'The Good Wife' Review: It's Back, and Tougher Than Ever

The Good Wife returns on Sunday night with its first new episode since January, and thank goodness for that. It’s an episode that features a rip-roaring good time with one of the show’s recurring characters — Dylan Baker’s murderous lothario Colin Sweeney is more grandly melodramatic than ever — as well as a plotline that, to me, is becoming problematic.

First, the good stuff: The episode, titled “Dark Money,” features a lot of finely detailed moral dilemmas for Julianna Margulies’s Alicia as she proceeds in her political campaign. The relationship creators Robert and Michelle King have developed between Alicia and her opponent, David Hyde Pierce’s Frank Prady, increases in complexity. This is the rare show that doesn’t settle for merely setting up foes or villains for its hero to stand in contrast to; she and we get to know her oppositional forces as fully-formed people. The politics of fundraising on Sunday night’s episode are complicated nicely by guest star Ed Asner, as a powerful old goat.

Related: 'The Good Wife' Creators Preview Kalinda's Exit and Upcoming Guest Stars

As I said, Dylan Baker’s Colin Sweeney is back and double the fun, and I say that as someone who’d begun to think this character was getting a bit one-note. Not anymore. Added bonus: Laura Benanti (of Nashville and Broadway) is around to raise Sweeney’s blood pressure as the brainiest arm-candy a man could want.

A good chunk of this Good Wife is given over to Kalinda’s ongoing business relationship with drug kingpin-client Lemond Bishop (Mike Colter). I am tired of this subplot. The Good Wife is usually so good at making a point and then moving on, but in this particular area, the show keeps going back to the notion that Archie Panjabi’s character must continue to do Bishop’s bidding, this week introducing a nearly-absurd babysitting element to her duties. I realize the show’s writers have to be moving Kalinda toward Panjabi’s announced exit from the series, but the way it’s playing out, Bishop — once one of the show’s most intriguing recurring figures, powerful, smart, and torn between his tough upbringing and the bourgeois success he’s achieved — is being reduced to a mere glowering menace. Plus, I cringe every time Kalinda calls him “sir.”

But I have faith the Good Wife folks know what they’re up to — that they’re doing something I cannot foresee.

The Good Wife airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on CBS.