Last Thursday, fans of “The Good Fight”—the darkly funny Trump-era spinoff of “The Good Wife,” created by the married showrunners Robert and Michelle King, which is currently airing, barely, on the locked-garden streaming site called CBS All Access—were faced with something unusual. A placard reading “CBS HAS CENSORED THIS CONTENT” filled the screen, silently, for eight and a half seconds. To many viewers, it looked like a joke. It wasn’t.

In fact, CBS had censored that week’s “Good Fight Short,” one of a series of “Schoolhouse Rock!”-like cartoons—written and performed by the singer Jonathan Coulton and animated by Steve Angel, the co-founder of the Canadian shop Head Gear Animation—that punctuate the legal drama, educating viewers on topics like impeachment and Russian trolls. The segment had been fully written and animated, then vetted by legal and run through all the regular corporate oversight. Then, less than two weeks before the episode was going to air, CBS told the Kings to cut the animated sequence. In response, the co-creators threatened to stop writing the show. In a subsequent conversation, the two sides reached what CBS called a “creative solution”: the Kings wouldn’t quit, but CBS would agree to display that placard where the short was meant to go.

The Kings’ initial plan was to leave the placard up for the entire ninety seconds that the song was meant to run, accompanied by a countdown clock. During the sound mix, they reconsidered: that approach felt potentially self-indulgent and bratty, and maybe punishing to viewers. Eight and a half seconds of protest seemed like enough, after which they would cut back to the regular episode. As a result, many “Good Fight” viewers interpreted the sign as a satirical gesture, not a real indication that CBS had censored a forbidden subject. “It did not occur to me that people would think that it was a joke—until, literally, we saw our family this weekend and people didn’t realize it had happened,” Michelle King told me.

So what was the forbidden subject? “The Good Fight” has featured musical segments about “the pee-pee tape” and the N.S.A., not to mention a moving, melancholic cartoon about immigration, in which Melania Trump was pictured in bed with President Donald Trump, as Coulton sang, “Poor huddled masses that yearn to breathe free / Does she feel tired of winning?” As Michelle Goldberg wrote last week in the Times, the show has become a cathartic outlet for viewers traumatized by the Trump era. Set at a majority-African-American law firm, where Diane Lockhart, a regal litigator played by Christine Baranski, is now a partner, it’s a series about élite liberals who have been radicalized by the times; in a recent sequence, one character made an argument for punching Nazis, in a direct address to the camera. (That sequence went viral, then got attacked by Infowars.) The show also hasn’t shied away from criticizing the behavior of institutions that resemble CBS. This season—which was written after the firing of the CBS C.E.O. Les Moonves, after he was accused of repeated sexual misconduct—the firm’s partners discovered that its founder had committed sexual assault and then voted to conceal these crimes with nondisclosure agreements.

Coulton told me that the censored song is called “Banned in China.” (Full disclosure: Coulton is a friend of mine and recently paid me to appear as a guest on an extremely nerdy cruise-ship event.) It begins with a verse about the fact that “The Good Wife” itself had been banned in China, in 2014, possibly in reprisal for a Season 2 episode called “The Great Firewall,” which portrayed a Google-like company, called ChumHum, exposing a Chinese dissident to government torture. The next verse of the song is about the way that media companies censor content, with animations of movie scenes being snipped out of film strips.

Then comes the bridge, which lists other things banned in China, many of them symbolic images that Chinese citizens use on social-networking sites to evade censors. These include an empty chair (representing the late Chinese Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo), Winnie-the-Pooh (who is said to resemble China’s leader, Xi Jinping), and “the letter ‘N’ and Tiananmen Square”—a reference to the fact that the letter “N” was briefly banned in China, because it was perceived as a coded reference to the elimination of Presidential term limits. One animation showed the Chinese leader, dressed as Winnie-the-Pooh, shaking his bare bottom. Another showed Chinese reëducation camps.

The song is clear about one of the motives for American self-censorship: China is too big of a market for media corporations to ignore. Like the episode around it, the lyrics touch on the notion that Western culture might help spread democratic ideals, even under censored conditions—but it’s ultimately damning about how easily what might begin as a pragmatic compromise can become an excuse for greed. The clip ends with Coulton, in animated form, singing that he hopes his song gets banned in China—something that can’t happen now, given that it was preëmptively removed by CBS.

Michelle King confirmed for me that “the cartoon was about American entertainment and companies censoring themselves in order to appease the Chinese market.” The Kings would not describe for me internal conversations at CBS about the company’s motives for censoring the segment, but Coulton said that the network’s standards-and-practices division had expressed concern that such a sequence would endanger CBS executives on the ground in China. For the Canadian animation company involved in making the clip, this is a visceral context, because Canada is currently embroiled in a clash with China: two Canadian citizens have been detained as payback for the arrest of Huawei’s chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, who was imprisoned, in December, in Vancouver, on a U.S. warrant.

Stanley Rosen, a professor of political science at the University of Southern California who also teaches courses on Chinese film, expressed doubt that airing such a cartoon would have exposed CBS employees to risk, although, he added, that might depend on whether network executives were seen as personally responsible for the segment. He emphasized that, in Hollywood, financial concerns about offending China are generally paramount and nothing new: in 1997, three major movie studios were temporarily banned from the country, after they produced the films “Kundun,” “Seven Years in Tibet,” and “Red Corner.” (The ban on all three was lifted by the end of 2000.) Rosen said, “Your whole brand, your whole company, is subject to the most offensive thing in your repertoire. People have learned from past mistakes—I don’t want to say past mistakes, but past decisions.”

Michelle King described her reactions to CBS’s demands as “very surprised and upset.” After all, the network had been aware of everything in the segment throughout its development. Robert King added, “Can I say parenthetically here, we’re not the bad kids at the table—we love all the people at the table, at CBS. This is an unusual circumstance.” The Kings have a reputation as a clever, network-friendly team of showrunners in a field rife with temperamental pay-cable auteurs. They are proud of their ability to roll with the collaborative punches, to build provocative episodes with deceptively conventional surfaces. (Admittedly, these surfaces have become more surreal in the current political landscape. One recent “Good Fight” episode includes a scene in which a devilish MAGA litigator, played by Michael Sheen, gets Roger Stone’s face tattooed on his back.)