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‘The Good Fight’ gets ready for Trump era

‘The Good Wife’ spinoff tweaked plot after the election

By Hank Stuever, The Washington Post
Published: January 11, 2017, 6:03am

PASADENA, Calif. — “The Good Fight,” the spinoff drama from CBS’ much-loved “The Good Wife,” was shooting its pilot episode on election night. Christine Baranski, returning in her role as attorney Diane Lockhart, remembers filming a scene in which she was packing up her office and put away a photo of Diane and Hillary Clinton, which was just the sort of thing Diane would proudly display.

Baranski still believed that Clinton would win the election. It wasn’t to be.

Now the show — its 10-episode run premieres on CBS on Feb. 19 with additional episodes released each Sunday on CBS All Access, the network’s streaming service — is eager to portray life for its characters in a Donald Trump political sphere. The pilot was rejiggered slightly to include Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration in the background. “It’s a very different era,” co-creator and executive producer Robert King told critics and reporters Monday at the Television Critics Association’s winter press tour.

“The Good Wife,” said King, who ran the show with his wife and collaborator Michelle King, was very much a show of the Obama era — “a satire, sort of, if you look at it, of the liberal mindset.” The new show, he said, will “(look) at how liberals are reacting … the confusion between what’s real and not real,” as well as the kind of “overall cultural shifts” that “The Good Wife” was so good at weaving into its overall story lines.

“The Good Fight,” in the words of CBS Interactive president Marc DeBevoise, will avail itself of “a premium cable sensibility” — which basically means steamier sex scenes and a sprinkling of foul language.

Baranski’s Diane gets a chance to blurt out the f-word fairly soon in the pilot episode, when the character, who is retiring at the top of her game from the law firm bearing her name, learns that her entire investment portfolio and life savings have vanished in a Bernard Madoff-style swindle. When her former partners, including David Lee (Zach Grenier), reject Diane’s request to return to her job, she has to start from scratch — which leads her to an all-African-American law firm.

Cush Jumbo, who played attorney Lucca Quinn in “The Good Wife,” returns as “The Good Fight’s” co-star. Sarah Steele, as Marissa Gold, also returns.

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