Imaginary ‘Good Wife’ feud continues to heat up

For a feud that “The Good Wife” swears doesn’t exist, things sure are heating up between Julianna Margulies and Archie Panjabi.

At Sunday’s New Yorker Festival, Margulies addressed the rumors that she and Panjabi are locked in a secret years-long feud that seriously affected the filming of the CBS staple series. Margulies dismissed the rumors as “Totally gossip” and suggested that those trying to say otherwise were making something out of nothing, even going so far as to suggest that it was sexist that people were theorizing about a feud between the two women behind the scenes.

Margulies also went on to defend the circumstances surrounding the Season 6 finale’s infamous green screen scene, wherein her and Panjabi’s characters get a drink in a bar. The actresses were unable to film the scene together, resorting instead to green screen.

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“It was shot the way Robert [King] wanted to shoot it, and the story line, too,” Margulies said, before going on to say that there were additional difficulties in scheduling the shoot around Panjabi’s work on “The Fall.”

There is, however, one significant person who disagrees with Margulies’ description of how the finale filming panned out, and that’s Panjabi, who took to Twitter to say that not only was “The Fall” not in production at that time, but “I was in New York ready to film the scene!”

As if the actresses’ blatant disagreement about the filming of the scene weren’t enough, it’s not as though theorizing about a feud is so off base. The last time that Margulies and Panjabi actually shared a scene together was in Season 4, Episode 14 of “The Good Wife.” That may not mean much to the casual show watcher, but fans of the series know that by the time Panjabi left the show at the end of Season 6, the pair had gone more than 50 episodes without sharing a scene.

Which is to say nothing of the bizarre lengths the show went to in order to deny any strangeness between the pair, all of which came to a head in that three-minute scene in the Season 6 finale, Panjabi’s final episode on the show, in which the women, ostensibly, have a drink at a bar together. It’s hard to say what was more unbelievable about the moment: that it was impossible to get the two to share a scene or that CBS thought they could use a shoddily utilized green screen to try to pull a fast one on the audience.

As “The Good Wife” enters what is likely its final season, its first without Panjabi, whether the actresses had some sort of falling out should be less relevant than ever. Yet the more CBS and the cast and crew of the show deny, the more convincing it becomes that there’s something worth denying.

Follow me on Twitter at @midwestspitfire.

libby.hill@latimes.com

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