A few weeks ago, on “The Good Fight,” some Chicago litigators found the pee tape. Initially, they suspected that it was a hoax—entrapment by Project Veritas, perhaps, designed to embarrass the D.N.C. Their firm investigated, and in the process they discovered an entire genre of pee-tape fakes. The F.B.I. weighed in. There was a granular comparison of bathrobe screen grabs. (“Enhance!”) Finally, they had confirmation: it was the real thing.

And then they buried it—all of them, conspiring together, with varying motives. Releasing a video of Russian prostitutes peeing on a bed that the Obamas slept in, the group understood, would lead to nothing but another shockeroo news cycle. There would be outrage, then distraction, and on to the next round. To survive in an era of numb unreality, they needed a better strategy.

“The Good Fight,” like “The Good Wife,” its predecessor, is a cockeyed love letter to just this kind of strategic life, as lived by a set of educated, hypercompetent professionals: a liberal élite, if you will. It’s a dark comedy about the limits of savvy, about whether it’s possible to maintain detachment and pragmatism, not to mention respect for the law, in the face of chaos—including internal chaos. Both shows were co-created by Robert and Michelle King, married showrunners who have learned, during their years of making network television, to camouflage their freak flag as a pocket square. (Their brand might be summarized as “Looks like ‘L.A. Law,’ tastes like ‘The Wire.’ ”) But the sequel, whose opening scenes take place on Inauguration Day, is an angrier product than the original. It features an unforgettable credits sequence, in which fancy purses blow up like Molotov cocktails, punctuated by shots of Putin fishing and of neo-Nazis in Charlottesville. Sometimes I watch those credits twice.

With their French Revolutionary air, they’re a nifty metaphor for the show’s incendiary mind-set, as exemplified by its heroine, the litigator Diane Lockhart, an EMILY’s List Democrat whose plans to retire with her hot Republican gun-expert husband dissolved when, in a triple whammy, her man cheated on her, she lost her money to a Madoff-like grifter, and Wisconsin swung red. Lockhart joined a new firm, though she held on to her statement necklaces and her air of hauteur. But, alone in her spacious office, she’s losing her cool, watching cable news, gawking at clips that feel maybe ten per cent removed from the real thing: “When asked about the tweet, White House officials insisted that the President was joking, saying, ‘Mermaids do not exist, therefore Trump’s reference to talking with one—’ ” Lockhart now owns a gun; she has a fling with an Antifa activist. When, in the second season, she starts to microdose hallucinogens, it seems less like a breakdown than like an attempt to match her insides to her outsides.

Lockhart is white, but her firm, Reddick Boseman, is a majority-African-American institution, founded by a civil-rights pioneer; its bread and butter is suing the Chicago Police Department. The setting is easily as plush as the one on “The Good Wife,” which took place at the white-shoe firm Lockhart/Gardner, but the structural do-over feels designed to address “The Good Wife” ’s biggest flaw: it was an Obama-era, Chicago-set show that whiffed when it came to race. Now there are enough black characters that none of them need to represent blackness. The best is Adrian Boseman, a charismatic macher played by the great Delroy Lindo. There’s also the wonderful Cush Jumbo, from “The Good Wife,” as a perpetually bemused rising star named Lucca. When Lucca, an associate at Reddick Boseman, gets pregnant by a politically ambitious federal prosecutor, a white guy who hopes to win over black voters, the story develops promising echoes of “The Good Wife” ’s central plot, about a power marriage between cynics. Not every plot deals with race—plenty deal with technology, a longtime obsession of the Kings—but the subject feels baked in, not imposed. Among other things, the show loves to mock the peacocking of white liberals, as when a man confides to Lucca, randomly, “The Root is a great online magazine. I have it on Google Alert.”

The first season, which had an arc about that Madoff-like swindler, was fun, but I was loath to recommend it, for a stupid but legitimate reason: it streams on the ripoff subscription service CBS All Access, a gated community tucked away from the news cycle. The second season is too good to ignore. There are plenty of torn-from-the-headlines plots, about Milo Yiannopoulos, #MeToo, and ICE violence. But the show’s appeal is broader than any single issue. “The Good Fight” is simply a fun, confident, muscular series, in which every character is interesting, down to the judges. The dialogue pops; the aesthetic choices sparkle. As on “The Good Wife,” the elevator is a sexy stage, from which the characters look out at us as they bicker and flirt. Birds slam into the window of the F.B.I. investigator’s office. Laptops showing the pee tape glow yellow, in a giggle-inducing homage to “Pulp Fiction.” One episode even features a “Schoolhouse Rock”-style song about impeachment.

In between “The Good Wife” and this show, the Kings made “BrainDead,” a one-season zombie allegory, in which Washington was taken over by alien bugs, which crawled into the ears of congresspeople (literally) and turned them into half-deaf partisan fanatics. If Wisconsin had watched it, maybe things would be different. It was a far cry, superficially, from “The Good Fight,” but it had a similar slapstick intelligence. But the show that “The Good Fight” most reminds me of is, oddly, “The Newsroom.” Like Aaron Sorkin, the Kings have a native sympathy for Ivy-educated workaholics doing walk-and-talks. But, rather than place the emphasis on one cranky white male genius/truthteller, “The Good Fight” shares the spotlight. When its heroes get self-righteous, it pokes them instead of worshipping them. The characters don’t apologize for their intelligence, but the show is smarter than they are. It’s like “The Newsroom” for people who hated “The Newsroom.”

The Kings even have an episode about an ongoing obsession of Sorkin’s, the morality of accusing powerful men of sexual wrongdoing, online, anonymously. It isn’t the only “Good Fight” episode about #MeToo: the best one featured a subtle accusation directed at Boseman himself. This episode is less controlled. Ostensibly, the subject is the Shitty Media Men list, although it mashes in Aziz Ansari’s infamous date, with elements of Peter Thiel’s dealings with Gawker. Like “The Newsroom” ’s version, which was about a Web site that outed campus rapists, the episode skates over crucial truths. Frustratingly, it suggests that men are getting fired as a result of rumors, rather than following internal investigations. It’s cartoonish about its lead feminist activist. But there’s a daring, even liberatory, nastiness to the episode’s portrait of ideological divides, which cause the firm to burst into debate—“This is just revenge porn!”; “The Web site just warns people off!”—in a way that nails taboo crosscurrents of the moment, including the fault lines beneath the surface of female solidarity.

And as messy as the episode is—at certain junctures, it feels like something that was cooked up during a pissed-off boomer book group on the Upper West Side—it manages to define the Kings’ central precepts. They are pragmatists. They loathe ideologues. They are suspicious of cant on both sides—and they are not wild about theatricality, which they see as a tool of phonies. They also know the limits of their own analysis: at the end of the episode, it turns out that Diane Lockhart has unwittingly protected predators. Her client, a tech guy who has funded a lawsuit to destroy the list, did so specifically to keep himself off it. And he wins, because the list was poorly strategized.

At the episode’s climax, the list’s creator confronts Lockhart. “My guess is you’ve never thought of yourself as a traitor?” the millennial activist sneers. Diane isn’t having it. “You know what your problem is?” she spits back. “Women aren’t just one thing. And you don’t get to determine what we are.” But the real zinger is her next line, which is sisterly in its way. “Next time, hire a lawyer—and do your list right.” ♦