The Good Wife - The Fourth Season

In the second episode of "The Good Wife - The Fourth Season", Kalinda (Archie Punjabi) sits in the ice cream parlor with her surreptitious and unstable ex-husband Nick. He is out of prison, and he doesn't like the fact that she's been having sex with women.

"I don't remember you being such a bitch," he says.

"You have a bad memory," she replies.

He moves in closer and whispers, "Do you remember this?"

All we see is Panjabi's Emmy award winning face as he does something to her. Nonplussed, she says, "I remember you being better at it."

He pulls up two fingers and buries them into her ice cream cone, bifurcating it right down the center and leaving it dripping with melted cream.

Without missing a beat, she plunges her tongue into the opening and cleans up the mess.

One of the things that makes "The Good Wife" such a pleasure to watch is that, even though it's all about sexual scandal, the writing is so intelligent it never feels like a 'dirty' pleasure.

You can expect that, at very least, each episode will provide you with a riveting courtroom drama, where ambitions lawyers fight battles of ambiguous good and evil. There are issues of freedom, justice and retribution, but there aren't clear lines and easy answers.

At its best, you can expect deeply nuanced characters that persist through tremendous fluctuations of fortune.

Kalinda is not the main character or even part of the main plot line. She's just one example of how every little detail makes this show so interesting.

She fulfills an important roll in the episodic formula. She is the techie investigator that can pry open any mystery and provide us with answers. But she is so much more than her 'type'; worlds of complexity linger behind her enigmatic eyes.

Inexplicable and gripping characters make this series surpasses all our expectations.

With a smart, strong vulnerability, Alicia Florrick (Emmy and Golden Globe winner Julianna Margulies) tangles herself between the two men in her life, her husband Peter (Chris Noth) and her lover (Josh Charles), her work and her family.

The brilliant supporting cast includes some of Broadway's finest: Alan Cumming, Nathan Lane, Stockard Channing, John Benjamin Hickey, Bebe Neuwirth and Kristin Chenoweth.

This 6-disc set provides all 22-episodes of this rich and compelling season with special features that you won't see on TV, like Standards and Practices: Sex And The Good Wife.

It may be messy, but you still want to plunge right in.

The Good Wife - The Fourth Season
DVD
$55.98
www.cbsstore.com