver). This relationship is never going to be a happy separation or a happy ending for that matter. The difficulties for anyone who works with a spouse is that the requirements of the job sometimes create its own tension. I don't mean to talk so bleakly about them but these cases are going to cause problems in their relationship.

JH: The firm itself is a character that goes through its own drama regularly on the show. How will all these personal dramas effect the firm itself?

RK: The biggest drama is that Eli (Alan Cumming) is now in-house. As he says in one of the first episodes, 'I don't like to share.' Eli is an only child and now he's joining a family and he has very, very big shoes. We've always thought of Will and Diane (Christine Baranski) are the mother and father in the firm and it's kind of a marriage that has its own problems and there's a love there; not a physical love. And now they've got this unruly cold child and Eli is someone who deals with the politics on our show and he will now be dealing with the politics of the firm and this family.

JH: How are you both holding up with the pressure as the show enters season three? Are you feeling a different kind of pressure or is it smooth sailing at this point?

RK: It's not smooth sailing. We're trying this year to do 11 [episodes] in a row without a break, without reruns. As fun as that is for viewers, we find it an incredible strain here obviously because the pressure of this is tantamount... but we're still having fun. We're having a lot of fun with characters and there's always something fun that you want to do.

MK: I think the big issue is always schedule. Hopefully we've learned a little something in years one and two that make parts of doing the job easier in year three. What keeps the pressure on is that the schedule is now contracted so there's less time to do it because it's trying to run all these originals in a row.

"The Good Wife" airs Sundays at 9:00/8:00c on CBS.

Read more: Interview: "The Good Wife" Creators Robert & Michelle King | TheFutonCritic.com http://www.thefutoncritic.com/intervi....nweQFwt