The Good Wife

The Good Wife opens with one of the great premise shots in television: Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies) standing beside her husband, the Cook County State's Attorney, as he resigns in a sex-and-corruption scandal. Then she has to go back to work.

Margulies plays Alicia's transformation — from humiliated political wife to formidable lawyer — across seven seasons with almost invisible precision. The case-of-the-week structure stays fresh because the cases are genuinely smart, and the show was years ahead of everyone else on technology: bitcoin, NSA surveillance, Google-style search bias and social-media juries all got episodes before most viewers knew what they were.

The ensemble is stacked: Christine Baranski's Diane, Josh Charles' Will Gardner, Alan Cumming's Eli Gold, and Archie Panjabi's Kalinda. The Will Gardner storyline in season five remains one of the most shocking and best-executed twists in network TV history.

Season five is the highlight for me.

The final two seasons wobble. Cast departures and behind-the-scenes friction (the infamous Kalinda-Alicia split-screen scenes) take the shine off the ending, and the finale is divisive.

Regardless, one of the most watchable series of recent times.