Since 2016, no television series has been more engaged with the experience of what it’s prefer to live in america than “The Good Fight,” now in its last season and scheduled to finish on Nov. 10. There may be also no show currently on television that I appear to have to clarify more often, perhaps since it airs on Paramount+—which, in comparison with places like Netflix, Amazon or Disney+, is usually viewed as a guppy within the streaming pool. (Full disclosure: I do know among the writers for the show.)
But in the case of compelling, funny and likewise difficult entertainment, “The Good Fight” is totally the show we must always all be watching without delay. Here’s the premise: Passionate liberal Chicago attorney Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski), who had been a most important character on Robert and Michelle King’s previous show, “The Good Wife,” joins an all-Black law firm run by Liz Reddick (Audra McDonald) and others (on this season, Andre Braugher’s Richard Lane) on the precise moment when Hillary Clinton is defeated within the 2016 presidential election. The series charts her struggle and the struggle of the firm to live within the strange and infrequently awful recent world that the Trump administration creates.
In the case of compelling, funny and likewise difficult entertainment, “The Good Fight” is totally the show we must always all be watching without delay.
With each season the series has gotten bolder and embraced the absurdity of our reality more fully. But, unexpectedly, the election of Joe Biden in 2020 didn’t change the show’s sense of dislocation. In actual fact, in its final season things have gotten exponentially worse. While the law firm continues to litigate cases and take care of its own internal politics, there’s some type of mass protest happening below on town streets, and every week it seems to get each more violent and fewer clear. Like something by Samuel Beckett, it is a situation during which nobody is de facto sure who’s protesting or what they need.
Much of the time these protests are only background noise within the office, with occasional punctuations of screaming or explosions. But each week the conflict impinges increasingly directly on the characters; a automobile bomb set off in a garage blows out a window in an office where Diane sits. When Liz criticizes Clarence and Ginni Thomas in a television interview, certainly one of the cameramen points his finger at her as if it were a gun and pulls the trigger. A white supremacist shoots a person in the pinnacle in front of a Jewish lawyer, spitting anti-Semitic slurs.
For the primary few weeks of the season it appeared like perhaps we were getting the world through Diane’s eyes, her own worst fears for the nation coming to fruition. Nevertheless it is increasingly clear the show isn’t portraying some dark fantasy of Diane’s but our own world’s situation and behavior. We’re the people continually presented with stories of horrifying things happening in our country, shocking things just like the presence of white supremacists amongst our border patrol and other law enforcement; the shooting of each unarmed people of color and protesters by police, with none consequence for the officers involved; and an energetic attempt by the last president of america to attempt to bring a couple of coup that will have allowed him to retain power. Yet despite the gravity of what these crimes represent, we understand them like a din in the gap, fighting that is occurring some place else.
It’s increasingly clear the show isn’t portraying some dark fantasy of Diane’s but our own world. We’re the people continually presented with stories of horrifying things happening in our country.
Are the Kings and their writing staff truly suggesting that we’re, as one lawyer concludes in probably the most recent episode, not living under the specter of a civil war but actually in the midst of one? That type of talk is usually avoided within the press, I feel with the tacit understanding that to speak of civil war is each to make it more likely and to provide it more credence. And by and huge I even have subscribed to that theory. I don’t want people on any side to feel so vindicated of their sense of grievance that they imagine the rule of law or the commitment to democracy now not needs be heeded. I don’t want us to provide up on America.
But we reside in a rustic where no less than 18 states, just about all Republican-controlled, have recently passed laws that make it harder for U.S. residents to exercise probably the most fundamental right of our democracy, the correct to vote (and these laws have been found to disproportionately affect people of color) and a Republican former president has repeatedly insisted the last election was “stolen,” with none evidence but vehemently enough that 70 percent of Republican voters say they imagine him. We’re busy arguing about whether or not Donald Trump ought to be charged for inciting the Jan. 6 attempted coup, but the very fact is that other coup-adjacent actions are going down around us, and a few of them are succeeding.
Knowledge doesn’t necessarily result in recent purpose on “The Good Fight.” Diane has spent many of the series just attempting to process her overwhelming feelings of grief, anxiety and confusion. What peace she has found this season has come through an F.D.A.-approved hallucinogenic, which seems to have helped her by making a space between her and the events happening round her. She is less sucked into the drama of all of it and more capable of just speak from her own convictions.
While that storyline has allowed the show to go to much more surreal places—in a single episode Diane finds herself suddenly and blissfully floating within the air—it has also been an interesting tackle the struggle involved with creating some type of interior space free from the buffeting of the storms around us. Diane will not be a spiritual person, but each her quest and the space and freedom she has found for herself in some ways resembles the on a regular basis mysticism of many Catholic spiritualities. Through silence, a slow reading of Scripture or a slow, intentional walk on a fairly autumn day, we allow ourselves to return to a spot where we’re more grounded, more capable of see things on our own terms.
I need to attribute the shortage of conversation about “The Good Fight” to its network and the undeniable fact that the show has been around for some time. But truthfully, I’m afraid it’s one other indication of precisely the type of ostriching that “The Good Fight” has been portraying. We’re frogs within the proverbial pot, and the water is getting very warm now, but we don’t wish to take care of it. So let’s as a substitute complain about Black hobbits and write 100 articles about the lighting in a misogynist dystopian fantasy.
To stare squarely at what confronts us is profoundly destabilizing. But in some unspecified time in the future what other option is there? Diane Lockhart stands before us like a way more tastefully dressed Virgil at the doorway to Hell. “There isn’t any way back, kiddo, only through.”