Donald Trump has breathed new life into CBS All Access’ The Good Fight, the Good Wife spinoff series bowing next month, creator Robert King and star Christine Baranski told TV critics at TCA today.
“What was good, the world changed on us,” King said. “The Good Wife was a little bit about the Obama years. This gives shape to a new show. … This is all going to change, and some say for better, some for worse.” Only the first episode had been written before the election and it was rewritten, King said.
The Good Fight, from The Good Wife creators Robert and Michelle King, picks up one year after the events of the final broadcast episode of The Good Wife. In the new series, a massive Ponzi scam has wiped out the entire financial estate of Baranski’s Diane Lockhart character.
“We were all in free-fall,” Baranski said of the presidential election outcome. On the spinoff series, “you have a lead character in moral and practical free-fall in a similar way to what the country is feeling right now. How do you take the next step when there is no foundation? Where are we morally?”
Baranski says she hopes the show will be a “positive message about women keeping up the good fight.”
The Good Wife was a “satire of liberal mindset because Chicago was such a liberal town,” Robert King insisted at TCA, while the spinoff looks at how that environment has changed. “Not just anti-Trump, we’re also looking at how liberals react. … It’s about how the culture is changing and the confusion, and what’s real and what’s not real.”
A scene in which Baranski’s character puts into a box a photo of Hillary Clinton that had hung in her office during the Good Wife years, remarking that Clinton is going to be next POTUS, takes on an entirely different resonance, Baranski noted. She said her character similarly will try to pick herself up after unexpected career downturn.
To drive viewers to CBS All Access, the pilot episode will be simulcast on the CBS broadcast network in the mothership’s former plum Sunday timeslot on February 19. After that, every weekly episode will be available on-demand at CBS All Access only.
In a trailer shown to critics before the Q&A session (watch it here), Baranski’s character is seen learning of her financial disaster on the phone and shouting “F*ck!” Naturally, TV critics wanted to know if that will be heard in the broadcast version of the pilot.
The characters in the series are “elegant people, cultured,” but they’re going to use swear words you would have expected to hear” in such extreme situations, Michelle King said. That said, the scene was shot three ways: once in which she uses the aforementioned obscenity; another in which she says “son of a bitch,” which is for CBS broadcast network; and a third version in which she shouts “motherf*cker!”
Michelle King said they had no intention of using that version on any platform “we just wanted to hear Baranski say it. “We have it on a loop at home,” Robert King joked.
