I can understand Julianna Margulies' bid to break through into TV, which has become a mid-career fortress for some of Hollywood's brightest leading ladies. Kyra Sedgwick, Mary-Louise Parker, Glenn Close, and Holly Hunter have all carved out serial drama dominions all across television. Which brings us to Julianna Margulies, who once called the front desk at Sarah Lawrence a couple years ago and just as snappily hung up. Julianna Margulies, who was among ER's inaugural team. Julianna Margulies, whose last stab at broadcast television didn't fare so well. But let's blame Fox for that one, because Canterbury's Law was actually a solid, well-acted piece of television. Margulies was at her finest then. Which now, more or less, places us squarely at odds with The Good Wife, a story torn from the headlines. And then cut-and-pasted back on CBS with all the fun parts redacted.

The Good Wife is basically about that whole sordid Elizabeth Edwards-John Edwards-Rielle Hunter scandal, but in a fictionalized way that doesn't really use any of their names. And because we're dealing with broadcast television, Margulies does not wear the heels of Hunter, which at least would've had some thrilling, trollopy echoes of Secret Diary of a Call Girl to it, but dons Mrs. Edwards' comfortable Payless flats. More annoyingly, this scandal's already been played out. Why relive everything under the guise of getting inside the mind of "the woman behind the man"? Although you could argue that cheating politicians and their troubled wives have been around since the dawn of politics, so maybe The Good Wife is nothing if not evergreen.

But a bad omen for the series: CBS. Such a safe network will probably inhibit a drama from reaching its full potential so as not to upset viewers. You see, reader, CBS fans tend to have delicate, frail hummingbird hearts. They are upset by unlikeable protagonists and complicated plots. Compound that with the cougar storyline they're obviously setting up by casting that dude who played Tucker Max in the namesake douchewibbler's biopic as Margulies' sexy foil, and cancellation/straight-to-DVD limbo is all but inevitable.

Although more fitting would be a quick move to CBS' pay-cable sister Showtime. In which case, perhaps Margulies would finally get that cable dominion that so many of her peers can boast and we'd get a chance to see her lob some major F-bombs.