‘The Good Fight’ Levels Up in Season 3

The Good Fight has steadily built a reputation for being one of the best shows on TV most people aren’t watching. That might be about to change. Brilliant, masterful, and deliciously pulpy, it is more than just a spin-off of The Good Wife. It is an audacious dramatization of life in 2019, and in Season 3, The Good Fight levels up. It’s pushing the boundaries of what a legal procedure is supposed to be by juggling taut mysteries, juicy melodrama, and profoundly creative storytelling. It is, in a single word, sensational.

Since it launched on CBS All Access in early 2017, The Good Fight has had a giddy time playing with the existential hell of being an upper class liberal in the time of President Trump. Nowhere is this more examined than in the character of Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski). The Good Wife character had her whole world fall apart — in more ways than one — when Trump trounced Clinton. The last few seasons have dug further into Diane’s unravelling and rebuilding. Last season, Diane was taking drops of acid to disconnect from reality and this season she’s throwing axes and talking to Trump-shaped bruises on her husband’s back.

In Season 3 the Trump administration is doing more than provide a prescient backdrop for the show’s outrageous drama. The news is actually inspiring the drama. It’s not just that Diane Lockhart is personally getting involved in a secret personal battle against the Trump family, but that echoes of other storylines playing out behind-the-scenes of the administration are popping up. In Episode 2, Welsh actor Michael Sheen (Frost/Nixon) joins the cast as a chaotic caricature of Roy Cohn and his proteges, Trump and Roger Stone. Roland Blum is a drugged up Cohn-obsessive who stymies Maia Rindell even as he inspires her to think more creatively. Then in Episode 3, Aaron Tveit enters as a DA with a Jared Kushner-esque bone to pick with Blum, who ruined the attorney’s father’s life.

As always, The Good Fight delivers pound for pound, some of the best acting on television. It feels like a cliché to say that Christine Baranski is an incredible performer, but she is so phenomenal in the role of Diane Lockhart — smart, patrician, wild, sexy, tired, funny, in control, and fraying at the bits all at once — that the character really has to be accepted as one of TV’s all time greats. She can say more with a full throated laugh than most actors can in full page monologues. That level of excellence ripples out to the rest of the cast. Cush Jumbo is exploring new layers of Lucca Quinn’s sensitivity as a new mother, and Rose Leslie finally feels confident in the part of Maia Rindell. (It helps that much of this season is focused on Maia loosening up and taking her power.) Sarah Steele continues to crackle like a firework at full force, Audra McDonald is elegance incarnate, and Delroy Lindo is still giving the best supporting actor turn on TV not yet honored with an Emmy nomination.

Finally, while the first two seasons of The Good Fight felt like something of an experiment, Season 3 is a strutting victory lap. Showrunners Robert King and Michelle King are no longer stretching the limits of what they did on The Good Wife. Now they are exploding the legal drama’s format and playing with storytelling convention, basking in the freedom CBS All Access provides them. The Good Wife made a name for itself by presenting a pulpy weekly show grounded in the facts of being a public figure torn between the law and ambition. The Good Fight supersedes its predecessor since it cares more about balls out storytelling. As Sheen’s character instructs Maia, “Stories beat facts every time.”

The Good Fight Season 3, Episode 1 “The One Inspired by the Recent Troubles” premieres on CBS All Access today. Future episodes will be released weekly on Thursdays.

Where to stream The Good Fight