To Trust in Strange Habits and Last Calls

A Phone that May Never Be Forgotten

TGW presents the institutions of the law, politics, and family—institutions that require trust—as impossible to govern without the aid of the mobile smartphone. The smartphone mediates between all these different roles easily, such that Alicia is only able to perform all her roles on the program (lawyer, political candidate, wife, mother) because of it. Although the series has been critically acclaimed for its integration of new technology into its complex storylines, its reliance on the smartphone as a habituated device essential to the everyday governance of these institutions has been less noticed. Yet, TGW entrusts the smartphone with such indispensability, positioning the device and its use as an embodied habit and thus a new form of governance.

Smartphones represent a convergence of technologies, media forms, and communications practices that work in tandem with advanced capitalism to promise a rigorous engagement with media on an unprecedented scale. Smartphones are first and foremost telephones, and as Avital Ronell (1989, 84) reminds us, the telephone “within language, entrusted to transference and translation, is to be plugged in somewhere between science, poesy, and thinking.” The telephone has a signifying function, bound to and partially comprised of language; Ronell positions the telephone in a middle space where the limits of mechanical apparatus and communicative thought co-mingle. The telephone is thus a hybrid device, one predicated on the act of ephemeral transmission, for unlike its sister technologies such as the gramophone, the telephone does not store or inscribe its user’s voices.

Yet, smartphones complicate the telephone as ephemeral speech, as they routinely record speech either through voicemails and voice memos, or through surveillance wiretaps. However, this shift from ephemeral to more permanent forms of communication radically reorients the nature of the digital archive. Tethered to a mobile body, smartphones individualize the telephone’s archiving and communicative properties: whereas landline telephones are specific to group settings (the family home, the office) or even to the public (for pay), mobile telephones are personal in nature. Like technological developments in television, the smartphone allows for individualization within one’s network, as in the running gag of Grace’s voice hurriedly repeating “Mom, pick up the phone” as her identifying ringtone on Alicia’s phone.

Whereas for Ronell the telephone represented language via a disembodied voice, the mobile smartphone’s ability to synthesize other forms of data and perform a wide variety of tasks establishes the device as something always on or near the body, like our most intimate articles of clothing (Goggin 2009, 231). (Likewise, it is not uncommon for smartphone users to compare the experience of leaving the house sans phone with being naked in public, approximating nomophobia, or the fear of being out of contact with a mobile device.) The landline telephone allows its user access to the outside world, but only because it is itself stationary, similar to cinema and television. As Heidi Rae Cooley (2004, 153) explains,

Both television and cinema present screens that offer views onto other worlds; in which case, television and cinema screens function as windows . . . [Smartphones] do not open onto other worlds but merge with the world as it happens.

Left unsaid in this otherwise reorienting gesture is the presence of the body; we might extend Cooley’s observation to include within this merging “with the world as it happens” (through social media apps and text messaging in addition to voice calling) the merging of body and phone.

Yet, to claim that smartphones incite a merging of hand and device is not just to repeat Marshall McLuhan’s thesis that the medium is the message and that new media technologies comprise extensions of the body. Rather, smartphones act in concert with bodies to acclimate technological modes of habituation: to construct an intimate relationship with one’s phone such that being without it incites panic is also to trust in its constant presence and functionality. Habit serves as a useful theoretical paradigm for understanding smartphone culture insofar as habit is an ongoing process not resistant to change. To make an environment habitable, one must make it familiar and stable, acclimated to routine and repetition. Cooley’s work has been instrumental in clarifying the commercial importance of this familiarity and stability in mobile devices, claiming that the chiasmic engagement between hand and device (its “fit”) operates at the level of industrial design and at the level of responsiveness. Good design encourages constant holding, solidifying the feedback loop between user and phone. “When successful, this effort results in a nonconscious bonding, a kind of relation that is not aware as such but neither is it repressed or unconscious,” she writes (Cooley 2014, 37). Furthermore, these devices are always in hand, or within arm’s reach: as Alicia, Will, and Diane (Christine Baranski) rush from courtroom to chambers, as Alicia reflects in her kitchen with a glass of wine, or as Kalinda (Archie Panjabi) sleuths around the streets of Chicago, their phones are typically within frame, unnoticed yet in plain sight. As a frequent gatekeeper of professional and personal communication, the smartphone reflexively traces its user; as Anne Balsamo (2012, 253) writes, “The entire purpose of the [smartphone] is . . . to reflect me back to myself.”

Habit thus produces regularity even when an environment demands otherwise; it is, “Change contracted, compressed, contained” while anticipating future changes (Grosz 2013, 220–21). So, it is with the smartphone on the twenty-eighth floor law offices of Lockhart Gardner, TGW’s key setting. ¹ Phones are a ubiquitous part of the series’ production design; no matter the nature of the case of the week, its preparation requires utilizing the smartphone as investigators seek out witnesses and partners call associates to strategize. Yet, the constant use of the smartphone is always purposeful; no member of Lockhart Gardner is crushing candies or swiping right in their day-to-day routines. ² The mobile smartphone is presented within the diegetic world of the series, though seldom acknowledged, as a tool necessary for the practice of law. The smartphone even functions as the technology that gives birth to new firms, as when Alicia, Cary, and other associates use burner phones to separate from Lockhart Gardner in an early season 5 arc. And, even when technology provokes chaos within the company, the smartphone is left off the hook, so to speak: its personalized nature removes it from the crises emblematic of the modern law practice’s dependency on technology, such as when Lockhart Gardner’s computer systems are encrypted by ransomware authored by Russian cyberterrorists (S6 E5, “Shiny Objects”), or when their emails are hacked shortly following Alicia’s victory in the State’s Attorney race (S6 E17, “Undisclosed Recipients”). Habitual smartphone use thus produces the efficiency of the law and consequently the best (and often most zealous) representation of the firm’s clients, serving as an ideological state of being in the service of maximizing corporate profit.

A Call that May Never Be Private

Television has used the cell phone as a way to advance storylines for decades, even before the adoption of such technology into the marketplace: the secret agent comedy series Get Smart (CBS 1965–1970) would disguise mobile telephones in everyday fashion accessories, such as shoes and compacts. As the device became a staple of everyday communication, however, it generally presented problems for screenwriters, who found that it upended conventional writing techniques. Carter Beys, executive producer of How I Met Your Mother (CBS 2005–2014), said that “people thought [cell phones] would be the death of the sitcom,” as the devices “have totally eliminated the existence of the ‘drop by’” (Pincus-Roth 2008). Despite these problems, Josh Schwartz, showrunner of Gossip Girl (CW, 2007–2012), a teenage soap featuring regular smartphone and geolocation updates from its mysterious eponymous blogger, saw excitement in the smartphone’s narrative potential, saying that phone conversations may be “less dramatic, but they are becoming so accepted because the other version [conversing in person] is seeming so alien” (Pincus-Roth 2008).

Of course, the integration of the smartphone into everyday communication has not entirely changed the ability of characters to communicate with each other without the phone. Malfunction is a common plot device: characters may suddenly experience no signal to be able to make an important call; alternatively, characters may be able to access a cellular network under improbable circumstances. Although TGW has used such devices to narrative effect—in “Net Worth” (S2 E14), Alicia must stand on top of her brother’s car to get reception and check in at the firm, though even then, reception is spotty—what is remarkable about the series is precisely how instrumental the device is for managing the series’ flow without regularly resorting to such situational tactics (since audiences, of course, trust that writers will deploy such narrative tricks in less obvious, organic ways).

Yet, the smartphone does not only mediate interactions between the characters of TGW but records them as well. Throughout the series, Alicia and her colleagues—especially performatively scatterbrained legal ally Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston)—record conversations with their adversaries to create legal records of incriminating conversations, reflecting changes to the laws that govern such recordings. In “A Few Words” (S5 E14), Elsbeth represents Will in an investigation by the Office of Public Integrity (OPI) into his purported involvement with voter fraud in Peter’s successful gubernatorial election. At an American Bar Association meeting in New York City, Elsbeth secretly records a conversation with OPI agent Nelson Dubek (Eric Bogosian), getting him to state that he has no actual evidence of voter fraud. Dubek protests, pointing out that Illinois state law requires two-party consent for the recording of a conversation, but Elsbeth points out that New York state only requires one-party consent, pointedly emphasizing her consent for effect. ³ Such routine use can be read through lines of trust as well: Elsbeth trusts her phone, whereas Dubek cannot trust Elsbeth or trust in the privacy of a conversation. Here, the smartphone does not enable communication between characters across long distances but instead legalizes a conversation that occurs face to face. The device’s functionality is not even tied to its design; the smartphone is not used as a telephone, but as a basic recording machine. Such interactions, then, privilege the smartphone’s mobility and handheld nature, in turn emphasizing a habitual relationship between device and self.

Other examples of surveillance culture on TGW abound. Most notably, a season 5 arc involved the National Security Agency (NSA) listening in on Alicia’s and Diane’s phone calls, after they represented an alleged terrorist sympathizer. Three episodes across season 5 explore this thread, which finds Alicia and Cary’s client, drug dealer Lemond Bishop (Mike Colter), arrested using information that could have only been discovered using wiretaps; the two discover that it is not Bishop’s phones that were tapped, but their own. The NSA is not, in fact, interested in pursuing a drug dealer, but through the process common that allows agencies to share information with one another—referred to in one episode’s title (S5 E13, “Parallel Construction, Bitches”)—a law enforcement agency can build an evidentiary basis for a new investigation that conceals how the original investigation began. Throughout the episodes, the NSA technicians are stereotyped as geeks, wearing t-shirts subliminally promoting CBS’s The Big Bang Theory, and showing as much interest in viral videos about goats as they do the stretched connective tissue between Alicia and potential terrorism.

Through onscreen graphics that map out the cellular networks of the series’ characters, the arc visualizes the concerns over NSA surveillance that culminated in Edward Snowden’s June 2013 revelations of the PRISM program, the clandestine efforts of the NSA to collect telecommunications data about its citizens’ internet and telephone use. The technicians do not just map out this network but also listen in on calls, as the law allows for the surveillance of anyone connected to Alicia or Diane and, in turn, anyone who calls them. In one scene from “Parallel Construction, Bitches,” technicians Dev Jain (Maulik Paucholy) and Tyler Hopkins (Tobias Segal) listen in on Diane and Will musing as to whether their phones are tapped:

Here, the technicians are interpellated into the role of series viewers. As regular listeners of the conversations that govern the storylines of the series, they engage in the gap filling of an active audience. What is striking about these scenes is not the act of surveillance itself, but how habitual the surveillance is for Jain and Hopkins: charged with listening to all the conversations from the series’ characters week after week, the technicians become responsible for compiling the information passed between phones and synthesizing it for digestion by the higher-ups at the NSA. In this respect, they engage in a process affectively similar to recapping (a reason, perhaps, why TGW’s fifth season was universally adored by critics), but in a way that highlights the viewer’s melodramatic investment in character relationships. Both the technicians and the viewing audience make sense of TGW’s serialized storylines through acts of telephonic voyeurism. But the storyline does more than this, for in aligning the audience with the NSA—a “staid bureaucracy relying on young hackers,” according to Robert King—it uncomfortably questions the all-knowing subject position of viewers accustomed to serial form. The supposed privacy of a phone call (as well as the NSA) cannot be trusted by viewers; even if we may enjoy knowing every little detail of information exchanged over the phone, so does a government acting in the name of counterterrorism.

A Series that May Never Be Episodic

The habitual use of smartphones in TGW is not unique to narratively complex dramatic television programs of the last decade; indeed, the rapid incorporation of such devices into these serialized storylines fuels this essay. As a negotiated balance between legal procedural and serialized drama, TGW testifies to the impact of such complexity on the procedural form, itself a televisual creature of habit. To extend earlier metaphors, just as users trust in mobile technology to make sense of themselves, viewers trust in televisual conventions to make sense of television itself. As smartphone storytelling habituates audiences into new narrative rhythms, TGW’s generic hybridity—its negotiation between episodic procedural and serial melodrama—becomes narrativized through the smartphone’s rhythmic serial updates.

Important here is TGW’s structure, which resembles descriptions by Jason Mittell (of “narratively complex television”), Jeffrey Sconce (“hybrid television”) and Michael Z. Newman (“primetime serial”) of an increasingly serialized form of dramatic television that principally emerged in the 1990s intertwined with the popular police, legal, and medical procedurals that comprised the bulk of network dramatic programming in the 1980s and 1990s (see Mittell 2006; Newman 2006; Sconce 2004). Accounts of contemporary serial dramatic form emphasize its newness in an ever-changing post-network landscape. As the editors note in their introduction to this special issue, the majority of U.S.-produced dramatic serials come from cable, premium cable, or streaming networks, have nearly half the number of episodes (8–13) per season compared with network programming (20–24), and are discursively constituted as independent commodities within a larger “Golden Age” of American television (constituting an emancipation of the medium from its formerly low art, mass entertainment status). ⁴ Yet, TGW is frequently cited as a “quality” drama, despite airing twenty-two episodes each season on a major network; in this respect, it resembles programs from the 1980s that interweaved serialized storylines within an episodic format. In 1992, for example, Sarah Kozloff wrote that

St. Elsewhere, L.A. Law, and similar shows have merely developed a distinctive, stable amalgam of series and serialization; on such shows, one or more of the half-dozen storylines featured on a given night may conclude, but others will develop over a number of weeks. (p. 92)

highlighting the effect of serialization on the medical and legal procedural forms years before the migration of dramatic programming to cable (see also, Parry-Giles and Traudt 1991; Schatz 1987).

Missing from these otherwise helpful taxonomic descriptions of contemporary dramatic serial form is a more robust account of the procedural, which occupies an ambivalent critical space. Procedurals have been a staple of broadcast programming since Dragnet’s 1951 premiere, and they remain wildly popular according to Nielsen ratings. Yet, they also tend to be figured by popular and critical discourses as “middlebrow” television insofar as they often lack industry prestige but have demonstrable mass appeal. TGW falls outside of this pejorative description, but its relationship to the procedural form remains ambiguous, with fans of the program hermeneutically categorizing the series using the language of both procedural and serialized forms. Take, for example, a thread on the social networking site Reddit (itself parodied in TGW as “Scabbit”) titled “Is The Good Wife a Bingeable Show?” Reddit uses an epistemology of crowdsourcing, such that the knowledge produced in its threads is often legitimated by users who self-declare expertise on the thread’s topic. This particular thread (Reddit 2014) includes many examples of fans attempting to categorize the series’ narrative form:

These comments indicate to me a certain ambiguity on the part of fans on how to view TGW structurally, tying specific viewing behaviors—binge watching—to the series’ form. These comments imply that one cannot “binge” on a procedural, that sophisticated audiences resist repetition, and that the series might initially resemble a procedural, but succumbs to the tempting logic of serialization as it proceeds. Yet, fans’ hermeneutic efforts contrast, unsurprisingly, with critical discourses surrounding the series, even if TV critics approach the series with the same generic ambiguity (see VanDerWerff 2011). Again, similar arguments are articulated—for example, cable and premium cable programming are more complex than network programming—but in such a way that determines narrative form: TGW may be a procedural, but its season-long serialized arcs are reminiscent of the melodramatic primetime soaps of the 1980s.

According to Jane Feuer (1995, 124), “Serial form and multiple plot structure appear to give TV melodrama a greater potential for multiple and aberrant readings than do other forms of popular narrative,” thus perhaps explaining the range of contradictory and shifting positions about how best to describe TGW’s narrative form and genre. However, rather than read this as a consequence of network or as symptomatic of changing viewing behaviors, I read TGW as emblematic of the effects of serialization on the procedural: it is a series that is both procedural and serialized habitually. Reading TGW as a habitual domestic drama finds it in close temporal quarters with digital culture. Wendy Chun (2016), for example, asserts that habit is exemplary of digital culture’s paradoxical temporality, observing that our understanding of “new” media must change when we divorce it from its always already compromised “newness.” Digital media objects thus become most important when they are not “new” but instead habitual; we habitually update both our hardware and our software “to remain (close to) the same.”

Consider the series’ occasional dalliances with “previously on” recap segments that allow for character arcs to continue (Alicia and Will’s flirtations, Cary’s arrest) without taking up time in the episode. Consider, too, the representation of the close-knit legal community on the program, with its regular rotation of judges and opposing counsel that allows for running gags: such as attorney Nancy Crozier’s (Mamie Gummer) faux-naiveté and Judge Patrice Lessner’s (Ana Gasteyer) demand that counsel preface their claims with “in my opinion.” Although it may be hard to imagine how Cook County, with over five million residents, has such an intimate legal scene, these cameos not only add to the series’ prestige factor (with high-profile actors and actresses playing these roles) but also present challenges in terms of character engagement. In one 2012 interview, the series showrunners said of such dynamic supporting characters: “the show wants to embrace complexity and baroqueness, because that helps hide magic tricks in terms of plot devices you don’t see coming” (Lacob 2012). These devices habitually update the series’ procedural form, mostly working unnoticed to adjust audiences to the demands of serialization. ⁵ A viewer of TGW does not have to start from the pilot to enjoy the series (at least, according to a few fans on Reddit), but can be habituated into more serialized plotlines, such as the bombshell narrative surprise of Will’s death in season 5, which violated the unspoken procedural rule of not killing off key characters. Even such a momentous event was framed within the case-of-the-week episodic format, thus upending viewer expectations of—and trust in—procedural storytelling. Thus, even in its structure, TGW mobilizes a smartphone logic of rhythmic regularity: just as the viewer becomes acclimated to the habitual pace of law, politics, and family, the series melodramatically updates itself, requiring the viewer’s affective labor to habituate, once again, into the narrative.

A Message that May Never Be Understood

Of course, television’s commitment to multiple forms of narrative is always already gendered, and thanks to the work of feminist television scholars such as Tania Modleski (1983), we know all too well how televisual flow mimics the rhythms of household labor, producing intermittent viewers who glance at programs. Furthermore, these intermittent viewers rely heavily on sound cues for structuring engagements with the text, as television primarily inherited its modes of address from radio. While these tenets of television criticism have been challenged in recent years by technological developments that demand a more immersive viewing experience (encapsulated, for example, in binge watching, which seemingly requires a viewer’s uninterrupted attention), TGW redefines the “rhythms of reception” through its unique engagement with the mobile smartphone. Reviews of the series from both the tech sector and Hollywood frequently mention the incorporation of technology into the program’s diegetic world, with Clive Thompson (2013) writing in Wired that the series “may be the best force for digital literacy in pop culture right now,” and The New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum (2012) furthering earlier comparisons by writing that “put bluntly, The Good Wife is to the digital debate as The Wire is to the drug war” (see also, Herman 2013). These accolades, however, principally emerge on the level of content and rarely, if ever, on the level of form. Although many of the series’ most climactic moments heralded by critics and beloved by fans are mediated through the smartphone, a few in particular are notable for how they isolate one specific characteristic of the smartphone—its capacity for voice messaging—and use it to manage both the melodramatic flow of the series as well as that of a spectator increasingly ruled by habit.

The ability of smartphones to record voice messages in network without requiring separate hardware amplified the agency of individual users to communicate with others, though text messaging would soon become a preferred way to communicate privately among younger generations. Gerard Goggin (2012, 32, 127) points to voicemail as a distinguishing feature of the device with regard to its use in public settings: voicemail allows one to reject unwanted calls, but it also creates an archivable recording that can be replayed at a later time—and tellingly, replayed by others as well as by the user. Voicemails were used to narrate the relationship between Alicia and Will at key melodramatic points within the series, often to provoke sensational speculation for both characters and audiences.

In the last minutes of the first season finale (S1 E23, “Running”), Peter Florrick celebrates his political comeback by announcing a run for Cook County State’s Attorney, a position he held prior to his conviction for corruption and a scandal that defines the series’ premise. Alicia is watching the announcement from the side of the dais with Peter’s campaign manager, Eli Gold, when she receives a call from Will. At this point in the narrative, Alicia and Will—former Georgetown law classmates—are beginning to admit their sexual chemistry to themselves, having locked lips six episodes earlier (S1 E17, “Heart”) and having attempted a date together (S1 E19, “Boom”) that was foiled by Peter violating his house arrest. On the call, Will begins to profess his love for Alicia, who in turn acknowledges her interest but demands details on how such a relationship would realistically work. Alicia subsequently hangs up, and as she walks toward Peter to play the role of the supportive political spouse, Will calls back, and a series of shots alternate between Peter’s speech (from the perspective of the news cameras in attendance), a close-up of Alicia’s phone announcing Will’s call, and a reverse-shot of Alicia, caught in contemplation over whether to accept or ignore Will’s call. This sequence is essentially repeated twice, and the episode fades to black with the sound of the phone ringing, ending the season with a Manichean choice for Alicia between two men: accept Will’s call and pursue new love, or ignore Will’s call and play the “good wife” once again.

The second season premiere (S2 E1, “Taking Control”) begins by repeating many of the sequences that ended the previous episode. Most of the voice conversations, however, are shown from Alicia’s point of view only, compressing the scene. The sequence that cuts between Peter, Alicia, and the ringing phone is repeated, but with one less close-up on the phone, shifting the focus to Peter and Alicia’s gazes. This has the effect of representing Will through the sound of a ringing phone, the shots of which have been excised from the sequence: Will becomes the disembodied voice, and without a body, he no longer has any physical commitment to the scene. Thus, Eli grabs the phone from Alicia’s hand as Peter whisks her up on stage, and Will leaves two voicemails: first one that lets Alicia go as he watches Peter’s announcement on television from his office, and second, one in which he changes his mind and professes his love for her. The possibilities engendered by this second voicemail, however, are curtailed by Eli, who listens to the message on Alicia’s phone and deletes it.

This seemingly resolves the narrative cliffhanger of the first season and propels the second season narrative into exploring Alicia’s relationship with Peter; however, the deleted voicemail’s significance does not expire. In a seventh season episode (S7 E10, “KSR”), Eli finds himself estranged from a romantic interest of his own, wealthy businesswoman and Florrick donor Courtney Page (Vanessa Williams), while managing Alicia’s romantic relationships once again (this time in the interests of Peter’s presidential campaign). In a heartfelt conversation with Alicia in her apartment, he counsels her not to let Peter’s campaign serve as an obstacle to her happiness, admitting to deleting the voicemail and informing Alicia of its contents. Her reaction—in true Good Wife style, occurring in the following episode (S7 E11, “Iowa”)—is to throw dishes at Eli in a display of emotional fireworks before excising him from her life for a few episodes. Alicia’s phone becomes the site of so many breakdowns in trust: Alicia trusted her phone to communicate an accurate number of voicemails; Will trusted that if he left a message declaring his love and commitment, Alicia would receive it; and Alicia trusted Eli as a friend who would not violate her privacy by deleting the voicemail. The closely knit characters trust in their phones unequivocally, even if human agency is responsible for the miscommunications that shatter trust between relationships.

The resurrection of the voicemail storyline borrows heavily from soap opera storytelling as well, exemplary of what Abigail De Kosnik (2013, 356) calls the “deep seed and long reveal,” in which “a deep seed need not have any ‘authorial’ intent behind it, but the reveal must accord with viewers’ recollection of characters’ histories in order to ring true.” The emphasis on viewer memory produces an affective relationship between structure, content, and audience, but one dependent on technology for its fruition. Voicemails therefore function in the narrative as both information that can be regulated by outside sources (since all smartphones convert voices to binary code) as well as characters by proxy, who can be accepted, ignored, or deleted at will.

The voicemail also plays a crucial role in one of the most critically acclaimed episodes of the entire series, “The Last Call” (S5 E16). This episode is better known to audiences as the one immediately following the traumatizing death of Will Gardner, who was the victim of a courthouse shooting in “Dramatics, Your Honor” (S5 E15). Like “Running”/”Taking Control,” a ringing phone provides the cliffhanger—Will has been shot, and both Diane and Kalinda are attempting to get ahold of Alicia to break the news—with a similar mise-en-scène: here, Alicia is sitting on a dais about to introduce her husband at the Chicago Correspondents’ Club annual luncheon. In his role as political handler, Eli receives a phone call from Kalinda, who is at the hospital where Will’s body waits. Eli refuses to summon Alicia to the phone at first (reinforcing his understanding of the importance of the phone to change a narrative’s direction), but Kalinda’s news changes his mind. Above the background of an awkward stand-up comic—Alicia’s opening act—Alicia takes the call, saying “Hello?” as the screen fades to black and the credits roll.

Viewer reaction to the episode was intense, as many fans could not, would not believe that Will Gardner was actually dead. Such a storytelling decision violated every convention of network procedurals, fitting in more stylistically with highly serialized cable dramas. Showrunners King Robert and Michelle King (2014) released a statement to fans crediting the move to actor Josh Charles’ decision to leave the series but defending the creative decision to kill Will off as a turning point that “keep[s] the show from slipping into a numbing sameness, and keep[s] the characters fresh: because you see how they react to a completely new status quo.”This description is reminiscent of the logic of the update, a habitual act announcing a change in cast, a new status quo. While the characters may have to reset on hearing of Will’s death (as fans did in the days and weeks following the episode’s broadcast), the episodic setting of the series—each weekly case punctuated by the familiar supporting cast—does not change, thus “resetting” the series in a more conventional grammar, as when an episodic series hits a “reset” button at the end of each episode and begins the narrative anew from a recurring situation. However, in the diegetic world, Alicia could not reset just yet, as she had yet to learn of Will’s death: fan speculation revolved around her immediate reaction to Kalinda’s phone call. The smartphone thus not only announces a habitual update to the narrative but also frames the process of grieving Will, narratively rendered again through the smartphone. Before one can grieve, one must pick up the phone, and this is true both for Alicia and for the fan watching at home.

As it turns out, “The Last Call” refers not to the last call of the story (Kalinda’s call to Alicia, on Eli’s phone) but to a voicemail Will left on Alicia’s phone earlier that day, which she discovers while sitting in the Lockhart Gardner offices. Shots alternate between a close-up of the Apple voicemail interface and Alicia’s troubled expression at receiving a notification for a voicemail from her dead lover. A third shot zooming in on her trembling fingers breaks up this identificatory sequence, illustrating the promise of touch to unlock omniscience. Yet, the voicemail itself is a fragment: Will begins “Alicia . . .” but is then interrupted by Judge Polizzi (“Mr. Gardner, we’re just about ready here”). Responding “H-Hold on, Your Honor,” he tells Alicia “I’ll call you back” and hangs up, distracted by the business of court. The voicemail is neither a meaty declaration of love nor the failed miscommunication of an accidental “pocket” dial. It is void of personal affect while it multitasks between professional conversations. ⁶ The voicemail suggests that Will had something important to say to Alicia before being interrupted by the judge, testifying to the importance of mobility (he could not call Alicia easily during a break from court otherwise, or at least without a handy pay phone nearby) and to the compartmentalization of everyday life as determined by a “mobile logic” (Ling and Donner 2009, 28–29). The distracted context of the “last call” is itself anticlimactic, as it is a narrativization of the bodily incorporation of mobile logic; even though the voicemail is aural, it still projects an affective opacity onto its message, not unlike text-based forms of digital communication (email, text message) in which the tone of the message is unclear, becoming climactic only through the act of interpretation. Deploying this hermeneutic code is the once-distracted spectator of TV melodrama, no longer glancing at the screen (per Modleski and Ellis) but gazing directly and deeply into Alicia’s eyes in grief: audiences may use their phones to accommodate distraction at work in the “real world,” but here succumb to serialization, putting their phones down at home so that Alicia may pick hers up.

Alicia, in fact, spends the remainder of the episode attempting to decode the fragment and extract the sort of meaning from it that would help her attain closure with Will, even conjecturing potential scenarios under which he would have called (reprimanding her for poaching a client or negotiating a peace settlement between their warring firms). She never succeeds in this quest for knowledge; the voicemail becomes an epistemological lockbox, rich with meaning that will never be revealed to Alicia or her fans. As an object of knowledge, the smartphone is synesthetic, allowing one to look and listen through touch. In the shot of Alicia’s shaky fingers, the act of touch structures melodramatic identification, as touching the phone becomes a metonym for touching Will. In writing about the iPhone—adopted as product placement by Alicia and CBS—Kristopher L. Cannon and Jennifer M. Barker (2012, 76) read the shiny device as a tool for child’s play, noting that its functionality operates via addition:

The iPhone begs to be plugged into users’ ears but is, simultaneously, willing to listen to us (speak on the phone, speak commands through voice control, or speak to ourselves while we record voice memos), which collapses the distance between inside (the machine) and outside (our bodies).

However, the voicemail remains foreclosed within a network, trapped between inside and outside without the satisfaction of resolution. What was initially a device that promised efficiency in transitioning between the episodic demands of law and the serialized demands of politics and romance is, for a moment, the obstacle between Alicia and narrative closure. Her phone governs her ability to grieve through its interruption of the circuit of speech and listening that exists between two callers. Like an update that freezes in time, unable to reset fully or to move forward easily, the “last call” demands a consideration of the smartphone as an object that structures a character’s response to a narrative catastrophe as well as one that evokes emotional deliberation and uncertainty: strange habits of labor, love, and life.

A Medium that May Never Be Trusted

That Alicia finds out about Will’s death during a phone conversation with Kalinda is appropriate not merely because it highlights the smartphone as a committed object within the narrative—certainly a ghostly character in its own right in “The Last Call”—but also because phone conversations between Alicia and Kalinda, as opposed to face-to-face interactions, had become the diegetic norm. In August 2014, approximately a month prior to the sixth season premiere, reporter Emily Orley noted that Alicia and Kalinda had not shared a scene together in over thirty episodes, since “Red Team, Blue Team” (S4 E14). While Orley noted the history between the two characters was rocky—Alicia having discovered that Kalinda had slept with Peter once many years ago—to imagine that one of the series’ most privileged relationships was playing out for the greater part of a season and half entirely by phone was indeed significant. And, sure enough, the sixth season continued the characters’ estrangement from each other, culminating in the season finale (S6 E22, “Wanna Partner?”), when Kalinda leaves the program after one final tequila shot with Alicia, seemingly providing momentary closure before she disappears to evade prosecution.

Yet, fans discovered as the bar scene progressed that the actresses never touched one another; something about the chemistry between the two actresses seemed forced, even beyond the context of their relationship. It was later revealed that the scene was shot with actresses Julianna Margulies and Archie Panjabi separately, using body doubles for single shots of each character and post-production splicing for the reconciliation. Most commentary on “Kaliciagate,” as it came to be called, asserts bad blood between Margulies and Panjabi as the reason for the tension, with unofficial comments from Panjabi indicating that the split was at Margulies’—also an executive producer on the series—request. To me, what is remarkable about the controversy is that the characters were able to get away with it for so long; that it made perfect sense for Alicia and Kalinda to communicate naturally through the phone. However, this underscores a different function of the smartphone to TGW’s narrative: as a tool of management not simply for character development and serialized storytelling, but as a tool to manage the actors and actresses themselves, a cellular deus-ex-machina solution for cast acrimony.

Framed through this perspective, Kaliciagate represents not the deterioration of a friendship, but a naturally melodramatic progression of communication following past events. It summons to mind the gendered gossip and stereotypical characterizations of “diva” behavior on- and off-set while also giving production staff a means to negotiate differences between producers and the cast, but it also serves as a technique that can define a relationship as it changes over time. Perhaps the smartphone manages the flow of information throughout the series because of these alleged concerns of production; but such rumors, like the last call, remain a mystery. Or, perhaps, TGW’s handling of the controversy solidifies the importance of face-to-face interaction, however, manufactured by Hollywood, for fans invested in character development, as opposed to the habitual conversational tone enabled by smartphones. Yet, if the spliced scene represents an unsatisfying exit for fans, it merely reflects the extent to which technology both enriches and limits TGW’s narrative and style. Kaliciagate only resonates because the mobile smartphone was able to mediate the affective relationship between two characters over several seasons, a testament to the series’ critical engagement with technology. This engagement, however, requires turning inwards on itself; betrayed by bad lighting and imperfect editing, viewers may be left to conclude that while we may never be able to trust technology fully, we must accept the fact that our phones provide a form of genuine communication with our multitasked, hyperactive lives. Like Alicia attempting to orient herself morally as she becomes a citizen who crosses public and private spheres with ease, the viewer must place trust in technological management skeptically yet pleasurably—a melodramatic investment in television’s own cellular obsession.