Actress Archie Panjabi, seen as Kalinda Sharma in the CBS drama “The Good Wife,” will be exiting the show after six seasons. The actress has signed a talent deal with 20th Century TV, and will therefore not be staying on “The Good Wife” when her contract is up at the end of the season, Entertainment Weekly reported. Panjabi will reportedly headline the drama pilot.
Panjabi is the second major actor to leave the show in the last year. Josh Charles, who played Will Gardner on the show, had asked if he could depart the show after Season 4. He remained on the show for the majority of the following season and was killed in a shocking courtroom shooting during Season 5.
While fans are surely collectively gasping at the news, creatively it actually makes a lot of sense, says Andres Reiher in her blog on Zap2it. “The Good Wife” is about its title character, Alicia Florrick, played by Julianna Marguiles, Reiher says, noting that the show may feel like an ensemble a lot of the time, but it really isn’t – it is “Alicia’s world, and the rest of the varied, interesting characters just live in it.”
Several bloggers have pointed out that the show-writers haven’t known exactly what to do with Kalinda since the bombshell of her past relationship with Peter and the subsequent arc of Kalinda and Alicia repairing their relationship. Perhaps Kalinda’s departure is long overdue, Reiher says.
Panjabi has been a major character on the show over the last six years as the infamous investigator who has friends in every part of town. She worked for Lockhart/Gardner and, after attempting to jump ship, Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski) refused to join Florrick, Agos & Associates this season without her loyal spy.
The character was, for a very long time, a central focus of the show: Kalinda and Alicia became fast friends in the pilot episode and worked closely together on cases for The Good Wife’s first four seasons. At the end of Season 2—a season for which Panjabi won an Emmy, Alicia found out that Kalinda had once slept with her husband, Peter, effectively ending their friendship and cleaving Kalinda from the show’s main character. As of now, it’s been 30 episodes since the two appeared in a scene together, writes Willa Paskin in a blog on Slate.com.
“A few years ago this might have seemed like a serious blow to the series, but ‘The Good Wife’ has now shown itself more than capable of rebounding from the loss of a major character, and, besides, it’s been a while since Kalinda was truly a major character,” Paskin writes. “It was probably time for her to go.”
“Archie is an Emmy award-winning dramatic actress, and rightly so,” said Sharon Klein, 20th’s executive vice president of casting. “Her work on ‘The Good Wife’ has been extraordinary, and the time has come for her to star in a project of her own. We couldn’t be happier that it will be with us,” she added.
For her role as Kalinda Sharma, Panjabi earned a Primetime Emmy Award in 2010 and a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Image Award in 2012, as well as two further Emmy nominations, one Golden Globe nomination, and three Screen Actors Guild Award nominations shared with the cast. Her other notable roles include Yasmin Husseini in “Yasmin” (2005), Pinky Bhamra in “Bend It Like Beckham” (2002) and Asra Nomani in “A Mighty Heart” (2007).