The Good Fight’ was the best of the anti-Trump shows. In a post-Trump world, it’s just as exhilarating.
Few scripted series have rooted their premises so thoroughly in (opposition to) Trump’s presidency as “The Good Fight,” a progressive cri de coeur that began with its protagonist, the patrician feminist Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski), starting a second chapter in her white-shoe career after her fortune is wiped out by a Ponzi scheme. Diane quickly finds a renewed sense of purpose in the law as a vehicle toward justice, hence the drama’s hypnotic opening credits, featuring the accoutrements of her former existence — handbags, wine bottles and conference-call phones, and, more recently, images of the former president — blowing up in slow motion.
The current fifth season, then, undoubtedly found creators Robert King, Michelle King and Phil Alden Robinson at a crossroads: If “The Good Fight” was no longer about fury at Trump and the struggle to do something constructive with all that rage, what was it about? After all, even its strongest elements seemed inspired by, or at least that much more compelling because of, the preceding occupant of the Oval Office.
As I’ve previously argued, “The Good Fight” is the only show able to out-surreal the Trump presidency — a feat the writers seemed to relish in, for example, by introducing a gonzo Roy Cohn figure (played by Michael Sheen) or “swatting” a Stephen Miller analogue in a left-wing terrorist protest against separating children from their parents at the border.
But “The Good Fight” was surprisingly introspective, too, always questioning the limits of Diane’s White feminism, especially within a predominantly Black workplace — a theme that gained new urgency during the Trump years, when Black, trans and other women belonging to minority groups ramped up their challenges to a larger feminist movement that, historically and now, has primarily benefited rich, White, straight women. (For a more online version of this phenomenon, see: the rise of the “Karen.”) All this existential Sturm und Drang on Diane’s part wasn’t for brooding’s sake alone; it was about the necessity of asking how to become a better person while pushing the world to become a saner and more humane place, or at the very least not letting the country’s more transparent corruption corrupt her.
There's a bit more at the link:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/tv/2021/07/07/good-fight-season-5-review/
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