In the first scene of The Good Fight, Christine Baranski, as Diane Lockhart, is staring at her television, eyes wide and mouth agape. She’s frozen, stunned at what she's watching, as if her body is in a state of shock. Forget “fight or flight;” she is traumatized into stillness.
On her TV, Donald Trump is being inaugurated as president of the United States.
That episode premiered five years ago, less than a month after the inauguration happened in real life. Famously, The Good Fight creators Robert and Michelle King rewrote and reshot the pilot following the shocking election results. That quick pivot injected the series with what would become its defining trait and that of our collective existences in the years that followed: incredulity.
After six seasons, The Good Fight wrapped up its remarkable run this week on Paramount+. (Its final episodes are titled “The End of Democracy” and “The End of Everything,” to give a sense of how bluntly the series engaged with the reality of the world and its palpable nihilism.) I can’t tell you what a relief it’s been to spend these years with Christine Baranski, bonding over that incredulity.
Each one of Diane Lockhart’s heavy sighs has been meaningful to me. Audra McDonald, who plays Liz Reddick, Diane’s partner at a law firm, is unparalleled in her skills at befuddled stuttering and shaking her head in disbelief. I felt seen. There’s a way that Sarah Steele’s Marissa Gold, an investigator-turned-lawyer, cocks her eyebrow, crinkles her forehead, and sends her eyes bugging out of their sockets that was like staring into a mirror each time she was on screen.
It’s not just that The Good Fight wrote Trump’s presidency into the show, when few other drama series did. It’s that it also bolstered the obvious anger and fear surrounding those years with more complicated feelings of bafflement, exasperation, delirium, and desperation. When one can’t comprehend how the reality surrounding them is possible, they feel unmoored. With its graceful act of acknowledging that feeling when no other series or even news program really could, The Good Fight steadied us again.
“What’s bad for the world is often good for our show,” Robert King recently joked to me in an interview. It was cheeky, but it was certainly not a lie. The key clarification is that The Good Fight was never opportunistic about its incorporation of life’s overwhelming darkness. No real-world story was garishly exploited for some kind of triggering emotional response. If anything, the show’s portrait of the unsettling dread that we’ve started to wear as a second skin has been generous. It’s maybe even been healing, though the series never had such schmaltzy intentions.
Now that The Good Fight is over, after a flawless six-season run, I’m not sure where to turn for that service.
A program that I felt a similar attachment to was Full Frontal With Samantha Bee. The talk show, which allowed Bee to fume each week over the outrageousness of the political landscape, was the closest thing we had to screaming into a void—a release we all needed. That show, however, was recently canceled.
Russell T. Davies’ Years and Years was essential viewing for its unwavering dramatization of the impact our current climate will have on the future; it was also so upsetting that, after one particular episode, I had to turn off the television to go vomit. And Lord knows The Handmaid’s Tale has long overstayed its welcome as a necessary cautionary tale. There are plenty of series that use character studies to show what life is like for certain demographics in unprecedented times—even the Roseanne spin-off The Conners is a great example of that. But they lack the direct confrontation with today’s surreality that The Good Fight was.
One imagines that a return to “comfort viewing” might be a last resort, the feel-good boom that made Schitt’s Creek, Ted Lasso, and The Great British Baking Show such hits during the pandemic. I’m not opposed to that. (From this year, I would recommend What We Do in the Shadows and Girls5eva for sheer laugh content, and Somebody Somewhere and Better Things to experience all the feels.)
But I don’t think pure distraction is healthy. The thing is, though: I’m not sure there are many shows that I’d want to tackle the news of the world in the way that The Good Fight did.
On a recent episode of the podcast Las Culturistas, guest Abbi Jacobson used the word “trumped” as a verb, and then stopped herself to reword what she was trying to say—horrified at even hearing Trump’s name out of her mouth as normal vocabulary. I get that. Imagine if Modern Family or This Is Us suddenly had plots about Kellyanne Conway. No thanks. It’s similar to how seeing the pandemic unfold in scripted series in 2020 and 2021 bordered on insufferable. (The Good Fight, unsurprisingly, is one of the few shows to incorporate the pandemic brilliantly.)
It’s an impossible position to be in. No other series seems equipped to do what The Good Fight did. But pretending those issues don’t exist doesn’t feel right, either.
These last years passed as if there were a safety line that tethered us to reality, but someone cut it when we weren’t looking. Now we’re spinning off into space, watching sanity, grace, and dignity disappear into the distance as we ping-pong against other people who are going through the same experience.
It’s not a great strategy to ignore the fact that you’re falling. There’s a natural, unsavory conclusion to that tactic. Watching The Good Fight, then, has been akin to releasing a series of emergency parachutes, to at least slow the fall.
To reference a popular plot on the show, it’s been like microdosing catharsis. I’ll miss that trip.
