Fighting “The Good Fight”

Christine Baranski stars as Diane Lockhart in “The Good Fight” a new series on CBS.
Christine Baranski stars as Diane Lockhart in “The Good Fight,” a new series on CBS.PHOTOGRAPH BY JEFF NEIRA / CBS

Over the past year or so, almost every television network has launched or announced a show about time travel. NBC has “Timeless.” Netflix has “Travelers.” The CW has “Frequency.” Soon, you’ll be able to watch “Time After Time” (ABC), and “Making History” (Fox). Now CBS has jumped into the ring: “The Good Fight,” which premières Sunday, transports viewers back to May, 2016, when “The Good Wife” was still on the air. As the show opens, it’s the day of the Presidential Inauguration; Chicago attorney Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski) is watching Donald Trump take the oath of office. In disgust, she turns off the television and—apparently—is caught in some sort of time warp. In the next scene, the country isn’t descending into authoritarian chaos; no one is compulsively refreshing the home page of the New York Times. Instead, the crisis du jour is the unmasking of a quaint, Madoff-like Ponzi scheme which has destroyed Diane’s retirement savings and ensnared a young associate at her firm, Maia Rindell, who turns out to be the schemer’s daughter. Watching the first two episodes, you’re in suspense. Will Diane and Maia find their way back to our dystopian present? Or will they remain marooned in the comparatively placid past?

It says something about this particular moment that it’s possible to be nostalgic for the world that existed less than a year ago. “The Good Fight” can’t help but evoke that nostalgia. Many characters return, including Lucca Quinn (Cush Jumbo), Kurt McVeigh (Gary Cole), and Marissa Gold (Sarah Steele). The writers still explore the new economy: one early episode focusses on the use of police interrogation techniques in the workplace. Chicago remains overrun with Amazonian warrior women: Maia, the young protagonist, is played by Rose Leslie, the real-life Scottish royal who starred as Ygritte, the “wildling” archer, in “Game of Thrones”; Heléne Yorke, of “Masters of Sex,” stars as her F.B.I.-agent girlfriend, Amy. All these echoes make the show feel less like a spinoff than a re-do. It’s probably safe to assume that the private investigator—who, in the episodes I’ve seen, remains anonymous—owns some great leather jackets.

The show does contain a few innovations. There’s now an all-black law firm in town; our heroines—spoiler alert!—end up working there, representing victims of police brutality in cases against Cook County. Diane’s new African-American colleagues are unimpressed by her white liberal bona fides; perhaps “The Good Fight” will be more immersed in issues of race than its predecessor. Maia, meanwhile, is also Diane’s goddaughter, which suggests a new focus on themes like youth and age, or perhaps mothering and daughtering. Finally, although the first episode of the show will air on broadcast television, the rest of the ten-episode season will appear only on CBS All Access, the network’s new streaming service. The first two episodes contain some nudity and profanity; maybe, going forward, the show will take advantage of its freedom in more substantive ways.

And yet, so far, “The Good Fight” feels straitlaced, by the numbers. The problem is two-fold. The titular character in “The Good Wife,” Alicia Florrick (Julianna Marguiles), was mysterious and strange, an unknown not just to others but to herself; having been sexually humiliated on the public stage—her husband, the governor, was caught sleeping with prostitutes—she seemed both to suffer and to use her suffering as a weapon in the quest for independence. Her struggle unleashed forces—anger, amorality, sexuality—that, earlier, had been constrained by the moral code of “goodness.” The heroines in “The Good Fight,” at least so far, are simpler. Their problems are less intimate, their strategies less perplexing.

Then there’s the fact that “The Good Fight,” like its predecessor, takes place in an intelligent and intelligible world—a world of systems, institutions, and incentives in which the smartest and most farsighted survive. This feels less realistic than it once did. We now seem to be living in an irrational and unhinged world of chaos and derangement in which institutions are useless and frothing craziness reigns. Robert and Michelle King, the creators of “The Good Wife” and “The Good Fight,” captured this development last summer, in their brilliant, short-lived series “Braindead.” In that show, it was revealed that space bugs—gross little insects hatched from an asteroid—have been crawling into our ears, eating our brains, and turning us into hyper-partisan zombies bent on self-destructive political warfare.

By means of that unhinged premise, “Braindead” evoked the true scale of our national predicament. By comparison, the political and legal machinations we see in “The Good Fight” come across as old-fashioned, even cute. No President is calling the judges on “The Good Fight” “so-called judges.” Watching “The Good Fight,” I found myself longing for the days when the world seemed like a moral gray zone. Perhaps the Kings felt that longing, too.