The Good Wife Review

It opens on a press conference, the wife standing silent beside her disgraced husband, and spends seven seasons asking what she does next. Julianna Margulies plays Alicia Florrick as a woman who learns to use the very instincts that wrecked her marriage, and the Kings write her story as a slow education in power: courtroom, law firm and campaign trail, all of them run on favours and leverage.

What set it apart on network television was its density. A case of the week sits inside serialised politics, technology and office warfare, and the guest bench of rival lawyers and judges, from Michael J. Fox to Carrie Preston, is deep enough to fill a second show. Christine Baranski, Josh Charles, Archie Panjabi and Alan Cumming are all superb, and Margulies won two Emmys in the lead. It is shot like the network procedural it is, cleanly and without flourish. The fifth season, which blows the firm apart and then delivers the most shocking episode of the run, is where critics stopped calling it the best drama on broadcast and started calling it one of the best anywhere.

The late seasons sprawl, Kalinda's storylines stall, and the finale divides even its admirers. It remains the high-water mark of the network drama in the cable age.