The best Star Trek show on TV is The Good Fight

Courtrooms are a bit like outer space: weird, nondescript places where most of the laws of physics you’re used to on Earth don’t apply. In court, no one speaks the way they do in most other contexts. You are at the mercy of fickle forces beyond your control. And the chairs that you sit in to navigate everything look really uncomfortable. Like decades of Star trek shows they’ve shown, TV writers can tell all kinds of stories about outer space exploration that aren’t really all that secret about the world around us. Star trek Writers frequently turn to whatever type of television suits them: maybe a mystery or Western one week, maybe a war story or a hostage crisis the next, followed by an episode that really settles into extreme diplomacy.

Meanwhile, legal dramas explore the conflicts of modern society with a clarity that can make them easy to overlook. Distilling a conflict into a battle of oratory in court is absolute catnip for playwrights and television actors that television writers may consider themselves. But the charms of a noisy court battle are still not as flashy as the Borg, and the possibilities for a story without a warp engine seem limited, at least on a superficial level. Of course, good television can come from anywhere and be about anything. But skeptics of the legal drama should consider The good fight, a legal drama with recklessly abandoning a Star Trek show at the top of its game, constantly trying out new ideas and then abandoning them for better ones.

The good fight is technically a derivative of The good wife, a CBS drama about a woman returning to her legal career after her state attorney husband is arrested and disgraced following a corruption and sex scandal. The good fight However, it takes a very different tack: set in 2016, the year of its debut, and more or less in real time, the series follows wealthy liberal lawyer Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski) after discovering that she is the victim of a scheme. Ponzi run by her. Financial Advisor. In the aftermath, Diane loses her savings, her comfortable job as a partner at her law firm and her plan to retire in an Italian village, safe from the political turmoil that would follow the election of Donald Trump. Instead, she is forced to take a job at Reddick, Boseman and Kolstad, a black-owned law firm where her perspective doesn’t carry the weight she’s used to. Things are different at this new firm, where lawyers are dedicated to tackling modern social problems like police brutality and the far right.

As this summary suggests, The good fight he wears his politics on his sleeve. (This is the first of several similarities with Star trek.) He is blatantly liberal, but also admirably restless. No character is always right, if a certain episode takes sides on a problem. Race is a central and ever-present theme, and throughout its run, each season of the show, which began in 2016 and just concluded its fifth season at the end of August, is firmly established at the time of its launch, like many of his episodes come from recent headlines, ranging from immigration enforcement overreach to the Capitol riots. Throughout, the show is neatly written, wildly funny, and frenetic paced, but what really makes it a joy to watch is the way it embraces the imaginative nature of good genre storytelling in its goal of delivering. compelling stories about the world as it is now. .

One of the remarkable things about The good fight This is how every time an episode starts, you really don’t know what you’re going to see. While he lets the headlines inspire his stories, unlike Law, does not develop the action in a procedural way. Instead of, The good fight embraces a higher reality, a world that almost like ours, but a little off the track. Maybe that surreal element comes from the absurd details, like JoyJane Lynch appears for a recurring role as an FBI agent working in an office where pigeons constantly crash into the window.

Or maybe it’s embedded in the longer and more considered stories, like the ongoing season 5 story about Hal Wackner (Mandy Patinkin from Homeland and The princess Bride), a self-proclaimed judge who runs a strange underground court where contestants get points like in sports, and anyone using exaggerated language has to wear a powdered wig. Or maybe it’s in the narrative quirks the show employs with little warning, like Season 3’s habit of dispensing exposures through shorts. Schoolhouse rockAnimated-style musicals, performed by none other than Jonathan Coulton of Portal fame. A season or episode of The good fight it feels like visiting a strange new world, one that is haunting in its similarity to ours, but with one little thing that is different.

Like Star trek at its best, The good fight is a television show for people who Really I love television, not just for its formal playfulness, but for the way it builds up a rich cast of supporting characters who are immediately twice as memorable as the main characters on other shows. An episode of The good fight It could suddenly spin around to follow a long-time background player or a new character, and build a good TV episode around either of them. This is the joy of the show: meeting characters like the effusively quirky Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston) or the deceptively spatial Allegra Durado (Wanda Sykes) and being immediately charmed by them, not knowing if they will appear again, but being delighted when they do. . (Or when, like Elsbeth, they turn out to be characters with a rich history of The good wife.)

In another crucial comparison with Star trek, The good fight you are openly trying to come up with big and important ideas. And vitally The good fight addresses those ideas in a way that seems to have been considered to the point where the writers are inviting disagreement. This is another of the show’s silent miracles: Because it is so openly about political issues, its characters are forthright about their beliefs and it allows the series to portray a whole universe of different ideas within its general liberal worldview.

Viewers are free to place their sympathies where they wish, even if they deeply disagree with, for example, Season 3’s ideas about “resistance” to the Trump presidency, or the effectiveness of building stories about real-world scandals. involving people like Jeffrey Epstein. and Roy Cohn. In other words, it’s a show that treats its audience in a remarkably adult way, while acknowledging that adults can contemplate intoxicating ideas about systemic issues and have fun, or disagree, at the same time. Still, while Star trek sold me the space a long time ago, The good fight It will never convince me to go to court where I don’t have to be. As much as you enjoy watching the TV version, no show is that good.

The good fight is streaming all five seasons in full on Paramount Plus, and has been renewed for season six.