The series focuses on Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies), whose husband Peter Florrick (Chris Noth), a former Cook County state’s attorney, has been jailed following a very public sex and corruption scandal. Alicia returns to her old job as a litigator (after taking years out to be a mother) to provide for her two children. The series was partly inspired by the Eliot Spitzer prostitution scandal, as well as by other prominent American political sex scandals, particularly those of John Edwards and Bill Clinton:
Michelle [King]: We came up with the idea about a year and half ago. There had been this waterfall of these kinds of scandals, from Bill and Hillary [Clinton], to Dick Morris, to Eliot Spitzer, to name just a few. I think they’re all over our culture. And there was always this image of the husband up there apologizing and the wife standing next to him. I think the show began when we asked, “What are they thinking?” And Robert and I started talking about it from there. … You know, what’s interesting about a lot of these political scandals is that the women are lawyers, too. Hillary [Clinton] is a lawyer. Elizabeth Edwards is a lawyer. I think that got us thinking along those lines. That is, we knew she had to go back to work, and we had so many female lawyers to draw on.
