Christine Baranski and Audra McDonald stare down Armageddon one absurd legal case at a time.
Or worse, they’ll make you the clueless subject of an internet prank?
In the cheerfully unsettling sixth season (premiering today), people eventually just stop noticing all the explosions.
Christine Baranski and Audra McDonald on ‘The Good Fight’.Elizabeth Fisher/Paramount+
Bangs keep echoing outside the windows of Reddick & Associates.
Attorneys conduct business, juggling office politics with legal tomfoolery.
But threats are everywhere.
Audra McDonald on ‘The Good Fight’.Elizabeth Fisher/Paramount+
So how nice to see the calm moment when multiple beloved characters ride down an elevator together.
And then a grenade lands at their feet.
There are still cases, of course.
Really, whatisgoing on outside?
The particulars are hazy: truckers, Antifa, a militia, white supremacists?
Recent history fills in the gaps.
A whole political party running against voting.
In a moment of renewed stress, Diane seeks wellness from Dr. Lyle Bettancourt (John Slattery).
He offers a kind of ketamine therapy.
“To just microdose,” he swears, “Is to be Dante without a Virgil.”
Remember, Dante met Virgil in Hell.
Diane’s mood improves.
She smiles that splendid Baranski smile and laughs that tremendous Baranski laugh.
Is this brilliant lawyer receiving new insight or losing sight of the Inferno around her?
Maybe serenity requires delusion.
Out here are concentration camps, lame documentaries, idiotic judges, and freaking Nazis.
Out here, Liz keeps getting strange phone calls from UNKNOWN.
Out here, no joke, they’re suing a fetus.
Safe to say, I think, thatGood Fightis officially the weirdest normal show ever.
Co-creatorsRobertandMichelle Kingnever lost this spinoff’s fundamental online grid-procedural DNA.
Every episode embeds familiar signifiers: Clockwork courtroom scenes, guest-star judges, devastating cross-examinations.
Stories are ongoing, yet not always serialized.
Constant cast rotation suggests the opposite of a five-season plan.
It’s possible all the youngEuphoriacs no longer carry any deep memory of regular weekly TV.
You expect murder on a post-apocalyptic series.
We’re lousy with lame dystopias and historical miniseries scoring decades-later points.
You went toGood Fightto watch headlines rip into flaming confetti.
There’s also a quiet sequence that will haunt my nightmares.
Liz goes on a news show to discuss the Supreme Court.
A cameraman on the show’s set makes a gun gesture at Liz and silently pulls his finger trigger.
And that was possibly season 5’sleastloopy running plot.
The show’s politics were either protean or static in a changing world.
It was explicitly anti-Trump voter, remains very pro-punching Nazis, but now also seems baffled by progressives.
PlusGary Coleas Diane’s incongruously gun-toting Republican husband; man, they put the sex in sexagenarian!
(The McDonald eye-roll plus the Baranski laugh equals pure television.)
Was the show keeping up with reality’s traffic?
Looming doom gives the new season more of a compass, I think, despite some awkward early steps.
Carmen’s dalliance with crypto feels vague.
You want aGood Fightcase to become a dizzying 10-ring circus, where different arguments turn your own opinion sideways.
Here, crypto just seems weird and monstrous: Accurate, maybe, and not very specific.
I can’t shake the feeling this season is leaving me with, though.
It’s never been more of a genuine thriller, even if the tension is mainly lingering.
You fear any casual conversation could take a violent turn.
Ever-confident Marissa finds herself shaken, worried that she’s become targeted by an anti-semite militia.
The streets of Chicago seem overpopulated with multiple shadow societies, some noble, some monstrous, all inscrutable.
There are still occasional joys, even some ambient chat about the greatness ofBelow Deck Sailing Yacht.
But some kind of end is near.
“Feels like bad times,” Carmen says at one point.
It’ll be worse whenGoodis gone.Grade: B+
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