For the co-creators Robert and Michelle King, the decision to embrace Diane’s frustration with Trump’s election, and to follow that simmering fury throughout various corners of her life, was a natural extension of their own political anxieties. “With the Trump win, we kind of found an emotional rationale for doing the show,” Robert King said when I spoke to the pair on the phone recently. “As Michelle often says, the politics of our characters tend to be very liberal because they’re working as lawyers in Chicago, and so a lot of it was trying to honor how they would react. But it also was helpful because I think Michelle and I were both having to deal with what felt like was off about the country, that there was a loss of guardrails.



“There are day-to-day repercussions of that, and it also seemed to be a little can’t stop talking about it,” he continued. “So to kinda make that Diane’s problem too was exciting, ’cause it was a way of working through our own problems.”



The election also made for a new kind of creative challenge for the veteran showrunners, who led The Good Wife through its seven critically acclaimed seasons. It caused a rupture in how left-leaning television shows conveyed the ideological underpinnings of their characters. The Good Fight was no exception. Trump’s win “turned this into a very different show than the one we thought we were gonna be making,” Michelle King said. “And there’s something exciting about that—suddenly you’re working without a net.”

Elizabeth Fisher / CBS

Whereas some shows have tried to assuage the fear that modern politics stokes in viewers, The Good Fight takes great care to reflect it. Its characters’ conflicts mirror the surrealist tone of the world around them. By actively incorporating the chaos of the political sphere into The Good Fight, the Kings have created a show that doesn’t attempt to address grotesque realities with aspirational politesse. The pair also avoids the opposite trap: forsaking aesthetic and narrative considerations in favor of heavy-handed social commentary. With its consistent focus on character development and its willingness to interrogate the moral compasses of all its leads, The Good Fight is a far more thoughtful and compelling series than nearly any other television show that has flirted with #Resistance story lines.



The show, which will premiere its third season on the proprietary CBS All Access platform on Thursday, grounds its political analysis in Diane’s ever more frantic reactions to the changing world around her. Where a Hillary-era Diane might have been most concerned about her own professional legacy, the Trump-era Diane weighs the events of her own life against much larger social dynamics. She is perennially plugged in. “Diane, of all the characters, I would think, would be the most addicted to cable news, being the liberal feminist. In Season 1 … Trump had just been elected; the presidency hadn’t quite taken hold enough,” Baranski said. “By Season 2, it became a show about trying to process this new reality slash unreality that is the Trump era, no matter what your politics. We are living in a truly strange, mind-bending age.



“I love that the Kings just chose to write her as a woman who was always—for the seven or eight years we saw her on The Good Wife, we saw her be a sane, centered woman who prided herself on a kind of liberal sensibility but moral authority, willing to try to see the other side,” she continued. “And … [to] watch that person become unhinged [in Season 2], it’s like when the sanest person in the room loses it, you know, Oh my God.”



But even as Diane struggles to stay afloat amid the changing political tide, The Good Fight never paints her as hysterical or overly dramatic; instead, the show presents her anxieties as natural responses to the dizzying world around her. The second season, for example, began with a series of targeted killings of lawyers, a spate of violence that rocks Diane partly because of how she lost her former law partner Will Gardner (Josh Charles) during The Good Wife’s run. (It also eerily recalls the recent uptick in violence against journalists.) By the season’s end, Diane has been rattled by several shootings of lawyers, including one of her colleagues. She’s been contacted by a student from Russia who claims to fear deportation because she was on the so-called pee tape. Diane grows weary.