Fans of The Good Fight are already mourning the series’ final season, but they can console themselves with a departing gift: Christine Baranski as Diane Lockhart, high as a kite after microdosing acid, singing “Something’s Coming” from West Side Story into a large sunflower.
Baranski has been playing the regal feminist attorney Diane Lockhart for 13 years across two different television series: The Good Wife and its spin-off, The Good Fight. The latter returns to Paramount+ on Thursday to kick off its last string of episodes. It’s an occasion for both celebration and despair, especially for those who have drooled over Diane’s poise, her chic wardrobe, and Baranski’s imperial performance for over a decade. That’s not to mention the show’s fearlessness in embracing the grave and the goofy in equal measure. (See above sunflower anecdote.)
“We couldn’t end the show without that!” Michelle King, who created both series with her husband, Robert, says with a laugh over Zoom. “The writers have fun with the challenge of seeing what else they can make her do,” Robert adds. “In these coming episodes, she sees an elf with a large penis. It's fun to see, well, okay, how is Christine Baranski going to react to that?”
An inebriated Sondheim performance with a microphone plucked from a vase. An incendiary monologue about the toxicity of men delivered to the animated face of Donald Trump… which she hallucinates… on a bruise… on the back of her husband, Gary Cole’s Kurt McVeigh. (A bruise that he suffered while leading Eric Trump and Donald Jr. on a big game hunt in Africa, no less.) Imagined late-night counseling sessions with the ghost of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. An entire episode that takes place in a reality where Hillary Clinton won the presidency, cancer is cured, and the polar bear population is thriving.
These are just a few of the things that Baranski has gotten to act out as Diane Lockhart on The Good Fight over the last six seasons, which have also tackled storylines about Trump’s rumored “pee tape,” the location of Jeffrey Epstein’s genitals, and everything from the Black Lives Matter rallies to the #MeToo movement.
“I mean, my God, even in my final season, I'm in bed between Gary Cole and John Slattery in this fantasy sequence,” Baranski tells The Daily Beast’s Obsessed. “I'm like, who has my life? Who has my career?”
Thirteen years playing one character is, let’s face it, a long time. “I’m missing her already,” Baranski sighs.
Ahead of The Good Fight’s debut in 2017, the Kings made the decision to reshoot the premiere to actively, aggressively include Lockhart’s despair and anger following Trump’s victory. In the ensuing years, the series has become a vital outlet for Baranski to channel her own rage. Looking back now that she’s finished shooting the final season, the actress recognizes how valuable that’s been for her at such a volatile time. It’s one of the parts of filming this show and playing Diane that she’ll miss most. Well, that and the fabulous wardrobe.
“I’m wearing one of her jackets,” Baranski says, sitting up straighter in her chair to show off a very chic, very expensive-looking blazer. She waxes nostalgic about the “racks and racks” of clothes that would show up on set for her yearly fittings. “Prada… Armani… Etro…” she says wistfully, as if listing off former lovers. “Diane was just a clothes horse, wasn’t she?”
Over the course of Baranski’s run on the two series, Diane’s wardrobe has become a phenomenon in its own right. There are countless blogs and articles paying tribute to her impeccable style. There are breakdowns of how to replicate her best looks and where to buy the pieces. Each week after a new episode airs, social media is flooded with screenshots of her latest swoon-worthy outfit, captioned with ecstatic praise.
The fashion is fun, but it’s not frivolous. Baranski recognizes how the attention paid to Diane’s clothes dovetails with what makes her such a trailblazing TV character.
“I think we're particularly obsessed with fashion in our postmodern world,” Baranski says. “More than ever before, how people look seems to matter terribly. And there she was, a woman of my age, still looking really smart and pulled together. No matter how bad things were, she shopped her closet and came up with beautiful clothes to wear. I always thought it was rather like her armor, her warrior outfit. She faced the world in her fabulous jackets with her brooches and her accessories.”
The battle she was marching into, as we all know too well, was a ferocious one.
The plan was never for The Good Fight to be the first—and still one of the only—TV dramas to directly confront the current political landscape. Trump, Kellyanne Conway, Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, Mitch O’Connell: They all exist in The Good Fight universe, as did real-life headlines about their politics. How characters reacted to those political overtures and the—shall we say—stressful cultural climate seemed true to how so many of us felt but couldn’t necessarily articulate until it was reflected back at us.
We’ve seen Diane work through feelings of anger, frustration, delirium, and resistance as she weathered the post-truth, post-facts, post-justice Trump administration. As the world around her became more and more surreal, she traveled with it. She even took up microdosing. For the show’s devoted fans, The Good Fight was providing a service, helping to navigate a whirl of confused feelings about how insane it felt to, well, be alive under these circumstances.
“None of us anticipated that Trump would be elected president,” Baranski says. The 2016 election happened while they were shooting the pilot, and “suddenly we were a show that was very much about how does the liberal feminist, the EMILY’s List feminist, live her life and go to work and survive this crazy Trumpian dystopian era that we're living through?”
The decision to take the show in that direction feels “less chaotic now,” Michelle King says. “Now it just feels like fate, that obviously that would be the decision we would need to make. It didn't feel that way at the time.” An added benefit is that the change of plan helped distinguish the spinoff from its predecessor, The Good Wife, and stand out as its own distinct series. “What's bad for the world is often good for our show,” Robert says. “I hate to say that. Sorry, world, but it's been very good for us.”
That might be a bleak assessment, but Baranski also counts herself as grateful for the series’ content: “I got to channel a great deal of my frustration, my anger, my heart, and my curiosity.”
She also became a news junkie. She asked for a TV for her dressing room and swiftly had the programming lineup memorized. When she woke up, it was Mika and Joe. Then Stephanie Ruhle and Nicolle Wallace. If she was working late, of course, Rachel Maddow was on. Then Chris Hayes and Lawrence O’Donnell—she watched the whole MSNBC slate.
“These have been really compelling times. I marvel when people say, ‘I don't watch the news,’ or, ‘I can't take it anymore,’” she says. “The fact is, we're living through an extraordinary time.”
The remarkable thing about The Good Fight was how it engaged with that extraordinary time, setting episodes in the present day. “I think if I had a show that was just completely about some fantasy world that had nothing to do with what's going on, I would have felt very strange,” she says. “It'd be like, why are we doing this when all of this is happening? This is just too weird to be in some comedy that has nothing to do with the world we're living in.”
Even before her impressive tenure as Diane Lockhart, Baranski had a storied career. She started in theater more than 40 years ago, where she won two Tony Awards. She won an Emmy for her boozy, scene-stealing performance on the sitcom Cybil in 1995, and she has been nominated a grand total of 15 times. Her film work includes roles in The Birdcage, Chicago, Into the Woods, and the crowning cinematic achievement of Mamma Mia! and Mamma Mia! Here We Again. (Get thee to YouTube to watch her performance of “Does Your Mother Know?” immediately.)
But there’s something about having played Diane Lockhart through this stage of her career and life—and this span of cultural chaos—that she recognizes as unique. The Good Fight’s streaming-exclusive run may not have gotten as much mainstream attention as her previous work. But that doesn’t surprise or bother her.
“I love that it was a show that dealt with ethical issues, moral issues,” she says. “These are not the kind of shows that really get the attention of Emmy voters. We prefer flying dragons and beheadings, rape victims and red weddings. With all due respect, the sensational stuff gets more attention than something as subtle as The Good Fight.”
When it comes to a project like this one, “I may never do anything as good again, but I certainly won't compromise,” she says, thinking about the future and how playing Diane Lockhart has changed her. “I don't need to do anything that I'm not comfortable with at this point, or not proud of. Particularly in a world that is getting so dark, I would hate to be putting junk out in the world. Really.”
