“The Good Fight”: Season 1 Report Card

For anyone used to watching The Good Wife, the finale of The Good Fight seemed to have come awfully quickly. After getting used to those long, leisurely 22-episode seasons — those same 22-episode seasons that Julianna Margulies and creators Robert and Michelle King would constantly bemoan as a handicap against getting the same kind of praise as prestige shows — The Good Fight‘s first season ended after a swift 10. In keeping with the grand tradition of The Good Wife universe arriving at pivotal moments via people showing up unexpectedly to your door, The Good Fight hit us with the cliffhanger of Maia Rindell getting indicted for her rotten father’s Ponzi scheme after said awful father skipped town instead of surrendering himself to authorities.

The good news is that we’re definitely getting a second season, so we’ll get some kind of resolution on Maia’s plight. But we can also hope that the hiatus allows the Kings to tinker with the show a bit. Figure out what’s working and what isn’t working and fine tune things for season 2. The Good Fight is an incredibly watchable show with moments of greatness, which only makes its flaws all the more nagging.

So in the spirit of getting the best Good Fight we can get for season 2, here’s a quick report card on what worked and what didn’t in these first ten episodes.

Old Friends

The Good Fight imported two cast members from The Good Wife to grow its new little garden with. Before the premiere, the lion’s share of attention fell on Christine Baranski’s Diane Lockhart. She would be the major connective tissue bringing the world of Lockhart Gardner into the world of Reddick Boseman & Kolstad. But while Diane’s storyline made for a dynamite premiere episode, the show has struggled to find storylines to keep her at that level. Her struggles fitting into the culture of Reddick Boseman have been mostly superficial. We went through multiple episodes where the main point of contention was Diane’s inability to pony up a capital contribution (The Good Wife universe is obsessed with the notion of capital contributions). Guest star Gary Cole wasn’t around enough to really explore Diane’s dying marriage, either, so we ended up getting just as much Diane this time around as we got on The Good Wife, a show where she was a supporting a character.

Faring much better was Cush Jumbo as Lucca Quinn, who was already at Reddick Boseman as the season began and who was responsible for most of the (few) vague references to what Alicia Florrick is currently up to (the verdict: shrug emoji). Lucca was a bit backburnered in the season’s first episodes, but once she got started with a romantic/sexual relationship with prosecutor Colin Morrello (Justin Bartha), things heated up in every sense of the word. On The Good Wife, Alicia provided for a few scenes that gave the show a surprising degree of sexuality, and it looks like Lucca definitely picked up that torch. Even better, Jumbo and Rose Leslie showed great friend chemistry as Lucca and Maia’s friendship developed in the last two episodes.

Rounding out the trio of returning characters was Sarah Steele’s Marissa Gold, show showed up in the second episode looking for a job and ended up as Diane’s assistant. Steele is a phenomenally likeable actress who has thus far managed to keep the spirited, knowledgeable, and wildly confident Marissa from becoming too off-putting. Her storyline, where she’s trying to learn enough to become an investigator, is among the ones I’m most excited to see resume in season 2.

Grade: B+

New Friends

With a clean slate to develop new characters, the results were … mixed. We’ve already talked about how Delroy Lindo is a charismatic magician who can breathe life into even the dullest environments. So it’s no surprise that he’s working wonders with the pretty-good character of Adrian Boseman. He’s not as fleshed out as he might have been in a longer season, but Lindo really makes him come alive. Adrian’s an asset to every storyline and scene he’s in. His counterpart at Reddick Boseman is Barbara Kolstad (Erica Tazel) who is just dying to break out as a kind of hard-assed semi-antagonist. It sometimes feels like the show needs to have an in-house heavy, kind of like David Lee was on TGW. But David was a bastard at heart, while Barbara is less selfishly motivated. It seems like the Kings haven’t figured out what Barbara has in place of David Lee’s dickishness, but they’d do well to really try to figure that out this offseason.

Faring well this season: Justin Bartha as Colin Morello, a satisfyingly conflicted prosecutor in the Cary Agos mold, whose aforementioned red hot chemistry with Cush Jumbo was a huge asset to season 1. And Nyambi Nyambi as Reddick Boseman’s in-house investigator, Jay, has been great and honestly worthy of a bump to regular status for season 2. Here’s hoping Marissa’s ambitions to become an investigator lead to the both of them working together rather than she replacing him.

But the highest profile new character was clearly Rose Leslie’s Maia Rindell, who became the focal point of much of the season, as half of the storylines revolved around the investigation into her parents’ Ponzi scheme. Maia has clearly been set up as the Alicia-like center of the show, the girl plagued by political scandal who’s struggling to establish herself on her own. But that kind of too-exact comparison to Alicia is one of many reasons why Maia’s storyline has fallen comparatively flat. For one thing, a cheated-on wife is a whole lot easier to get behind than the (semi-)oblivious daughter of a Bernie Madoff analogue. For another, Alicia had a fire lit under her from minute one, while Maia seemed like a leaf blowing in the breeze for at least half the season. The good news is that Maia came into her own in the final two episodes of the season, seemingly coming to terms with her family and her role in their scandal and (finally) stepping up at work. The bad news is that the season-ending cliffhanger seemingly yanked her back down into the Ponzi pit.

Grade: C+

Random Weirdos

One of the great things about The Good Wife was how often it allowed its case-of-the-week roots on network TV to allow it to play with an assortment of quirky, strange characters who kept recurring. Whether it was Howard Lyman as the old lawyer crank or Matthew Lillard showing up with his “Thicky Trick” music video, these bits of local color were great. And they were a lot easier to integrate into the series with 22 episodes instead of 10. The Good Fight managed to stock up on a few, though, including a handful of enjoyably cranky judges. And they brought back Dylan Baker as fussy sociopath (and murderer!) Colin Sweeney. But Sweeney didn’t work quite as well without Alicia to bounce off of, which might be why the show appears to be trying to replace him with John Cameron Mitchell as a Milo Yiannopoulos type who needles/appreciates Diane in a similar fashion to Sweeney needling Alicia. It’s not quite as enjoyable to watch, mostly because it’s hard not to imagine that TGF is going soft on Milo, but it’s the right idea.

Grade: C

Current Events

Here is where The Good Fight makes the best argument for the rest of us to let it figure its character stuff out. Because in the wake of Donald Trump’s election, no narrative program has more boldly addressed the new American reality than The Good Fight. Famously, the first episode had to be re-written in order to reflect the new Trumpian reality, and in the following episodes, the lawyers at Reddick Boseman managed to take on the Trump era directly. While other shows might’s ginned up a fake president to rail against, The Good Fight decided to cut out the middleman and go after everything from the supposedly repressed Trump episode of SVU to ostracized black Trump voters. And they’ve done so with both clarity and humor. It’s really been a thrill. More of that!

Grade: A

Overall

With The Good Wife, the Kings oftentimes seemed bottled in by their title.  Every time it seemed like Alicia Florrick’s journey was leading the show to evolve into something else, Alicia would get yanked back into the muck of her scandal/family/infamy, perhaps because the Kings wanted to keep the show on theme for its ultimate finale. This was sometimes a weakness. But with The Good Fight, they might be better off thinking a bit more about the title and steering the show in the direction of the political and the current. And at the same time, that title doesn’t necessitate that Maia always be dealing with this Ponzi scheme. Let it be a specter that haunts her but doesn’t define her. Let her evolve as a character. Explore her friendship with Lucca. Become a lawyer for real. The more the show leans into its existence as a lawfirm in 2017 America — rather than a show keeping up with Bernie Madoff’s New York — the better off they’ll be.

Grade: B+

Where to stream The Good Fight