BrainDead

While The Good Wife, a flagship series that ran for 7 seasons on CBS-TV, has passed into history (the series ended on May 8th), the creators of that show, Robert & Michelle King, without missing a beat, have launched a brand new series, called BrainDead which premiered last night (June 13th).

The main question I have now is this – will continued viewing of this show render me into some sort of mushy-brained, incoherent, babbling and drooling blogger.

BrainDead’s story can be summed up rather quickly. The setting is Washington DC, and a good part of the show is set in the building where the US Senators have their offices. It may be The Russell Senate Office Building, a Washington DC landmark, or it may not be. But within these corridors of power, running in the hallways is not permitted, and even walking fast is looked down on.

We learn this as we are focused on the winsome Mary Elizabeth Winstead who plays Laurel Healy. She’s an early 30-something documentary film maker, and she’s in need of funding for her project about Melanesian Choral Singers. Her brother Luke Healy is played by Danny Pino, and he is a Senator.

If Laurel will go to work for her senator brother for six months, her Dad, Dean Healy (played by Good Wife alum Zach Grenier) a rich something or other, will pay off her college loan debt which currently amounts to being in the neighborhood of 200K. In short she has no choice.

Her first day on the job begins at once, and you may be shocked to learn that the Senator’s offices are anything but luxe. All the money that the Kings and the their producers put into sets and office furnishings on The Good Wife is nowhere to be seen in this production.

But that may be the point. After all this is public service. Laurel is assigned the job of CRA – that stands for Constituent Relations Administrator, and her job is to listen to, then work on and, hopefully fix the issues or problems of Senator Healy’s constituents.

There’s no manual or training course for this job. You listen and you learn as you go. Of course, the needy constituents that line the chairs in the waiting room are a motley crew. Except for one woman who says – My husband, he was away at sea, but now that he’s back, he’s not the same. He’s my husband but he’s not my husband.

Mmmm, that sounds strange.

But it is only the beginning. Still to come are Aaron Tveit (Graceland and before that Les Miserables) as Gareth Ritter, a somewhat shady political consultant/bagman/fixer, Tony Shalhoub (Monk) as US Senator Red Wheatus, plus Megan Hilty (Smash).