The acting by Margulies is striking and feels deeply authentic. Simple statements like “I’m not built to be an unhappy person” resonate with everyone who has experienced grief. The writing is focused and deeply personal, but also universal. She confesses she’s tired of it all, the laundry, the house, the everything. She admits she may not even like her kids. Once she does, everything pours out of the series' heroine. Lucca (Cush Jumbo) approaches Alicia (Juliana Margulies) and invites her to open up about her grief. This is the philosophy behind this brutal monologue in The Good Wife. So to hear a character in a television show say exactly how she is feeling, with an unrelenting, unpleasant, devastating honesty, it reads to us as shocking. In day to day life, we spend so much time sidestepping the truth, either to avoid confrontation or judgement or embarrassing ourselves. Sometimes the most shocking monologues in film and television can just come from speaking completely and totally honestly. It lays out a sprawling, angry mission statement for the controversial, messy, and ambitious show to come. This monologue arrests the audience's attention and doesn’t let go. It doesn’t matter whether you agree with the character’s politics or not. Midway through his cruel, pessimistic speech, he leans into the past, and waxes nostalgic for the America he remembers. He then goes on to deliver a blistering, rapid fire takedown of the student’s question, firing off statistics and insults without pausing to breathe. It’s not the greatest country on earth,” Will says to the stunned crowd. Spurred on by the bickering of his fellow political panelists, and hallucinations of a woman from his past, Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) lets his frustration get the better of him and delivers a scathing response to a student’s question of why America is the greatest country on earth. While this monologue from the pilot certainly had the potential to lean that way, the writing is so sharp and the performance by Jeff Daniels is so impassioned, it’s impossible to not be swept up in it. Aaron Sorkin (who, rest assured, will make more than one appearance on this list) may draw criticisms for injecting too many of his own beliefs into his writing and veering into preachy-ness at times. Say what you will about the later seasons of The Newsroom, but the show begins masterfully.
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