The Good Wife, More4

What better to brighten our morbid January nights than the return of this superior Chicago-based legal drama? The Good Wife has never attracted lurid publicity or been afflicted with cutting-edge trendiness, but instead relies on the somewhat Germanic characteristics of being fastidiously designed and impeccably constructed.

Co-creators Robert and Michelle King and executive producers Tony and Ridley Scott have grasped the importance of building the show on pin-sharp writing allied with sympathetic casting, with the result that The Good Wife consistently achieves a seamless balance between plot development and characterisation (contrast with, for instance, the BBC's new Upstairs Downstairs, which resembled a metaphorical crowd of drunks fighting in a lift by comparison).

Though, or perhaps because, an American TV hour only contains about 43 minutes of the actual programme, the show is scripted so tightly that virtually every line resonates with some sort of significance, with a bearing on either this week's storyline or the overarching themes and relationships which have been developing since the start of the first series. The only problem is that if you're feeling a bit dozy after dinner, you'll probably have to watch the whole thing again on 4oD to catch up on the nuances you missed.

This series-two opener picked up precisely where season one left off. Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies) was agonisingly poised between embarking on a long-suppressed affair with her law-firm boss Will Gardner (Josh Charles) or deciding to stick with husband Peter (Chris Noth) as he tried to make a political comeback after being unhorsed by a calamitous corruption and prostitution scandal. In the event, the decision was hijacked by Peter Florrick's campaign manager, Eli Gold (the deliciously Machiavellian Alan Cumming, pictured above), who erased Gardner's "I love you, let's give it a go" message from Alicia's phone. For the moment, the romance has been left to congeal on the back burner.

There's plenty of other activity to take up the slack. Will and his legal partner Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski, in dependably regal form) have solved their liquidity crisis by merging with another law firm, prompting an epidemic of in-house political manoeuvrings, while a new political scandal hitting the headlines ("White House hopeful denies sex charge") has reminded the media to take another poke into the Florricks's not-so-private lives. The show has always 'fessed up to taking some of its cues from the true stories of (among others) the Clintons and hooker-happy New York governor Eliot Spitzer, and its finely drawn layers of political chicanery would give The West Wing a run for its money. This week, for instance, Alicia found herself targeted by "trackers", college kids hired by her husband's political enemies to lure her and her children into embarrassing indiscretions to be used as tabloid fuel.

And by no means least, The Good Wife always delivers top-flight courtroom action riddled with brain-teasing twists, as well as a regular cameo slot for a different judge. Last night it was the capricious and overbearing Hon Howard Matchick (Chris Sarandon), doing his best to make Alicia's life a misery by commanding her to defend Wikileaks-style internet entrepreneur Vance Salle (Jacob Pitts) on a murder charge. Naturally, Alicia rose to the challenge, though not without help from resourceful and unscrupulous investigator Kalinda Sharma (Edgware's own Archie Panjabi, pictured left, who won an Emmy for the role last year). Great performances, fine writing, ingenious plotting... there's not a lot wrong with this show.

• Watch The Good Wife on 4oD
• Find The Good Wife on Amazon