The Good Fight is a dance between the serious and the utterly ridiculous

Season 4 of The Good Fight came to a sudden and crashing end due to the pandemic. Unlike other shows that weathered the production break and picked up where they left off, The Good Fight drew a line under it and began a whole new season with an episode we all needed, titled Previously On.

In a series of recaps, it covers how the lockdown affected the law firm, the George Floyd protests, the hospitalisation of one of the staff members, and the death of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, all in keeping with the concept of keeping things current, something that has been a theme of the the show throughout. Later in the season, the events of 6 January 2021 at the Capitol become a significant arc between Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski) and her husband Kurt (Gary Cole), whose politics have always been in opposition.

Outgoing characters have their stories tidied up, and the scene is set for new beginnings, like Marissa (Sarah Steele) deciding to become a lawyer, and new hire Carmen Moyo (Charmaine Bingwa), quiet, understated and accomplished. She catches the eye of top client Oscar Rivi (Tony Plana). He’s a bit on the shady side but that’s just by the by and it makes things all the more interesting, and Carmen must employ all her fresh-out-of-law-school knowledge, and her composure to stand up to senior partners.

Once we are all caught up we may proceed, in a dance between the serious and the utterly ridiculous. There are questions about Diane being a name partner at a black firm, and there are clashes between her and Liz Reddick (Audra McDonald) around this. What are appropriate and inappropriate things to say to people of different races in the workplace?

And on the other side is Judge Wackner’s (Mandy Patinkin) fake community court in the back room of a copy shop where Marissa is the clerk, and plaintiffs and defendants dress up in ridiculous costumes a la Masked Singer, and things get completely out of hand; even more so when another community court is discovered in a suburban house, presided over by Judge Vinetta (CCH Pounder) who has her own holding cell in the basement.

Crazy as this all is, Wackner is a nod to Joseph Albert Wapner (15 November 1919 – 26 February 2017), best known as the first presiding judge of the ongoing reality court show The People’s Court. 

“Mandy Patinkin’s storyline in the fifth season of The Good Fight was the best subplot of 2021. It was a brilliantly constructed, thoughtful, and hilarious exploration of our judicial system in the era of Trump. It worked because of Patinkin, because viewers so readily wanted to believe in his character, and because we wanted to pull for him even as his brilliant idea unraveled and he proved himself to be a man corrupted by his own idealism,” says Pajiba.

More than one critic has hailed Season 5 as the best so far. “There’s a twisted poetry to The Good Fight operating, rather brazenly, at the center of media’s bumpy streaming revolution. Indeed, the show tests the bounds of what television can do; a kind of reverence for the form comes through in the way it’s so exuberantly deconstructed,” says Vanity Fair.

And from Indie Wire: “By the time Season 5 hits the end of its fourth episode, following all its disparate storylines as they thread through the firm’s office corridors, it’s hard not to feel like this is a show right at home in the one part of the world it can still control.”

All five seasons of The Good Fight are available to stream and binge on Showmax.