The good news: no one died. (Let's be honest, since the unexpected slaying of lawyer Will Gardner, played by Josh Charles, last season, all bets are off on that front.)

The even better news: there's a great big unexpected twist in the episode, which screens in Australian on October 8.

Time magazine's review of the episode used the words "disorienting", "de-personalising" and "horrifying".

"The Good Wife, like a heavily scheduled professional, comes to each Sunday with a lot of tasks and toggles between briskly like calls on multiple lines," the magazine's TV critic James Poniewozik wrote. "Yet it moves so [like a ballet] it never feels like it's simply knocking items off a checklist."

The Washington Post warned that the show's sixth season has a lot to live up to following a "stellar fifth season".

There will be no spoilers here - the series is expected to launch in the next few weeks on the Ten Network - but the show's producers Robert and Michelle King promise a big season beginning with a game-changing twist in the first episode.

"Usually the season starts a little more sedately; there's a little more of setting up the chess pieces for the chess game later," Robert King told US media.

"We thought this season it would be more fun to just start the chess game right away."

King said the show would, in its sixth season, be heavily serialised.

"Our show has never been as serialised as it will be this year," he said. "Usually when you see a case on our show you know the case will be resolved by the end. Even if it's resolved poorly or ambiguously there's usually some storytelling resolution at the end."

Instead, King said, the premiere episode's bombshell would "simmer over the next few episodes."

Though the show has garnered positive reviews for most of its life, it was last year's shock death - Will Gardner killed in a courtroom shoot-out - which sent fans reeling and left critics speechless.

It confirmed the show's storytelling is perhaps the best on American network television, and competes confidently against the best dramas on cable channels, which have considerably shorter writing loads and considerably greater freedoms.

Robert King says fans shouldn't expect the same kind of shock in future seasons.

"We don't want to be playing tricks with the audience like it's a three-card monte or something," King said. "It's really meant to try and follow what the reality would be if these people lived in reality."

It may also take some time for the show's heroine, Alicia Florrick (Julianna Marguiles), to fall in love again.

"With everything we do in this show we really try to adhere to what would be psychologically true with Alicia," Michelle King says.

"So we're very sensitive to her probably being a little bit shy about rushing into things and yet being a vibrant woman. Those two things are in tension with each other."

* Season six of The Good Wife premieres in Australia on Wednesday, October 8, at 9.30pm.