The Season 4 premiere of “The Good Fight” imagined a world in which Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election. The rest of the season, beginning with Thursday’s episode, returns to reality, including a world in which there are no consequences for the wealthy.
“This year is largely about them tackling the rich and powerful,” Sarah Steele, who plays investigator Marissa Gold on the CBS All Access show, told the Daily News.
Diane Lockhart, played by Christine Baranski in her finest chunky necklaces and brooches, has been given the power to represent pro bono cases after her law firm is taken over. But she finds herself stymied by a mysterious “Memo 618” that gets any case thrown out immediately when it’s handed to a judge.
By all accounts, Memo 618 seems like a seasonlong mystery, but no one’s talking. Steele said she knows that secret, but not all of them.
“What I think is sort of helpful about (being surprised) is that because I don’t know where it’s going, I get to experience each episode as a viewer would when I first read (the script),” she told The News.
John Larroquette, who joined the show this season as lawyer Gavin Firth, doesn’t want to know the secrets either.
“He’s very smart, very disciplined, with a spiritual bent,” he told The News about his character. “I still haven’t decided if he is earnest and honest or if he wants to get what he wants.”
Larroquette said showrunners Robert and Michelle King based Firth on a prominent Chicago lawyer, but he didn’t ask his real-life counterpart any questions. He didn’t want the answers. Having the secrets, he said, leads to “bad eyebrow acting.”
“If it’s not on the page, it’s not on the stage,” the “Night Court” alum said. “It seems like he’s benevolent and generous and charitable … (but) it’s clear from the beginning that he is now the captain of the ship.”
But the upstairs bosses send a lawyer to spy on the firm, suggesting Firth can’t be trusted.
That’s one of the keys of “The Good Fight”: very few people are good, and even fewer are who they seem to be. And sometimes, like with last season’s fake Melania Trump, Roy Cohn and Milo Yiannopoulos, they’re exactly who they seem to be.
But this year, the show is about Memo 618 and how the rich and powerful can seemingly get away with everything.
“On ‘The Good Wife,’ even with it being an amazing ensemble show, there was a sense that I was there to provide a function for Alicia’s arc,” Steele told The News about “The Good Fight’s” predecessor, which starred Baranski and Julianna Margulies as said good wife, Alicia Florrick.
“That’s not what our show is doing; this feels much more of an ensemble show. (They’re) really experimenting more with form and different themes every season, more than each individual character.”
“That’s what’s so amazing about the Kings: the reason that they’re able to take these crazy risks is that their character work and the internal consistency of each scene is so sound, I never feel like I’m doing things that don’t make sense.”
“The Good Fight” is unflinching in dealing with politics or race. The Kings, the husband-and-wife duo who were also behind “BrainDead” and “Evil,” shy away from almost nothing, even after CBS censored a scene about China last year.
“No other show is trying to capture how surreal this moment in our nation’s history is,” Steele said.
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