TMC
11-11-2022, 05:20 AM
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/goodbye-good-fight-tv-show-001802166.html
In the first scene of The Good Fight, Christine Baranski (https://variety.com/2022/tv/columns/the-good-fight-finale-christine-baranski-1235428475/), as Diane Lockhart (https://variety.com/2022/tv/columns/the-good-fight-finale-christine-baranski-1235428475/), 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 (https://news.yahoo.com/goodbye-good-fight-tv-show-001802166.html) 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 MacDonald, 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 (https://www.indiewire.com/2022/11/the-good-fight-ending-ymca-season-6-finale-1234781033/), after a flawless six-season run, I’m not sure where to turn for that service.
In the first scene of The Good Fight, Christine Baranski (https://variety.com/2022/tv/columns/the-good-fight-finale-christine-baranski-1235428475/), as Diane Lockhart (https://variety.com/2022/tv/columns/the-good-fight-finale-christine-baranski-1235428475/), 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 (https://news.yahoo.com/goodbye-good-fight-tv-show-001802166.html) 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 MacDonald, 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 (https://www.indiewire.com/2022/11/the-good-fight-ending-ymca-season-6-finale-1234781033/), after a flawless six-season run, I’m not sure where to turn for that service.