How Evil inspired the season 4 premiere of The Good Fight

Warning: This article contains spoilers from the season 4 premiere of The Good Fight.

In The Good Fight's wild season 4 premiere, which launched on CBS All Access Thursday morning, Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski) wakes up in an alternate universe where Hillary Clinton actually won the 2016 presidential election instead of Donald Trump. At this point, the legal drama is known for taking big swings and doing the most within the framework of a legal drama, but kicking off their new season with an extended dream is bold even by Good Fight standards and the ultimate heat check.

According to co-creators Michelle and Robert King, though, you can thank their metaphysical CBS drama Evil — which follows a psychologist, priest-in-training, and handyman as they investigate demonic possessions and miracles for the Catholic Church and features wild shots of Michael Emerson talking to his demon psychiatrist — inspired them to take this leap in The Good Fight's season 4 opener.

"We had a lot of fun working on Evil because it expanded our minds a little bit of what we could do with a standard network-like plotting," Robert tells EW. "So, it probably got inspired by some of the dreamlike elements in Evil."

The rest of the episode was also inspired by a thought experiment where the Kings had fun imagining what would change if Clinton had won. As Diane moves through this new world, she learns that Elizabeth Warren and Merrick Garland are Supreme Court justices, the polar bear population has increased, and most ridiculously the Clinton administration has found a cure for cancer. But then this liberal dream takes on a nightmarish quality when Diane discovers that Harvey Weinstein is still one of the most powerful men in Hollywood and even won the Presidential Medal of Freedom. From the episode's perspective, the Women's March didn't happen, sexual assault accusations against Weinstein and other powerful men didn't come out, and the #MeToo movement never started because people weren't angry about Trump winning the election despite the Access Hollywood tape and several sexual misconduct allegations against him, which he has denied.

"You go to a lot of liberal parties where there are a lot of liberal people spouting a lot of liberal opinions about if Trump weren't president and Hillary were president. I do think that always sounds good until you start realizing what else would be changed by that," says Robert. "So what we wanted was to show the negative sides of a liberal wet dream."

He continues: "The Evil thing was more willing to allow ourselves to expand what we thought of as the show, and two was wanting to explode a kind of utopian myth of what liberals often have of what an alternate present might look like."

New episodes of The Good Fight available every Thursday on CBS All-Access.

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