Inauguration

It's been eight years since The Good Fight first aired, and I'm surprised to be the first to leave a review here. Time has passed-so has one presidency, and we are now well into Donald Trump's second term. What was a political cataclysm in 2016 has become a new normal. While many (regardless of their political alignment) experienced Trump's first victory as a shock, his reelection felt, to me, entirely predictable. From this vantage point, I'm revisiting the atmosphere that birthed The Good Fight-a show born from rupture, not continuity.

As a European viewer, I approach American television as something more than entertainment: it is a cultural laboratory. The U. S. tests political and societal extremes that other nations later absorb and recontextualize. In this light, The Good Fight is not just a spin-off of The Good Wife, but a necessary mutation. And, like all meaningful mutations, it begins in trauma.

If The Good Wife was a political and emotional Bildungsroman, its successor is something else entirely: a sophisticated elegy turned manifesto. The Good Fight doesn't merely open in shock-it absorbs that shock into its genetic code. The series begins with Diane Lockhart, a pillar of liberal elegance and institutional faith, watching Donald Trump's inauguration in stunned silence. A moment of perfect symbolic clarity: the screen flickers, and something shatters-not just her retirement plans, but her worldview.

The pilot, as conceived in October 2016, envisioned Diane's departure following a Clinton win, a moment she believed would justify her life's work. Then, reality intervened. With Trump's election occurring during production, the show pivoted, portraying Diane as utterly stunned and unable to function professionally.

While The Good Wife stretched out its final season to ride the emotional inertia of the Obama era and Hillary Clinton's anticipated victory, The Good Fight is entirely post-illusion. It emerges from loss, from freefall. And it knows it. The opening credits alone-Diane's refined world of vases, handbags, stilettos, laptops, and telephones blown to pieces-is a sublime visual metaphor. This is not mere narrative upheaval; it is aesthetic rage. The bourgeois liberal dream doesn't fade quietly. It explodes.

In a stroke of irony so sharp it borders on satire, Diane, who was once the embodiment of white, educated, feminist privilege, is now hired at a majority-Black law firm as a "diversity" partner. But the show isn't mocking her. It's reorienting the narrative. Her symbolic capital-her name, her politics, her poise-carries less weight here. And that's the point. She must now function in a space where she is no longer the axis. It's not just narrative comeuppance. It's ethical recalibration. The story no longer revolves around whiteness, comfort, or prestige-it moves toward Black voices, queer stories, and radical feminist critiques.

Here lies the core divergence from The Good Wife. That show started with a personal trauma-the betrayal of Peter Florrick-and used it to explore structures of power. The Good Fight begins with collective trauma and uses it to unravel the personal as inherently political. Maya, Diane's goddaughter, isn't just lost; she's emblematic of a generation promised progress and delivered disillusionment. The betrayal of her corrupt father is a generational rupture. She is a liberal millennial stripped of legacy and direction. Both women, in their own ways, are cast out of paradise: one from ideological security, the other from familial stability.

To me, The Good Fight doesn't seek continuity with The Good Wife-it seeks disobedience. If The Good Wife asked whether a woman could redefine herself within the system, The Good Fight asks whether the system itself should still exist. Reddick, Boseman & Lockhart is not just a new office-it is an alternate political utopia. A place where different rules apply, where different leadership emerges, and where different kinds of grief speak in different tongues. It's The Good Wife on a political acid trip.

And no, I don't believe Trump caused the collapse of a world. He revealed it. The Good Fight understands this with uncanny precision. The show is not just an act of resistance-it is an exorcism. It doesn't try to restore the pre-Trump order. It insists that order was already rotten. Trump didn't storm the gates of a pristine garden; he turned the lights on in a paper-mâché Eden.

That first scene is powerful not for what it shows, but for what it suggests: Diane doesn't just witness a transition of power-she sees the collapse of her belief in the social contract, in the protective promise of civilization. She is meritocracy incarnate: white, liberal, well-dressed, institutionally embedded. And suddenly, that world no longer recognizes her. She no longer knows how to move through it.

That's what makes The Good Fight such a rare gem. It doesn't just build on its predecessor-it interrogates it. It doesn't settle for catharsis; it demands reckoning. It's a work of art forged in fire, sculpted with fury, and polished with intellect. And like all great art, it forces you to ask: What story were we living in? And who did it serve?