There’s violence in the streets. Civil rights are increasingly under threat, while common sense and logic are being branded as extreme viewpoints. Moreover, the pigeons are flying into the windows again.
“I feel like I’m back where I was six years ago,” Christine Baranski’s Diane Lockhart says in the new Season 6 trailer for The Good Fight. “No matter what we do, we just end up back at the start.”
When the Best TV Series We’ve Had the Pleasure of Watching in the Last Six Years—an admittedly unofficial award title for the critically hailed series—premiered in 2017, it was the first TV drama to directly confront Donald Trump’s election. The spin-off of the Emmy-winning The Good Fight had scripted an entire pilot based around how a presumed Hillary Clinton victory would inspire esteemed lawyer Diane Lockhart to pursue a career change. Instead, her disgust over what’s happening in the country sends her spiraling.
The series has portrayed what its creators, Robert and Michelle King, have called a “fictionalized reality.” The show manages to capture the feeling of destabilization—what it’s been like to look at the world and the news, and feel untethered and unmoored. It’s never been a full-on condemnation of Trump, the rise of MAGA, and everyone involved.
Instead, the series distills the chaos surrounding all of that, bottling all the feelings of unease, outrage, and mania into a cleansing tonic: When you watch The Good Fight, you, at the very least, see emotions that make you feel validated and, almost inexplicably, normal.
Past seasons have incorporated some of the most outrageous and consequential news into storylines, whether it be the Trump “pee tape” or the search for Jeffrey Epstein’s body. It’s also covered things like the #MeToo movement, Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation, and the race reckoning of the last several years.
The sixth season of the show will be its last, news that my therapist and I have been working through for the last several months. The trailer hints at more topical storylines, first and foremost struggling with the feeling of déjà vu that comes with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the rolling back of voting rights, and the return of Cold War aggressions.
As violence in the streets and clashes with police create the unease of a looming civil war, Diane starts to wonder if she’s losing her mind—a feeling exacerbated by what seem to be several psychotic episodes.
“I’m feeling it. That most dangerous feeling. Hope,” she says at one point. Alan Cumming’s Eli Gold (making his Good Fight return!) then asks, “Where do you find your optimism?” Her answer: “In a hallucinogenic drug called PT108.”
Yes, Diane is tripping again. To her, that surreality feels more sane.
The trailer gives a first look at new cast member Andre Braugher, the return of fan-favorite lawyer Elsbeth Tascioni—actress Carrie Preston’s line delivery of “There is very little in this world I don’t find ridiculous,” deserves applause—and the sharp banter that fans crave. (Almost as much as they crave scenes of Baranski regally swanning through fancy office buildings and courthouses in her deliciously regal blazers.)
The final exchange in the trailer, between Diane and Audra McDonald’s Liz Reddick, is a perfect one. “Do you ever feel like we’re going to lose everything?” Diane asks. “The firm?” Liz replies. “And the country,” Diane says.
Liz snorts and swirls her huge glass of red wine: “I mean, have a drink or two before we face that. My god.”
Season 6 of The Good Fight premieres Thursday, Sept. 8, on Paramount+.
