Civil war has come for “The Good Fight.”
In the final season of the legal drama, premiering Thursday on Paramount+, six seasons of chaos come to a head: politics, race, gender.
Showrunners Robert and Michelle King “are really good at having their finger on the pulse of what’s happening in the nation. Perhaps what they pick up is, in some ways, more sensitive because they go right to what the crazy is and lean into it,” Broadway star Audra McDonald, who stars as Liz Reddick, told the Daily News.
“They’ve learned because every single thing that’s happened in the last five, six years has felt like just a ridiculous plot twist. And I’m talking about life. Really, a pandemic? Really? They have been leaning into that and as we’ve been leading up to this final season, we’ve been seeing the violence kind of swirling all around and I think what’s happening now is we’re acknowledging that it’s closing in. It perhaps feels inevitable.”
“The Good Fight” has thrived on the ridiculousness, from a Season 3 episode in which an undercover Melania Trump walks into the law office looking for a postnuptial agreement to the Season 4 finale when the gang tries to prove that Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself, only to confirm that he did — and find his frozen penis stored away on his island.
That, the Kings said, is the trick to surviving the Trump presidency with a show that intended to open with Hillary Clinton’s win.
“We have difficulty when the show is too strident,” Robert King said, as wife Michelle, with whom he also created “The Good Wife,” “Evil” and “Brain Dead,” chimed in, “Too earnest.”
“It really worked for this show that Trump won. I’m sorry to say that, but if Hillary had won, it probably would have been a little too earnest and a little too like ‘The Good Wife.’ I think the show was challenged by the Trump years, and that was probably good for it. I think.”
Now, the husband-and-wife team are bringing it all home, more violent than ever.
“It’s the opposite of T.S. Eliot: we’re going out with a bang, not a whimper,” he said.
McDonald, a six-time Tony winner, has found clarity in the confusion surrounding her character. This season, she pushed the Kings to send Liz home more, to let her be a mother on camera after having fully established her success as a lawyer.
And like Liz, the actress has watched the world implode around her with no way to stop it.
“If you were to sit down and write down everything that’s happened in the past five years, six years in this country and taken it to a TV exec and said, ‘I want to make a show about this,’ they would have said ‘that’s crazy, this can’t actually happen,’” McDonald, 52, said.
“We would have said that in maybe 2014. But in 2022, we all, as a planet, know that anything is possible and anything can happen and anything has happened. Unfortunately, this is our reality. I know this is a scripted show but we’re not that far off.”
On the other side of Liz’s stoic realism is partner Diane (Christine Baranski), who this year begins experimenting with a ketamine-like drug that sends her sky high. Diane’s personal brand of white feminism has found her at odds with her drive to succeed: should she really be a named partner at a Black law firm? Should she be forced to step down and risk a man taking her place once again?
So instead she hides, with the help of physician Lyle Bettencourt, played by “Mad Men” alum John Slattery, who prescribes drugs and a digital detox.
“The news is generally bad, so don’t watch it 24/7. I don’t! I’d blow my brains out if I did,” Slattery told The News. “It’s just protective behavior in this world, where if you leave yourself wide open to all the bad news that’s out there, I don’t know how you’d recover.”
“The Good Wife” ended with a slap. Its sequel, “The Good Fight,” has upped that drama in almost every episode. Liz and Diane have fought Republicans, sexist pigs, social media conglomerates and everyone in between.
“The good fight continues, and that’s what this finale shows us,” McDonald told The News.
“We no longer have John Lewis here with us, but we all still know that we need to get into good trouble. That’s still a rallying cry.”
———
