The Good Wife

After her Emmy-winning stint on the long-running medical series ER, Golden Globe winner Julianna Margulies makes a triumphant return to television in 3’s highly anticipated new series The Good Wife.

The Good Wife tells the story of what happens to Alicia Florrick (Margulies) when her husband, Peter (Chris Noth), an Illinois state's attorney, is implicated in a sex and corruption scandal and sent to prison. The show's "ripped-from-the-headlines" quality is particularly topical in our post-Spitzer, post-Sanford world.

The show's husband-and-wife producers, Michelle and Robert King, however, emphasize that this is not a show about powerful men and their bad behaviour; it's about the people left in a scandal's wake, including Alicia, Peter's mother and the couple's two teenage children.

"[Telling Alicia's story] seemed much less certain, much more interesting," Robert King tells ET, "because how do you really remake your life when everybody seems to have an opinion about how you should remake your life?"

The first scene of the premiere episode echoes the news conference in which Gov. Eliot Spitzer confessed his misdeeds - with his wife staring blankly at his side. Margulies recalls watching the scandal unfold.

"In my head I kept thinking, 'Well, why are you standing there?'" But bringing Alicia to life has changed her opinion about people like Silda Wall Spitzer and Hillary Clinton.

"It gave me a tremendous amount of respect for them because I was so quick to judge them until I stood in Alicia's shoes," she says.

After her husband's incarceration, Alicia needs a job, and that's where the show takes its basic structure. She's offered a position at a high-powered Chicago law firm by Will Gardner (Josh Charles), an old friend from law school. The firm's top litigator, Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski), mentors Alicia as she regains her legal footing.