Picking up on the thread of TV series with continuing fake TV series, YouTube user Charlie has helpfully put together this montage of scenes from two fake shows — Darkness at Noon and Talking at Noon — that periodically showed up in the CBS drama The Good Wife (2009-2016).

Some good stuff there, as when Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies) glances at the screen and asks her daughter, “What’s going on?” The response: “He shot the bald guy, now they’re blaming the other guy, now she’s in trouble.” Pretty elegant recap.

Or the troubled hero’s soliloquy: “People just think there are black hats and white hats, but there are black hats with white linings, and white hats with black linings, and there are hats that change back and forth between white and black, and there are striped hats. Evil rests in the soul of all men… and there is nothing you can do but curse God.”

Another nice touch is the spoiler-dispensing Talking at Noon, the chat show about the show within the show. It’s takeoff on AMC’s Talking Dead, which debuted in 2011 to hash and rehash that network’s The Walking Dead, thus inventing the now-thriving genre of “aftershow.”

According to an IndieWire article, Darkness at Noon began as a shot at another AMC show, Low Winter Sun (which had been cancelled after one season by the time Darkness at Noon appeared, which seems a bit punching down) and “evolved into an ongoing satire of TV-antihero tropes.” To me, the dopey dark existentialism evoked another cable cop show HBO’s True Detective.

In fact, every platform has its pluses and minuses, specifically when it comes to shows about crime, criminals, and the law. The premium cable of HBO and its brethren, with its primo production values and near-total freedom in terms of sex, violence, and language, sometimes seems to rely on, or revel in, those things at the expense of character and plot, and invoke a cheap nihilism. Basic cable — like AMC and FX — to me often hits a sweet spot, in shows like Fargo and Better Call Saul, but even they tend to operate with a surfeit of testosterone (note the Everest-like left breast of the Darkness at Noon corpse) and be overly concerned with who is the biggest “badass” (a favorite approbative word on Talking Noon).

The shortcomings of broadcast TV are pretty well known. Most of them relate to various sorts of unrealisticness. The Good Wife, which was the brainchild of show-runners Robert and Michelle King, was definitely better than most. I watched it for the last two-thirds of its run and enjoyed, among other things, its unusual savviness about politics and the law, the better-than-average use of “ripped from the headlines” plots, and great characters portrayed by Alan Cumming, Christine Baranski, Sarah Steele, and Stockard Channing, among others That list, along with the (not as strong IMHO) title character, suggests the good job it did reversing TV’s traditional gender imbalance.

But the show also had its share, and at times more than its share, of soapy melodrama. To get a small sense of that, here’s Wikipedia’s summary of one of the not-so-great characters:

Blake Calamar (Scott Porter) is a private investigator for the firm who competes with Kalinda. He tries to frame Kalinda for putting a doctor in a coma but fails. He finds out that her former name was Leela Tahiri and Peter helped her change it. In return, she slept with Peter.

When stuff like that happens, as someone once said, there is nothing you can do but curse God.