The Good Fight S 3 E 1 Close this dialog window Streaming Options “I’m happy.” Those are the first words we hear in the season 3 premiere of The Good Fight, and they’re spoken by Christine Baranski’s Diane Lockhart as she lies in bed with her (Republican) husband, Kurt. Apparently, the only Goodverse couple I care about officially got back together during the time between seasons 2 and 3 and are finally living together as husband and wife. And, as her words indicate, Diane is content. But she’s also smart enough to question that feeling, and she makes Kurt assure her that’s actually the case. “Everything’s going to be all right,” Kurt says. (Of course, we the audience know the opposite is true, and a storm is coming in both the premiere and the season as a whole.) If you’ve been reading EW’s recaps of the Good Wife spin-off since season 1, you’ll know by now that I’m fully in the bag for the show. It is my favorite my series on television. Although part of me is worried about writing about this season as a whole, mostly because my colleague Darren Franich perfectly captured what makes this show excellent in his insightful and palpably giddy review of season 3, I’m excited to dive right back into another sobering yet also somehow comforting season about what it’s like to live in these uncertain, collapsing, and absurd times, especially after watching this episode. The season 3 premiere, “The One About the Recent Troubles,” is a great re-introduction of the show and quintessentially Good Fight, putting all the show’s strengths on display. Directed by Robert King — he of “Robert and Michelle King,” a.k.a. the legal drama’s showrunners and co-creators — the hour effortlessly moves between multiple, sometimes conflicting tones: serious topical material on #MeToo, absurdism (hello, Trump sons! ), and straight-up comedy, with a Schoolhouse Rock-style animated explainer and a somewhat meta story about Maia. As I mentioned above, the happiness Diane is experiencing doesn’t last long. As she and Kurt get dressed for their days, she finds someone’s blonde hair on Kurt’s jacket. Her mind immediately jumps to an affair because, well, we’ve been down this road before. Her day gets crazier from there because she, Adrian, Marissa, and Jay learn that Carl Reddick, who died in the season 2 premiere, raped his secretary, Cynthia (Ms. Cowley to you, if you never worked with her) for 15 years. He also raped the firm’s stenographer, Wendy. Given that Reddick was the firm’s founder, a civil rights icon, and Liz’s father, everyone is visibly shaken by this discovery. As the firm rushes to come up with an appropriate response, the episode never loses sight of Cynthia and Wendy, because we hear a recording of Cynthia talking about her assault multiple times. The script’s handling of the firm’s response is interesting as well. Both Adrian and Diane are somewhat conflicted about how to handle the situation. On the one hand, they’re disgusted by what happened; however, they must temper their revulsion in order to focus on protecting the firm’s reputation. Their solution? An NDA. Having Cynthia and Wendy sign on is in their best interest, but it also does contribute to a culture of silence over issues like this. The episode understands the position the firm is in and why they go the NDA route, but it also tries to hold them accountable via a clever animated short that explains exactly what NDAs do. The person most troubled by all of this is, of course, Liz. At first Liz is upset and tearful, because this destroys every memory she had of her father. But after she cries, she gets angry and aggressively asks Adrian if he knew about this, because she remembers her father complaining about Adrian deciding to install glass windows in all the offices. From there she maintains her anger, but she channels it into protecting the firm. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, but Audra McDonald delivers a powerful performance in the premiere. After Adrian briefs her on the scandal, Liz joins the rest of the partners in the conference room, where she finds out her father also assaulted the stenographer. At that point, the camera pushes in on Liz as disgust, disbelief, and so many other emotions flash across her face while she tries to process this troubling news. Next: Trump invades Diane’s life Feeling a sense of responsibility because it’s her father, Liz handles the negotiations with the two women and asks Marissa find out if there are more victims out there. Surprisingly, Wendy turns down the firm’s money because she doesn’t want to play a role in taking another black man down, which is a sentiment that could fill up an entire recap. Similarly, Cynthia tells Liz that her father wasn’t a bad man, which is a hard pill to swallow. Cynthia agrees to sign the NDA in return for the firm paying her the $80,000 pension Reddick apparently promised her many years ago. On any other show, the #MeToo case would take up all the oxygen in an episode, but that’s not the case on The Good Fight, as the Kings make sure they don’t waste a single second of the premiere’s 57-minute runtime. As the firm is rocked by the Reddick scandal, Diane’s personal life is disrupted by learning that Kurt is doing something far worse than cheating: Eric Trump and Donald Jr. are paying him to shoot with them. “It’s not politics, it’s work,” says Kurt. But that doesn’t change Diane’s mind. She just starts beating her head against the wall of their bedroom, which is one of the funniest, most theatrical, and most relatable moments of the premiere. To make matters worse, Kurt is going on a safari trip with them. Kurt’s arrangement with the Trump sons, though, converges with the episode’s main story line in an interesting way: During the safari, one of them accidentally shoots Kurt in the back, Dick Cheney-style. But Kurt can’t talk about it at all because, to Diane’s horror, he signed a NDA. Later that night, Diane imagines Kurt’s bullet wound is talking to her with Trump’s voice, soliloquies back at it, and ends up talking herself into leaking that Trump paid for the porn star we met in the season 2 finale to get an abortion, even though the adult actress told Diane she didn’t want to come forward. In previews leading up to the season, the Kings said this season is about good liberals going bad, and Diane’s anger toward the president driving her to ignore a confidential source’s wishes is definitely the first step in that direction. Diane’s decision to leak the abortion also points to one of my problems with the episode: What has Diane been up to the past year? In the season 2 finale, Diane finally stopped taking drugs and decided it was time to fight back against Trump; however, in the premiere, which picks up a year later, it feels like she hasn’t really done anything to follow through on that resolve. There’s this sense that time has indeed passed but the characters have remained in stasis until the show came back on the air. Finally, we need to discuss the Maia of it all. The Good Fight has never really figured out what to do with Rose Leslie’s character, and that sort of becomes the joke in this premiere. Right now the firm is trying to rebrand itself and update its website. Part of the initiative means sidelining Maia as much as possible because they don’t want her own father’s scandal to reflect poorly on the firm. (There’s a running theme in this episode of daughters being forced to pay for their father’s crimes.) At first Maia is fine with her digital erasure from the firm, but then she becomes annoyed because when the partners continue to apologize for it. Thankfully, our favorite investigator Marissa gives Maia a personality makeover and teaches her how to stand up for herself; she even lends Maia some badass sunglasses that make her look intimidating. After the pep talk, Maia is noticeably more self-assured.<doc-sep>(CNN) — Situated in worlds of politics and privilege, power and corruption, “Billions” and “The Good Fight” each play to top-of-mind liberal concerns in the Trump era. Yet the Showtime series feels more compelling by tangentially making its case, whereas the CBS All Access drama loses something by leaning directly into an anti-Trump stance, to the point of bashing the viewer over the head with it. “Billions” is embarking on its fourth season, while “The Good Wife” spinoff begins its third. In essence, the “Billions” finale shuffled the show’s structure and loyalties, creating parallel battles for power while turning one-time adversaries Bobby “Axe” Axelrod (Damian Lewis), the billionaire hedge fund manager, and former U.S. attorney Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giamatti) into unlikely if slightly wary allies. The new dynamic pits Axe against his former protégé Taylor (Asia Kate Dillon), in a high-stakes chess match that has seen Taylor enter into an alliance with a ruthless Russian oligarch, toothily played by John Malkovich. As for Chuck, his efforts to regain his perch lead him into politics, squaring off against his own former deputy (Toby Leonard Moore) as well as others in the process. “Billions” is a brutal, seamy world of leverage, where “What have you done for me lately?” is the prevailing mantra and squeezing favors out of people is a practiced art. Everything about the show is juicy – starting with the key performances – and its sense of the current political moment is savvy without needing to be especially specific. The writing produces some prescient flourishes, such as one of the characters being faced with what amounts to blackmail, in a story arc that can’t help but bring to mind how Amazon’s Jeff Bezos handled his recent run-in with the National Enquirer’s parent company. Whatever else the series has to say about the current times and national mood, “Billions” works because the focus remains steadfastly on the characters. Occasionally funny and frequently profane, it provides commentary without being heavy-handed, and escapism by gliding through the serialized jockeying for power and advantage against a decadent backdrop of the lifestyles of the .001-percent bracket. Patrick Harbron/CBS Michael Boatman, Delroy Lindo, Christine Baranski, Audra McDonald in 'The Good Fight' “The Good Fight,” by contrast, is also smart, but in its new season veers so far toward reality – into what’s basically a real-time version of historical fiction, mixing actual people with fictional ones – as to distract from its central storylines. Set in a high-powered law firm, the new season finds attorney Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski) again dealing with a woman who claims to have had an affair with President Trump, while another subplot – which discretely unfolds off screen – relates to the president’s sons, Don Jr. and Eric. Separately, Diane begins actively working with a “resistance” group, while harboring doubts about its tactics. There’s also a strong sexual-harassment storyline, and a trial that involves the murder of a journalist, making a point about the hostile environment in which “reporters are being targeted by protestors all over the world.” Producers Robert and Michelle King have always dealt with hot-button issues through their courtroom drama, and they clearly feel liberated by this premium-TV platform. That includes dropping in amusing little animated interstitials each week, explaining things like nondisclosure agreements, the late Roy Cohn and online troll farms via what amounts to a jaded form of “Schoolhouse Rock.” The balancing act, however, occasionally goes haywire, invading reality in a manner that at best risks becoming too cute for its own good, and at worst borders on self-indulgence. The show remains impeccably cast, and there are wonderful moments, such as Lucca (Cush Jumbo) wrestling with the vagaries of motherhood. A new player also includes the always-welcome addition of Michael Sheen as a positively bonkers and amoral defense attorney, who clashes with the firm’s Maia, played by Rose Leslie. The distinction between these two premium shows, both airing on CBS-owned services, ultimately provides a useful lesson for dramatists in this polarized age. Because even if you support what the characters in “The Good Fight” are fighting for, when the satirical flourishes start to eclipse the drama, it’s not an especially good look. “The Good Fight” returns March 14 on CBS All Access. “Billions” returns March 17 at 9 p.m. on Showtime.<doc-sep>For the co-creators Robert and Michelle King, the decision to embrace Diane’s frustration with Trump’s election, and to follow that simmering fury throughout various corners of her life, was a natural extension of their own political anxieties. “With the Trump win, we kind of found an emotional rationale for doing the show,” Robert King said when I spoke to the pair on the phone recently. “As Michelle often says, the politics of our characters tend to be very liberal because they’re working as lawyers in Chicago, and so a lot of it was trying to honor how they would react. But it also was helpful because I think Michelle and I were both having to deal with what felt like was off about the country, that there was a loss of guardrails. “There are day-to-day repercussions of that, and it also seemed to be a little can’t stop talking about it,” he continued. “So to kinda make that Diane’s problem too was exciting, ’cause it was a way of working through our own problems.” The election also made for a new kind of creative challenge for the veteran showrunners, who led The Good Wife through its seven critically acclaimed seasons. It caused a rupture in how left-leaning television shows conveyed the ideological underpinnings of their characters. The Good Fight was no exception. Trump’s win “turned this into a very different show than the one we thought we were gonna be making,” Michelle King said. “And there’s something exciting about that—suddenly you’re working without a net.” Elizabeth Fisher / CBS Whereas some shows have tried to assuage the fear that modern politics stokes in viewers, The Good Fight takes great care to reflect it. Its characters’ conflicts mirror the surrealist tone of the world around them. By actively incorporating the chaos of the political sphere into The Good Fight, the Kings have created a show that doesn’t attempt to address grotesque realities with aspirational politesse. The pair also avoids the opposite trap: forsaking aesthetic and narrative considerations in favor of heavy-handed social commentary. With its consistent focus on character development and its willingness to interrogate the moral compasses of all its leads, The Good Fight is a far more thoughtful and compelling series than nearly any other television show that has flirted with #Resistance story lines. The show, which will premiere its third season on the proprietary CBS All Access platform on Thursday, grounds its political analysis in Diane’s ever more frantic reactions to the changing world around her. Where a Hillary-era Diane might have been most concerned about her own professional legacy, the Trump-era Diane weighs the events of her own life against much larger social dynamics. She is perennially plugged in. “Diane, of all the characters, I would think, would be the most addicted to cable news, being the liberal feminist. In Season 1 … Trump had just been elected; the presidency hadn’t quite taken hold enough,” Baranski said. “By Season 2, it became a show about trying to process this new reality slash unreality that is the Trump era, no matter what your politics. We are living in a truly strange, mind-bending age. “I love that the Kings just chose to write her as a woman who was always—for the seven or eight years we saw her on The Good Wife, we saw her be a sane, centered woman who prided herself on a kind of liberal sensibility but moral authority, willing to try to see the other side,” she continued. “And … [to] watch that person become unhinged [in Season 2], it’s like when the sanest person in the room loses it, you know, Oh my God.” But even as Diane struggles to stay afloat amid the changing political tide, The Good Fight never paints her as hysterical or overly dramatic; instead, the show presents her anxieties as natural responses to the dizzying world around her. The second season, for example, began with a series of targeted killings of lawyers, a spate of violence that rocks Diane partly because of how she lost her former law partner Will Gardner (Josh Charles) during The Good Wife’s run. (It also eerily recalls the recent uptick in violence against journalists.) By the season’s end, Diane has been rattled by several shootings of lawyers, including one of her colleagues. She’s been contacted by a student from Russia who claims to fear deportation because she was on the so-called pee tape. Diane grows weary.<doc-sep>
The Good Fight is the best show on TV: EW review The Good Fight Close this dialog window Streaming Options The world has gone mad, sure. But the senior partners at Reddick, Boseman, & Lockhart foretell a return to normalcy. “I’ve had my fill of left-wing anger,” explains Liz (Audra McDonald). “I’m trying not to let politics get in the way of moving the firm forward,” declares Adrian (Delroy Lindo). “I’m happy,” are the doomed words Diane (Christine Baranski) says at the very beginning of the indescribably wonderful new season of The Good Fight (beginning March 14 on CBS All Access.) Don’t get too comfortable. Chaos reigns. For Diane, Donald Trump is still everywhere: On the news, in her head, somehow right here in her bedroom. But in season 3 of this glorious series — a transcendent screwball horror farce, which pretends to be a legal procedural in a manner that recalls the villain from Texas Chainsaw Massacre borrowing another person’s face — there are bigger problems than the Leader of the Free World. Allies are becoming enemies. The incoming class of associates looks suspiciously Caucasian. Someone’s handing out secret salary information. Someone else is handing out fentanyl lollipops. The glass walls of Reddick, Boseman, & Lockhart are shattering — literally, shattering! The dead live again: A secretary comes forward with a disturbing allegation about a deceased Civil Right icon’s decade-plus sexual assault habit. And then a stenographer comes forward with another allegation, and then why even use a word like “allegation” anymore? The rain won’t stop, all day, every day. “Is this global warming?” asks Marissa (Sarah Steele). “I think it’s just Chicago,” answers Jay (Nyambi Nyambi). THE GOOD FIGHT Credit: Patrick Harbron/CBS Ah, but The Good Fight‘s Chicago is a fantasy battlescape, nexus central for politics and entertainment. In this Chicago, Roy Cohn’s spiritual heir walks out of an office and Fake Taylor Swift walks in. Down the street, an all-female resistance movement plots a digital coup from a subterranean headquarters that looks like a Medieval throne room. Across town, an insane attorney named Roland Blum (Michael Sheen) lives like the least subtle Roman Emperors, crushing his enemies in the courtroom by lying the truth into oblivion. Sheen’s a new addition this season, and he is giving one of the single most most performances since Al Pacino discovered the phrase Hoo-ah!. Blum breathes drugs through his gills, mainsplains American history in ravenous soliloquies, announces his entrance by bellowing “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree!” He could be a cartoon character. But The Good Fight has moved its own stylistic goalposts far beyond its progenitor series, pushing The Good Wife‘s snappy-smart dramatics toward the visceral and the surreal. When Blum starts singing “I’ll Be There” by the Jackson 5, he’s just fitting in with the crowd. Everyone’s got a tune in their heart now. Lucca (Cush Jumbo) lulls her ten-month-old to sleep with a rendition Buddy Holly’s “Everyday.” Liz sings “I’ll Fly Away,” and perhaps one definition for TV perfection is letting Audra McDonald sing for no plot reason except because she can. I’ve seen the first four episodes of the season, and every one has a breakaway animated musical number. These “Good Fight shorts” all have witty lyrics by Jonathan Coulton explaining concepts like NDAs and troll farms. Coulton wrote last season’s Schoolhouse Rock-aping number “High Crimes and Misdemeanors.” That ditty earned the series its only Emmy nomination last year. A travesty, but understandable. CBS All Access is one more streaming service no one can keep track of. I’ve spent the last year proclaiming The Good Fight‘s abject greatness, and the net result in pure viewership numbers is that my mom finally started watching. But so, a new proclamation: The Good Fight returns as the best show on TV. Co-creators Michelle and Robert King aren’t just chasing topicality. They’re telling deep stories about rich characters struggling to make sense of this incoherent moment. Every action has inadvertent, apocalyptic consequences. Lucca takes her baby for a stroll and sings a few bars of “Baby Shark” within earshot of a loudmouthed white lady, and somehow that incident begins an uncivil war among the law firm’s employees. Diane seeks a new output for her liberal rage — and winds up conjuring an uncontrollable political movement. In the Kings’ expanding vision, certain individuals receive even more of a spotlight this season. Local Republican Julius (Michael Boatman) has political aspirations.