Six years ago, as the US went to the polls, a new TV show was busy filming its first season. The Good Fight was a spin-off from the long-running drama The Good Wife, which starred Julianna Margulies as anti-hero Alicia Florrick, a woman returning to a law career after her politician husband is embroiled in a sex scandal. This new show would focus on another character from The Good Wife, Florrick's boss and mentor, Diane Lockhart – played by Christine Baranski – a die-hard liberal and feminist who was about to witness her dream become reality as the US voted in their first female leader.
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Then, mid-way through filming the pilot, the election results landed. Suddenly, a show about a female lawyer in a world where the ultimate glass ceiling had been smashed and Hillary Clinton was president was totally redundant. The show's creators and showrunners Robert and Michelle King hastily reworked the opening scene to show an open-mouthed Diane Lockhart sitting in a dark room, watching Trump's inauguration on TV in disbelief and horror.
And so began a show that, over the next six years, would continue to rip storylines straight from the headlines – with plots covering Donald Trump's presidency, MeToo, police brutality, Jeffrey Epstein, the 6 January insurrection, the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Covid and many more, outlasting Trump's presidency to reach a now sixth and final season. It also punched well above its weight as a legal drama to become one of the most political – and creative – shows on television, and one of the few to truly capture the disorienting and surreal experience of living in the world over the past few years.
