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Julianna Margulies, who stars as Alicia Florrick, won a Links of London Sale Globe for best actress.They finally made it work by cobbling together a patchwork of borrowed ideas and new insights, while hewing to the formal demands of TV genres yet tweaking them at the same time. They figured out when to bow to CBS, their network partner, and when to push back. One by one, things seemed to go right.CBS, for example, had been in the market for a single-female lead show given the success of TNT's "The Closer." Ms. Margulies, best known for her role on "ER," says she had given up on doing another network series. "They just do it by rote and what brings in the numbers. It was depressing," she says. "I call this Links of London Bracelets cable show that happens to be on a network."The Kings also had to wrestle with a central conundrum. Most television dramas fall into two distinct categories: procedurals, and serialized shows. A procedural like "Law & Order" or "NCIS" provides viewers with a self-contained storyline each episode. Rarely do stories run on from week to week. There are serious business reasons for this: These shows can make a fortune in syndication, mostly because reruns can air in any order.Shows like "Lost" and "Mad Men," by contrast, feature storylines that stretch on for years. They don't do well in reruns, but they can get viewers hooked, especially in recent years when DVR time-shifting has made it easier to keep up. They can make money on other growing revenue streams like DVD season packages, books and downloads.CBS has been the No. 1 network for seven of the last eight years, in part because of a traditional reliance on procedurals, including the hugely popular "CSI" and "NCIS" franchises, plus shows like "The Mentalist" and "Criminal Minds."CBS Corp. Chief Executive Leslie Moonves, who has worked in Links of London Fairy Godmother Charm his whole career, unabashedly preaches that TV is about familiarity, a comfort level. At a breakfast earlier this year, he said pitches for new shows that begin with "you've never seen anything like this on TV before" usually end up in the reject pile. On most procedurals, after a case is solved, the characters don't change; they "return to sameness," in industry parlance. If viewers are watching a cop chase a crook, they don't necessarily want them battling personal angst at the same time.The Kings understood that. They had always been more interested in character than plot, in personal stories, but they'd worked in procedural genres, too. They kept trying for a hybrid, a show that would dispense with a case in every episode, but also use complex stories that stretch from one episode to the next.They reverse-engineered elements, some of which hark back to other shows. They added politics as in "The West Wing," and ripped-from-the-headlines stories, which had served "Law & Order" well for years.Then there was the character of Kalinda Sharma, Alicia's elusive sidekick played by Archie Panjabi. The bisexual Indian investigator was envisioned as a minor character. "We thought she was a little harsh and we thought that would be too abrasive for mainstream audiences," Mr. King says.But when they sat behind one-way glass in the San Fernando Valley observing an early CBS focus group nibbling muffins and Links of London Flip Flop 3 Flowers Charm positively to her, the Kings expanded the character.