How The Good Fight became TV's most political drama
Since it began in 2017, The Good Fight has been brilliant and often astounding television. The legal side of the story quickly morphed into an anarchic political drama with only a sprinkling of courtroom action, taking its cue from its predecessor, The Good Wife, which followed a similar path. It has built on those foundations with an admirable lack of regard for decorum, and there is a lot to admire: Christine Baranski’s graceful performance as the esteemed Diane Lockhart, its embrace of playful surrealism, and its willingness to treat real-time, real-world events as TV fodder.
But even as a dedicated viewer and evangelical fan, I started to wonder if it was losing its clarity of vision, at around halfway through the current and soonto-be-concluded third season.
The entrance of the excellent Michael Sheen as the Roy Cohn-esque Roland Blum, written as a Cohn protege, should have been a certain hit, but the character’s bluster and bombast has destroyed everything in its path. His arc seemed too long and too silly, and for the first time, I missed the caseof-the-week structure that had propped up The Good Wife. And then came its new habit of inserting animated musical shorts into each episode, to explain a concept that had appeared during the hour: non-disclosure agreements, Nazi cartoon frogs, Russian troll farms. At best, they were cutesy and grating; at worst, condescending. I’m sure it’s a matter of taste. I know people who have found them charming. But what I did not expect was that my own personal season three nemesis would turn out to have a dramatic function far beyond the show.
As first reported in the New Yorker, CBS censored last week’s Good Fight Short; instead of a song called Banned In China, it aired a placard reading ‘CBS Has Censored This Content’, for eight and a half seconds. In light of the series’ wry and satirical tone, and the fact that the episode was about the human cost of big corporations working with Chinese government censors, it is easy to see why viewers assumed that it was another joke. It was not clear that CBS had in fact censored the content until the New Yorker story broke the news. In discussions – imagine being in the room for those discussions – The Good Fight showrunners, Michelle and Robert King, threatened first to stop writing the series, then to air the placard for the full 90 seconds that the segment would have taken. They settled on a shorter insert, sparing the audience, without sparing CBS’s blushes.
That this was the line drawn is particularly surprising given how far
The Good Fight has pushed its provocative storylines already. The better parts of season three have been draped around the consequences of a #MeToo scandal for Reddick, Boseman & Lockhart, after the firm’s (deceased) founding partner was accused of multiple sexual attacks on women who worked for him. It is uncannily similar to the Les Moonves scandal. Moonves was, of course, until 2018, the head of CBS.
The disclaimer remains at the end of the credits each week, with a boldness that is extraordinary. “The persons and events in this film are fictitious. Any similarity to actual persons or events is unintentional.” I had often wondered at the beginning of the series how it could continue to get away with dramatising the Trump presidency in the way that it did. It pinned storylines to the existence of the infamous Russian “peepee tape”, and this season, a version of Melania Trump, or ‘Melania Trump’ – the distinction was not clear – appeared, ready to divorce her husband, unsure of how to proceed, though it could have been a ruse, too. Nothing about it was clear.
The pitfalls for a series as liberally minded as this one are plain, particularly when it comes to politics. It is preaching to the converted. It runs the risk of seeming self-satisfied and even elitist. This season, it has had its moments. But its most impressive strategy, away from the Blum circus and the elevated jingles, has been to turn its judgment in on itself, after two seasons of directing it the other way. Embroiling Diane and Liz in an underground resistance movement, whose tactics for fighting a dirty and morally reprehensible regime are to play the game with the same ruthlessness, has been a delicious and complex twist. Their decisions – usually choosing between something bad or something worse – have pushed them into a deep hole from which it will be difficult to come back.
Next week’s season finale has set everything up for catastrophe. The resistance group is eating itself. Even the cartoonish Roland Blum, and the sidelined Maia Rindell, appear ready, at last, to justify their presence. But the fact that an episode about censorship and China could have ignited a reallife political row about censorship and China shines a spotlight on The Good Fight’s combative spirit. It’s the best storyline season three has had yet.