The Good Fight (Season 5 Review)
The fifth and, I take it, the final season of this show confirmed to me that this is a spin-off which all in all I prefer to the original. (The Good Wife started out strongly, but derailed so much for me that I never watched the final season.) Not least because it managed to remain an ensemble show, and impressively ambitious in its surreal black humor in how it responded to the times it was produced in.
This last season starts out with an episode which encapsulates the first year of the pandemic, the 2020 elections and the attempted coup on January 6th, with the rest being set during the Biden presidency, which means that nominally the series' big bad is out of power. But, as in real life, the Orange Menace was never the cause as much as he was the symptom of the overall rot. In dealing with the fallout, the season squarely adresses the deeper problem of people living in different realities now, of, for lack of a better term, the social contract being broken. Impressively - as in last season's opening episode which was one episode long "if Hilary had won" AU -, it doesn't simplify to "this is all the Republicans' fault". What causes the existence of "community" courts in this season is a real problem with the system as it exists, the way poor people have rarely if ever access to legal justice while the rich can literally buy themselves lawyers and judges, the overflow of criminality. But said courts themselves aren't a solution, either, but ever larger fragmentation, until we're left with everyone no longer accepting any jugments but those of an increasingly smaller circle of people they agree with anyway, and thus the end of society.
I was impressed by how with all the surreal humor that is the show's trademark they never diguised what the stakes were. (Though I'm surprised that in-universe, it took Diane until the finale to draw the obvious parallel between Wackner Rules and The Apprentice.) At the latest the fact David Cord, as a rich man owner of his very own prison, was ready, willing and able to take in the prisoners Wackner gave him should have made everyone call it quits, but because the first prisoner to get this treatment was a rapist scumbag, Marissa (and the rest of the gang) chose not to say anything. By contrast, when Julius got arrested for "parking tickets", it stopped being funny and our heroes tried to go their separate ways but found they couldn't due to their own need of Cord as a client. And the whole thing exploding, in the final episode, in a mini 6/1 with exactly the same kind of violence and very real threat emerging from the seemingly harmless crazy was really the only way it could have ended.
And the show never stopped showing the inequalities; thus the female (black) judge (or "judge") who really started this out of an emergency and very real need gets arrested (for theft of intellectual property of a white man), while Wackner never does. Diane wrestles for the entire season with the fact that on the one hand, she feels she's earned her position as a name partner on this firm, while on the other, almost everyone else sees it as the result of white privilege. The episode where she asks her imaginary Ruth Bader Ginsberg if RBG would have retired had she known that Obama would replace her with a black man, and head! RBG says no, because she knew what she could do but couldn't know about any potential successor is a good example of showverse and realverse commenting on each other. (Not least because by RBG not retiring during Obama's presidency, a third Trump judge came into existence.)
At the same time, I don't think the series would have worked as well as it did if we didn't care about the characters. And the show managed a relatively big turnover within two years; in this last season, both Luca and Adrian faded out after the initial episodes, with new characters Carmen, Wackner and Liz' boyfriend the tv producer coming in, and yet it worked. Mind you, Carmen's scenes felt almost (not in a bad way) old fashioned in that her dilemma - gaining the confidence of a big time gangster who insists on her representing him, which enhanced her status at the law firm but also means a degree of complicity in what he does - felt very much as something out of The Good Wife which Alicia faced repeatedly. Otoh the fact the firm does represent drug dealers very much plays into the seasonal (and overall) themes.
On a trivia note, I am amused that after two shows, they finally found an in-character excuse for Diane to sing in the finale. (Though not full throatedly, i.e. it wasn't a show off case for Christine Baranski.) I'm also tremendously relieved that Diane and Curt remained together (once they had reunited early on in this series) throughout the show. Of all the romantic canon pairings of this and its parent show, these two were possibly the only one I was truly rooting for, and yes, those crazy kids did make it, his Republicanness and her Democratness not withstanding.
Diane in the end deciding on the one hand to step down as name partner and become an equity partner instead but on the other determined to use her chance to go on a hunt with Curt and the big money men was a neat summary of the character, I thought; she will do the right thing eventually, even at her own cost, BUT she'll also always be tempted to go for the power as well, because ambition is part of her nature, too. Due to her having been on both shows from beginning to end, she's ended up as the character we know best, and I bid her a fond farewell now, as I do the other characters, both long and short term.
Black comedy with real emotional stakes as a way to depict the madness of our times: sounds easy, must have been fiendishly difficult to accomplish and get right. I'm very interest in what the Kings and the other writers will do next.
This last season starts out with an episode which encapsulates the first year of the pandemic, the 2020 elections and the attempted coup on January 6th, with the rest being set during the Biden presidency, which means that nominally the series' big bad is out of power. But, as in real life, the Orange Menace was never the cause as much as he was the symptom of the overall rot. In dealing with the fallout, the season squarely adresses the deeper problem of people living in different realities now, of, for lack of a better term, the social contract being broken. Impressively - as in last season's opening episode which was one episode long "if Hilary had won" AU -, it doesn't simplify to "this is all the Republicans' fault". What causes the existence of "community" courts in this season is a real problem with the system as it exists, the way poor people have rarely if ever access to legal justice while the rich can literally buy themselves lawyers and judges, the overflow of criminality. But said courts themselves aren't a solution, either, but ever larger fragmentation, until we're left with everyone no longer accepting any jugments but those of an increasingly smaller circle of people they agree with anyway, and thus the end of society.
I was impressed by how with all the surreal humor that is the show's trademark they never diguised what the stakes were. (Though I'm surprised that in-universe, it took Diane until the finale to draw the obvious parallel between Wackner Rules and The Apprentice.) At the latest the fact David Cord, as a rich man owner of his very own prison, was ready, willing and able to take in the prisoners Wackner gave him should have made everyone call it quits, but because the first prisoner to get this treatment was a rapist scumbag, Marissa (and the rest of the gang) chose not to say anything. By contrast, when Julius got arrested for "parking tickets", it stopped being funny and our heroes tried to go their separate ways but found they couldn't due to their own need of Cord as a client. And the whole thing exploding, in the final episode, in a mini 6/1 with exactly the same kind of violence and very real threat emerging from the seemingly harmless crazy was really the only way it could have ended.
And the show never stopped showing the inequalities; thus the female (black) judge (or "judge") who really started this out of an emergency and very real need gets arrested (for theft of intellectual property of a white man), while Wackner never does. Diane wrestles for the entire season with the fact that on the one hand, she feels she's earned her position as a name partner on this firm, while on the other, almost everyone else sees it as the result of white privilege. The episode where she asks her imaginary Ruth Bader Ginsberg if RBG would have retired had she known that Obama would replace her with a black man, and head! RBG says no, because she knew what she could do but couldn't know about any potential successor is a good example of showverse and realverse commenting on each other. (Not least because by RBG not retiring during Obama's presidency, a third Trump judge came into existence.)
At the same time, I don't think the series would have worked as well as it did if we didn't care about the characters. And the show managed a relatively big turnover within two years; in this last season, both Luca and Adrian faded out after the initial episodes, with new characters Carmen, Wackner and Liz' boyfriend the tv producer coming in, and yet it worked. Mind you, Carmen's scenes felt almost (not in a bad way) old fashioned in that her dilemma - gaining the confidence of a big time gangster who insists on her representing him, which enhanced her status at the law firm but also means a degree of complicity in what he does - felt very much as something out of The Good Wife which Alicia faced repeatedly. Otoh the fact the firm does represent drug dealers very much plays into the seasonal (and overall) themes.
On a trivia note, I am amused that after two shows, they finally found an in-character excuse for Diane to sing in the finale. (Though not full throatedly, i.e. it wasn't a show off case for Christine Baranski.) I'm also tremendously relieved that Diane and Curt remained together (once they had reunited early on in this series) throughout the show. Of all the romantic canon pairings of this and its parent show, these two were possibly the only one I was truly rooting for, and yes, those crazy kids did make it, his Republicanness and her Democratness not withstanding.
Diane in the end deciding on the one hand to step down as name partner and become an equity partner instead but on the other determined to use her chance to go on a hunt with Curt and the big money men was a neat summary of the character, I thought; she will do the right thing eventually, even at her own cost, BUT she'll also always be tempted to go for the power as well, because ambition is part of her nature, too. Due to her having been on both shows from beginning to end, she's ended up as the character we know best, and I bid her a fond farewell now, as I do the other characters, both long and short term.
Black comedy with real emotional stakes as a way to depict the madness of our times: sounds easy, must have been fiendishly difficult to accomplish and get right. I'm very interest in what the Kings and the other writers will do next.