Justin Bartha Explains Why He Took Up ‘The Good Fight’

The Good Fight’s first season finale is roaring onto CBS All Access this Sunday. The legal drama was a bold step for CBS. The Good Fight isn’t just the first CBS All Access series; It’s the first CBS show with the attitude of a streaming service show. Here, Christine Baranski’s Diane Lockhart doesn’t hold back. F-bombs fly and the cases tackled reflect touchy real-life topics like Black Lives Matter and the alt-right.

However, The Good Fight does carry on one important tradition from The Good Wife — it’s currently the best-cast show in America. Guest stars include Matthew Perry, Aaron Tveit, and Andrea Martin and The Good Fight’s official ensemble cast includes the likes of Delroy Lindo, Bernadette Peters, and Justin Bartha. “Initially, that was my favorite thing about The Good Wife,” Bartha told me over the phone this week. “You know, I love theater in New York and I live in New York and every great theater actor is in one episode. The guest stars are the Avengers of actors. So that’s the initial attraction to the universe is obviously the actors.”

Bartha plays Colin Morello, a heavy hitter in the State’s Attorney’s office who provides a foil (both professionally and romantically) to Cush Jumbo‘s Lucca Quinn. The two meet when they square off against each other in court and soon develop a crackling flirtation that explodes into a full-blown romance. Their snappy scenes together lift the tone of The Good Wife.

“When casting and the Kings and I sat down, we did speak a lot about an old-school type of courtship. There’s a modernity to it, but there’s an old-school banter. They’re both on the same wavelength. The initial idea that they had a lot of similarities in both their personal and their professional life, maybe both keeping the other sex at an arm’s length. So I think that they both have similar coping mechanisms that lend for some witty banter and some transparency to what they’re doing,” Bartha said, adding that he used Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway’s chemistry in The Thomas Crown Affair as a touchstone.

Even though things are fraught between Colin and Lucca as the season comes to an end, Bartha confirms he will be back in season two. “Yeah, I’ll be in the second season for sure.”

The Good Fight has made headlines for its uncensored look at life in Trump’s America. “I think if you’ve read anything about the show, they initially conceived it as, you know, Christine Baranski being a bit of a Hillary Clinton archetype. She certainly was a Hillary Clinton supporter. So I think that they were surprised by the Trump win and I think if there was one good thing to come out of the Trump administration — not to be overly selfish — is the tone of this show has been able to siphon from that energy that has been put out there and obviously it’s colored the storyline and the tone of the show in general,” Bartha told me. “So, the environment right now wasn’t originally pushed, but the character I play was always pitched as having a potential political life, coming from a kind of dynastic Chicago family that was rearing him, possibly had some ambivalence towards that future. You know, the current state of our nation has added a very interesting depth to the show that it might not have had if Hillary had won.”

Still, Bartha had one major quibble with how critics were interpreting the political angle of the show. “The one thing that kind of annoys me when I read about The Good Fight is when it’s co-opted as this sort of liberal soapbox, where I think the perspectives of the characters — they’re showing multiple perspectives from many different characters. You know, certain conservative characters, obviously, get taken down by liberal characters. But you do see a mix and it’s not completely one-sided. As the show is politically centered now, I think that that concept of liberal and conservative, as it’s getting fuzzier in our real life, I think it’s interesting that the characters are possibly a little fuzzy, too.”

The Good Fight is the very first original series on CBS All Access, which means signing onto it could have seemed like a big gamble, but that’s not what made Bartha leery to sign on. “Initially, I was a little apprehensive about the spinoff because I didn’t know it was a streaming show. When they initially pitched it to me, I thought it was going to be a CBS show, blah blah blah. And then I found out about the new streaming thing and that the Kings were going to be able to do whatever they wanted and really create the world that they see and have it grounded in reality, that’s actually when I leaned more into it. It was more interesting to me.”

He added, “That being said, there’s always a bit of fear about a company launching an entire endeavor all on the backs of one show that could fail miserably, so yes, there is that. But also, initially they were going to do Star Trek first, which I think became bigger than they had thought, so they switched it around. So there wasn’t a lot of time to think about it. No, it’s exciting. In my opinion, I think that every network is going to have to do this eventually in the next five to ten years. We all know that CBS is a little more successful than some of the others, so I think they got the head start.”

The Good Fight‘s season finale premieres on CBS All Access this Sunday, April 16th.

Stream The Good Fight on CBS All Access