This article from New Yorker perfectly encapsulates the wonder that is The Good Fight. You’re gonna love ’em both!
The Incendiary Verve of “The Good Fight”
by Emily Nussbaum
A few weeks ago, on “The Good Fight,” some Chicago litigators found the pee tape. Initially, they suspected that it was a hoax—entrapment by Project Veritas, perhaps, designed to embarrass the D.N.C. Their firm investigated, and in the process they discovered an entire genre of pee-tape fakes. The F.B.I. weighed in. There was a granular comparison of bathrobe screen grabs. (“Enhance!”) Finally, they had confirmation: it was the real thing.
And then they buried it—all of them, conspiring together, with varying motives. Releasing a video of Russian prostitutes peeing on a bed that the Obamas slept in, the group understood, would lead to nothing but another shockeroo news cycle. There would be outrage, then distraction, and on to the next round. To survive in an era of numb unreality, they needed a better strategy.
“The Good Fight,” like “The Good Wife,” its predecessor, is a cockeyed love letter to just this kind of strategic life, as lived by a set of educated, hypercompetent professionals: a liberal élite, if you will. It’s a dark comedy about the limits of savvy, about whether it’s possible to maintain detachment and pragmatism, not to mention respect for the law, in the face of chaos—including internal chaos. Both shows were co-created by Robert and Michelle King, married showrunners who have learned, during their years of making network television, to camouflage their freak flag as a pocket square. (Their brand might be summarized as “Looks like ‘L.A. Law,’ tastes like ‘The Wire.’ ”) But the sequel, whose opening scenes take place on Inauguration Day, is an angrier product than the original. It features an unforgettable credits sequence, in which fancy purses blow up like Molotov cocktails, punctuated by shots of Putin fishing and of neo-Nazis in Charlottesville. Sometimes I watch those credits twice.
With their French Revolutionary air, they’re a nifty metaphor for the show’s incendiary mind-set, as exemplified by its heroine, the litigator Diane Lockhart, an emily’s List Democrat whose plans to retire with her hot Republican gun-expert husband dissolved when, in a triple whammy, her man cheated on her, she lost her money to a Madoff-like grifter, and Wisconsin swung red. Lockhart joined a new firm, though she held on to her statement necklaces and her air of hauteur. But, alone in her spacious office, she’s losing her cool, watching cable news, gawking at clips that feel maybe ten per cent removed from the real thing: “When asked about the tweet, White House officials insisted that the President was joking, saying, ‘Mermaids do not exist, therefore Trump’s reference to talking with one—’ ” Lockhart now owns a gun; she has a fling with an Antifa activist. When, in the second season, she starts to microdose hallucinogens, it seems less like a breakdown than like an attempt to match her insides to her outsides….