'Good Wife' creators map CBS drama's final act

For fans of The Good Wife, the beginning of the end starts Sunday.

The CBS series has called it quits after seven seasons, and announced that the next nine episodes will be its last in dramatic fashion —  in a Super Bowl promo. And while questions about whether the show would continue started to surface earlier this season after husband-and-wife creating team Robert and Michelle King announced they would exit in May, CBS programming chief Glenn Geller said last month that their departure wouldn't necessarily influence whether the show would continue for an eighth season.

Many of the series stars' contracts were due to expire this year, adding fuel to the speculation about the drama's fate. Among them: Julianna Margulies, who has won two Emmys for her portrayal of attorney and Chicago politician's wife Alicia Florrick,

'The Good Wife' calls it quits

When Good Wife (Sundays, 9 p.m. ET/PT) made its debut in September 2009, 13.7 million viewers saw Alicia standing by her prosecutor husband,  Peter (Chris Noth), as he defended himself from charges of political corruption (and later, infidelity).After Peter was sent to prison, Alicia entered the workforce as a junior partner at a law firm where Will Gardner (Josh Charles), her former law school lover, was a partner. Fans were hooked into the rough ride ahead as Alicia navigated cases, trials and personal drama involving friendships and intimate relationships. Enemies, friends and lovers were intertwined with story lines involving love, deceit and death.

When the show started, the Kings had the idea that "it would only go 13 episodes because that is the only thing we'd ever done before that," Robert King said Monday. Once the series launched, "We had to think ahead and that's when we started thinking in terms of what was the full story we wanted to tell and how long we wanted to tell it."

For The Good Wife, the Kings came to realize "that the show could only really support  — and the story of Alicia Florrick could only support — seven years, so we started to build toward that," Robert said.

Don't look for any flash-forwards to show what happens to Alicia. "We're trying to make (the ending) fit seamlessly with what's come before, and we haven't typically structured this show that way," Michelle said.

'Good Wife' creators explain shocking episode

And while the Kings expect familiar guest stars to return in the final episodes, they won't say who. "It's not going to be exactly the end of Seinfeld in that way," Robert said. "We just kind of want to get in a little bit of check-in with characters that we've seen."

Just don't look for Archie Panjabi, who played investigator Kalinda Sharma, or Mike Colter, who played drug kingpin Lemond Bishop.

And while the show may have continued even without the Kings, Michelle said, "Everybody came to the same decision: To be able to go all together is what we all wanted."

Adds Robert: "We're ending the show because it really should be a show that is ended. ... A character shouldn't kind of be pushed from year to year and made to go through some paces because someone has to make money. It's really lovely that CBS will allow it to end."

The series finale will air May 8, but the husband-and-wife producers are already working on BrainDead, a new CBS drama due this summer.