Christine Baranski might have one of the best laughs on television. It’s a delighted ripple of sonic caramel and she puts it to considerable use in the sixth and final season of the Paramount+ legal drama “The Good Fight.” Spinning off from the long-running CBS series “The Good Wife” in 2017, it quickly established itself as a wonderfully spiky and humorously enraged treatise on This Moment We’re Living Through. What a long, strange trip it’s been.
This time, that trip is partially drug-induced. That’s why Baranski’s Diane Lockhart is laughing so much. It’s a side effect of an experimental mood enhancement treatment — she wants off this treadmill of anxiety we’re all stuck on — and the drug is called PT108. It is “less powerful than ketamine” and administered in the swanky offices of a physician played by an enigmatic if underused John Slattery. After each session, Diane emerges blissful and glassy-eyed, obsessed with the vividness of colors around her, somehow transformed into an unlikely flower child with an expensive wardrobe and high powered job.
This is in stark contrast to the reality around her — but is it even reality? When we first see Diane striding to work in Chicago, she meets up with her longtime colleague Liz Reddick (Audra McDonald) and it’s as if the Loop has been emptied entirely of people, cars, sounds. It’s eerie, but neither woman acknowledges this, except to note a bit of smoke and the smell of fireworks in the air. Behind them a towering edifice has “The Trump Building” written across it in official lettering. Is this another one of the show’s playful tricks? Is this a dream? After going upstairs, they eventually peer out their windows and suddenly down below there are crowds of protesters and police, noisily clogging the streets of downtown.
Chaos and violence is in the air. But inside those sleek law offices, everything is business as usual.
Maybe that dichotomy, which continues episode after episode, is meant as a canny statement all its own — about the surreal feeling of a world falling apart around us while we force ourselves to carry on and go to work as if nothing is amiss.
But I’m not sure the sentiment actually lands. Not the way it plays out here. “What do they want?” Diane asks, staring down at the writhing humanity. “What does anybody want?” someone responds shrugging and, I’m sorry, but this is so empty. And more to the point: “The Good Fight” has been here before — and done it better.
I always liked the show’s wit and anger and cheerily bizarre narrative gambits, but this season it has an annoying tinge to it — instead of smart and sly, it feels aimless.
When we last saw Diane, she had decided to step down as a named partner amid legitimate questions about why a white woman was wielding so much decision-making power at what was supposed a Black firm. That change in status means she’s now relegated a spot adjacent to the bullpen, where all the lowly associates work. But she still has a spacious corner office. It’s one of those changes that feels like a distinction without a difference: Demoted in name only. The money men upstairs, to whom Liz must now answer alone, foist upon her a new named partner in the form of Ri’Chard Lane, played by Andre Braugher, who swaggers in wearing a gorgeous camel hair coat and an air of extreme confidence and eccentricity. His eyewear collection is a marvel!
There are other changes to the status quo. One-time assistant turned investigator turned law student Marissa Gold (Sarah Steele) is apparently already a lawyer who passed the bar … mere months after she started law school. Make that make sense! The show’s creators Michelle and Robert King bring back her dad, Eli Gold — the political mastermind from “The Good Wife” played by the always welcome Alan Cumming — who is in some legal hot water of his own these days. And newish associate Carmen Moyo, who was introduced last season (Charmaine Bingwa) continues to be more than willing to represent high-end clients who are likely guilty of the grisly crimes of which they are accused. This inevitably puts her in the crosshairs by even associating with them. Is she an adrenaline junkie? Just ambitious? Hard to say, since we learn next to nothing about what drives her in the five episodes provided to critics.
The rest of the firm’s Black associates remain nameless, as always. This has always frustrated me. There’s a profound lack of curiosity about any of these young attorneys (aside from Carmen, who remains inscrutable throughout) and the show fails to envision them as fully realized characters who have thoughts and opinions and experiences that would be far more worthwhile to spend time on than more high jinks from Marissa.
“The Good Fight” feels especially heavy-handed in its final run. I have so little sympathy for Diane, much as I admire Baranski’s performance. But the character’s unhappiness is boring at this point. The curse of the progressive, she smugly opines, is that if one person is suffering, you can’t enjoy your life. Says the woman who married the NRA guy!
On the flip side, this is absolutely McDonald’s best season. Liz is savvy about how to deal with this new partner/interloper big footing into her professional territory — she plays Ri’Chard at his own game — and she has to confront her past as a prosecutor and whether she knowingly used the testimony of a corrupt cop to gain a conviction. She also finds herself becoming phone pals with an extremely unlikely real-life figure — I won’t spoil the reveal but they bond over reality TV — and I don’t buy for one minute that she would be naive enough (or curious, or even flattered) to cozy up with this person, publicly or privately. It feels like an odd attempt by the show to humanize and minimize this person’s behaviors. The entire plot point feels vapid rather than meaningful.
Even so, the acting on the show: Topnotch. Same with the wardrobe. It’s always had a ridiculous if sharp-eyed view of the legal system — and the world at large.
But this time out, instead of saying something, “The Good Fight” is simply going through the motions.
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'THE GOOD FIGHT'
2 stars (out of 4)
Rating: TV-MA
How to watch: Paramount+
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