The Good Fight

The Good Fight is worth discovering for yourself on its own merits, and it’s a lot easier to recommend it now. Sometimes, there’s something to be said for quality and quantity.

Sometimes season 3 of a top-tier series empowers creators to swing hard for the fences, a play that doesn’t always turn out well. These new episodes of The Good Fight do, thank god. Each of the four new hours provided to critics display creators and showrunners Robert and Michelle King connecting to the ball with awe-inspiring power, covering a vast swath of current events without overly stuffing each episode with didactic, do-gooder fury.

The Good Fight is, with the possible exception of the season five arc with Alicia and Cary leaving Lockhart/Gardner, better than its CBS predecessor The Good Wife ever was. Period. Full stop. ... I'm not without reservations on The Good Fight. Freedom from CBS procedural structure has mostly been an asset for the show, yet it has a tendency toward unformed chaos in episodes that don't include a major court case.

The Good Wife spinoff has now become fully its own thing – even if that thing, with its welter of tones and moods, from levity to despair, and frequently experimental forms (the episode also included a cartoon song video explaining non-disclosure agreements, on top of the talking pellet wounds) – resists simple classification.

The show’s flexible, seemingly effortless dodges between the silly and the serious feel true to the experience of being alive today, truer than I would’ve thought possible. For a show as intensely rooted in the Political Now as any fictional show could possibly be, that’s an impressive feat.

In these new episodes, The Good Fight is at its best when the characters get honest about race within the majority black law firm in ways that feel startlingly real and, frankly, unique for a TV show.