Once you get past your assumption that The Good Wife is going to be an adult drama along the lines of the much-missed Once and Again and will instead be an elaborately set up courtroom drama, the hour long turns out to be one of the best shows to premiere yet this season.

Still, there’s a lingering whiff of disappointment that what the ads and the features made sound so topical, with its “Politician’s wife humiliated by his affairs and public disgrace!” premise, turns out to be “Humiliated six months ago, a politician’s wife encounters obstacles when she returns to the workplace after 13 years of raising a family!” As good as the show is, there’s still the feeling that the talents of Julianne Margulies and Chris Noth (perfectly cast as the sort of Illinois politician who gets off on sucking a hooker’s toes) are wasted on a sleek lawyer show.

Still, the show (executive produced by Ridley Scott) is damn good. Hopefully the writers will follow the dictates set up in the pilot and leave the comic cases to shows like Drop Dead Diva, focusing less on wacky clients and more on the quiet, dogged work of Margulies’s Alicia Florrick, a woman with everything to prove.

Alicia has to convince the snippy, younger lawyers at her firm (where an old friend has hired her as a defense counselor) that having children doesn’t make a woman stupid. She has to prove that she’s more than a mouthpiece for her husband, whose disgraced presence hangs over her like a cloud. The prosecution and state attorney are convinced that her legal skills are nothing more than the ventriloquist machinations of her incarcerated husband, an assumption she quickly clears up in a devastatingly icy conversation at the courthouse.

The supporting cast are all fantastic (including Christine Baranski as the other older female lawyer at the firm, and fiercely protective of her turf) and Margulies looks fantastic. There’s a welcome adult feel to The Good Wife that separates it from the rest of the lawyer pack currently on air—most of the other shows currently on network television, actually. But one still regrets that the fall-out of the scandal has been left behind in the opening minute of the series for a case-of-the-week format.

Photo courtesy of CBS.