I’ve recently started binge watching “The Good Wife,” one of CBS’ hour-long prime-time dramas. While I’d heard of the show before, it wasn’t until I saw Julianna Margulies’ speech after winning her second Emmy Award for Best Actress in a Drama Series that I thought I should give the show a try.
After my incessant viewing of the legal drama, I was saddened to hear one of the show’s excellent female characters, Kalinda Sharma, would be leaving at the end of the current season. Sharma, played excellently by Archie Panjabi, has consistently been one of the shows most powerful characters, a role that netted Panjabi an Emmy for Best Supporting Actress.
Panjabi, the British-born daughter of Indian immigrants, made her first major appearances in “Bend it like Beckham” and “A Mighty Heart.” But it’s on “The Good Wife” where Panjabi hits the ground running with an amazing portrayal of the rebellious, yet productive, private investigator. Sharma is headstrong yet understood, known for wearing knee-high leather boots in every scene and is more of a badass than any of the male characters on the show.
Throughout the first season, Sharma is shown having sexual relations with both men and women, but her sexuality is never fully addressed on screen. It wasn’t until the season finale when Margulies’ character, Alicia Florrick, asks her outright, “Are you gay?” Kalinda’s answer is brief, yet effective: “I’m private.”
These two words perfectly identify Sharma’s overall character on the show. At work, she’s a hard worker, using her sexuality and personality to get information for Lockhart-Gardner’s lawsuits, but she tries to keep her personal life at an arms length when it comes to her colleagues. While this doesn’t stop her from having sex with Cary Agos, an associate who leaves to work at the Illinois State Attorney’s office, Sharma doesn’t see the reason to disclose personal information to her coworkers.
It isn’t revealed how Sharma identifies herself sexually until the end of the fourth season, when she tells Alicia at the bar, drinking tequila, that she’s “flexible.” This labeling, or lack there of, is another example of how Sharma doesn’t need to have outward labels placed upon herself, and that she can decide who she is.
In the show’s fourth season, an abusive husband comes into the picture, a man whom Sharma left in Canada before coming to work at the Lockhart-Gardner. Her husband follows her around, and ends up finding Sharma’s current female fling. As the man tries to lay roots in Chicago and state his dominance over Sharma, she dispatches the lawyers to help prevent him from doing so, which they are successful in doing.
This privacy of her past is what makes Sharma one of the show’s most likeable characters. While most of the series leads have various parts of their personal lives revealed through various story lines, Sharma’s work on keeping her life away from work allows for her to have relationships with women from the United States Justice Department and the FBI.
Sharma’s expression of her sexuality also puts her in an interesting place among television’s roster of LGBTQ characters. While rarely shown in a relationship, the show places Sharma in the same caliber as heterosexual male characters, at least sexually. She uses her attractiveness for personal satisfaction and for the benefit of her firm, and easily castes off men or women for whom she no longer has use.
This characterized shift of a queer character shows some changes in the way in which adult queer characters are portrayed on prime time television. “Glee” and “The Fosters” have very different ways in portraying their queer characters, but Sharma is miles apart from how NBC’s “The New Normal” and ABC’s “Modern Family” portray their queer characters. Keeping the character’s sexuality from being a focal point of their characterization isn’t necessary, but refreshing.
Sharma’s departure from the show will be hard to replace, because a queer woman of color isn’t yet normality on prime time. “The Good Wife” will still hold a place on critics’ lists as a great drama, but fans will miss one of the most developed, yet private, characters on television.
Are you a fan of Kalinda Sharma? Let Conor know at cmurphy5@wisc.edu
