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Thursday, May 12, 2016
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
ARTS

TV REVIEW

‘Boxes’ resorts 
to tried and true

By SOPHIA KAUFMAN

Daily Arts Writer

The most played song on my 

iTunes library in 10th grade was 
probably The Goo Goo Dolls’s 
“Slide” 
from 

Dizzy Up the Girl 
in 1998. It was 
the 
song 
that 

first introduced 
me to the band. 
I fell in love 
with the guitar 
rhythm 
that 

felt weightless, 
a 
cascading 

opening melody 
and lyrics that, as cheesy as it 
sounds, hurt to listen to — just the 
way songs do when they ring true.

The Goo Goo Dolls’s latest 

album, Boxes, doesn’t feature 
anything as poignant or tightly 
crafted as some of their previous 
work, but that doesn’t make it any 
less pleasant to listen to. Boxes 
reveals a more mellow side to 
the group. As always, frontman 
John Rzeznik’s voice adds a bit of 
texture to the song’s sentiments 
without pulling focus from the 
song as a whole — which is almost 
always a good thing.

However, the album’s first 

song, “Over and Over,” feels 
bizarrely too young for this 
album and The Goo Goo Dolls 
as a group. It would be the kind 
of fun mindless track you forget 
you’re actually listening to until it 
stops, if it weren’t for the chirpy 
chorus of “Turn it up!” This kind 
of chirpiness works better later on 
in a light, dancing piano melody in 
the song “So Alive.” “Souls in the 
Machine,” which follows it, picks 
up the pace a little bit; it feels like 
the antithesis to something like 
Pink Floyd’s “Brick in the Wall.”

When the chorus of “Flood” 

hits, it’s more gentle than you 

expect, making it much more 
pleasant 
and 
somehow 
more 

subtle, despite its obvious love-
song-like 
quality. 
“The 
Pin” 

and “Boxes” deal with the less 
passionate parts of a love story: 
with the comfort and safety that 
comes with a love that feels like a 
home. The first lyrics of “Free of 
Me” — and the way they’re sung 
in an ever-so-slightly petulant 
tone — sound unusually similar 
to Simple Plan. The next two 
songs, “Reverse” and “Prayer 
in My Pocket” follow suit. The 
beginning of “Lucky One” sounds 
like a mashup between a Taylor 
Swift and a Sam Smith song (I 
promise, it’s true). “Long Way 
Home,” the final song on the 
album, includes a sprightly piano 
sequence, emphatic drum beats 
and a familiar return to home — a 
warm way to round out the album.

Boxes is, more than anything, 

comfortable. 
The 
Goo 
Goo 

Dolls fall back on safe melodies, 
unsurprising beats and lyrics 
that feel like they could have 
come from an Imagine Dragons 
or One Republic album. The 
amount of repetition and the 
similarity of styles to other artists 
in the album stand out. It feels 
slightly been there, done that 
— nothing like the freshness of 
songs like “Slide,” “Iris,” “Black 
Balloon” 
 
or 
dancing-in-the-

rain kind of hits like “Rebel 
Beat” or “Last Hot Night.” The 
sentiments are comfortable and 
comforting in their familiarity, 
but they don’t make me laugh 
or cry or do anything other 
than find comparisons to other 
songs. Nothing sticks with me, 
which is slightly disappointing 
— especially considering that 
“Slide” is probably still within 
the top ten of my iTunes, even 
five years after I’d heard those 
opening four measures.

B

Boxes

The Goo 
Goo Dolls

Warner Bros. 
Records

‘Good’ finale dismays

“Good Wife” finale 

fails to properly honor 

series.

By ALEX INTNER

Summer Managing Arts Editor

“The Good Wife” said goodbye 

after seven seasons with an epi-
sode that didn’t take much time 
to 
celebrate 

the show, its 
characters 
or 
anything 

that made it 
great. Instead, 
for better or 
worse, it put 
the focus on 
closing 
the 

story arc of the 
past 
several 

episodes. To me, that’s a damn 
shame. Over the course of its 
remarkable, yet imperfect seven-
year run, this show built a stable 
of characters who deserved more 
appreciation than a plot-based 
finale like this one allows. The 
finale didn’t do as much as it could 
or should have to show off what 
made “The Good Wife” so fun to 
watch and exciting at its peak.

The main focus of the series 

finale is the conclusion of Peter 
Florrick’s (Chris Noth, “Sex and 
the City”) trial for deliberately 
setting free the son of a major 
donor while he was the Illinois 
State’s Attorney. The trial has 
been ongoing for several episodes, 
and it seems like an odd way to 
spend the final episode. The key 
source of drama is Alicia Florrick 
(Julianna Margulies, “ER”) and 
Diane Lockhart (Christine Baran-
ski, “Chicago”), Peter’s lawyers, 
trying to find some way to present 
new evidence to the jury, think-
ing it might help their case. The 
story meanders along through 
the episode, as writers Robert 
and Michelle King (“In Justice”) 
somehow find a way to add more 
twists than were already done in 
earlier episodes. While it was nice 
to return to the courtroom, there 
wasn’t enough here to justify 
spending a substantial chunk of 
the series finale on a boring, epi-
sodic storyline like this.

Where the finale did look back 

on its run was in its moments 
between Alicia and Will Gardner 
(Josh Charles, “Sports Night”). 

Alicia, questioning whether she 
wants to choose Peter or Jason 
Crouse (Jeffrey Dean Morgan, 
“The Walking Dead”), ends up 
fantasizing conversations with 
her former lover, Gardner. In 
these fantasies she makes realiza-
tions about her case, but she also 
talks to him about their relation-
ship and the law they practiced. 
Until Charles left in the middle of 
the fifth season, Will and Alicia’s 
connection was one of the cor-
nerstones of the show, so to have 
them together again onscreen 
made of a highlight of the episode, 
especially because it allowed the 
finale to actually look back on the 
series’s run.

The oddest choice of the entire 

episode occurs in the final scene, 
where “The Good Wife” ends on a 
moment of bitterness. After Alicia 
stands by her husband through 
his resignation announcement, 
she runs offstage thinking she 
saw Jason in the doorway. It turns 
out not to be him, but as she turns 
to walk back to the stage, Diane 
walks by and slaps her across the 
face for revealing Diane’s hus-
band’s affair in courtroom testi-
mony, and Alicia is left alone. So, 
“The Good Wife” ends with a slap. 
It’s a bitter and angry choice by 
the Kings. Though there’s no need 
to artificially insert a happy end-
ing, at the beginning of the finale, 
Alicia and Diane are at a point of 
mutual respect, trying to build an 
all-female law firm. The episode 
had to work to get the characters 
to a point of tension like this, and 
the legwork just wasn’t there to 
support this final twist.

That kind of artificial charac-

ter work shows what was miss-
ing from this finale, the authentic 
drama that made the series great 
in the first place. When “The 
Good Wife” was at its peak, the 
story twisted and turned in new 
and surprising ways, without ever 
feeling like it was too much or too 
crazy. Each scene flamed with 
tension or crackled with energy 
as the cast members bounced off 
one another. The series would 
always go 10 or 15 minutes before 
cutting to a commerical, often 
using the time to build and build 
to the point where I forgot there 
were even breaks to take. Never 
was this more true than in season 
five. I’m rewatching the opening 
of the episode “Hitting the Fan” 
as I write this, and watching Will 

confront Alicia about her plan to 
leave the firm … the feelings of 
betrayal are palpable. Something 
the finale sorely lacked was this 
dramatic tension, or any kind of 
character-based payoff like “Hit-
ting the Fan” had.

Some of the credit for “The 

Good Wife” remaining so good for 
so long belongs to this fantastic 
ensemble, in which each member, 
from Margulies at the top to guest 
stars at the bottom, crafted well-
rounded characters with poise 
and skill. I will always remember 
the series for taking advantage of 
New York City’s long list of actors, 
bringing in everyone from Broad-
way stars Baranski and Alan Cum-
ming (“Tin Man”) in series regular 
roles, to actors like Martha Plimp-
ton (“Raising Hope”), Michael J. 
Fox (“The Michael J. Fox Show”), 
Carrie Preston (“True Blood”), 
who is probably my favorite of 
the show’s guest stars as Elsbeth 
Tascioni, and David Hyde Pierce 
(“Frasier”). That barely scratches 
the surface of the deep roster of 
talent this series employed. (In 
fact, the finale also pissed me off 
by completely wasting an appear-
ance from “Bunheads” star Sutton 
Foster, who was barely onscreen 
at all).

“The Good Wife” also repre-

sents a faded breed of network 
drama, one that tells a serialized 
story over the course of 22 epi-
sodes. The broadcast business 
model is changing — to the point 
where some shows don’t need to 
reach the traditional 100 hours 
to become successful. In fact, 
Margulies has said that nothing 
would convince her to do another 
22-episodes-per-season network 
drama. For me, there’s still value 
in a show that can maintain its 
story over this many hours, and, if 
the industry goes towards shorter 
seasons as predicted, “The Good 
Wife” will go down in history 
as one of the last carriers of that 
torch.

I may have had problems with 

elements of the final season and 
how “The Good Wife” spent its 
time in the final episode, but I 
will dearly miss the drama. Over 
its seven-year run, it gave the 
television landscape fascinating 
legal cases, beautiful character 
moments and brilliant dramatic 
payoffs that few on network tele-
vision have come close to match-
ing.

WARNER BROS. RECORDS

Drums are cool, apparently.

MUSIC REVIEW

B

The Good 
Wife

Series Finale

Sunday at 9 p.m.

CBS