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Matthew Gilbert

Yahoo! ‘The Good Wife’ is ending

A commercial during the Super Bowl announced that the seventh season of “The Good Wife” will be its last.CBS/file/CBS

The Broncos won, a bunch of brand-name advertisers won, Beyonce won, God and Budweiser won, and, in a bit of quieter news, so did devoted fans of “The Good Wife.”

During last night’s Super Bowl, a commercial for the CBS drama starring Julianna Margulies announced that this season, the show’s seventh, would be its last. “Last nine episodes begin next Sunday,” the 20-second ad read, flashing through images of Margulies across many seasons and many sprayed-to-within-an-inch-of-their-lives hairstyles.

Fans of “The Good Wife” win because now we know the show will not peter out in disgrace like too many other network series including “The Office, “ER,” “Glee,” “Scrubs,” “Desperate Housewives,” and “The X-Files.” It will end on May 8 with its reputation intact as a drama that, despite some ups and downs, despite a few alterations to its giant cast of recurring characters, stood above anything else on network TV until its end. In recent years, “The Good Wife” has been the only network drama to consistently and deservedly win Emmy nominations.

While “Grey’s Anatomy” continues on ABC long past its creative life, barely recognizable as the charming and addictive soap opera of its early years, “The Good Wife” will end with a degree of grace, just as the storylines have reached their natural conclusions.

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Questions about the longevity of “The Good Wife” began in mid-January, when “Good Wife” creators and showrunners Robert and Michelle King announced they’d be stepping down at the end of this season. The couple have two other series in the works, a comic-thriller for CBS called “BrainDead” and a drama for Amazon about a Vatican spokeswoman called “Vatican City.” Without the Kings’ leadership, it seemed, “The Good Wife” would surely lose its formidable mojo. Margulies, who has taken home two Emmys for the role, and whose contract with the show was up for renewal, also raised suspicion last month by making reference to being unemployed in April.

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By the way, the achievements of “The Good Wife” are even more impressive when you realize that seven seasons in network TV equal 14 seasons in cable TV.

Most of the high-quality shows we celebrate these days, from “Game of Thrones” to “Breaking Bad,” feature 10 or 12 episodes per year – half that of most network shows. The fact that the Kings and their writing staff were able to keep “The Good Wife” running at such a high level across so very many hours and years is miraculous. The show struggled in the ratings for its entire run, but it remained the big prestige drama on a network primarily known for its lucrative franchises, such as “CSI” and “NCIS.”

In some ways, “The Good Wife” has been a procedural, too. Most of the episodes have revolved around cases-of-the-week. And it has been one of TV’s smartest procedurals, because the cases have dug deeply into timely and up-and-coming issues about the Internet, privacy, and morality.

But “The Good Wife” has been so much more than a procedural at the same time, with compelling ongoing plotlines about law-firm politics, local politics, national politics, and, most important of all, the gender politics of being a woman in transition from publicly embarrassed wife to effective and emotionally powerful professional.

Now the story of Alicia Florrick will come to a close with the advantage of advance warning. The end of the series will be written as the end of the series. I will miss it, but that’s as it should be. One of the oldest clichés in the business still applies: Always leave them wanting more.

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Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @MatthewGilbert.