Since its debut in 2017, it’s taken slices of headline fodder and put them in a TV context, reconfiguring and prodding at them under the guise of a fascinating legal drama.
Some of these developments are quick — Cush Jumbo, filming her scenes in London, gives Lucca Quinn as satisfying a leave as anyone could expect under the circumstances — and others continue some of the long-simmering evolutions that were happening during a different era of Unprecedented Times.
This show has a view of the legal world where — perhaps justifiably — the line between justice and a cash grab is just as easy to cross by accident as it is to do by choice.
Now that the past few seasons have taken Liz and Diane’s respective idealist instincts and shown all the ways that the world has managed to curdle them, “The Good Fight” is even more well-rounded by the two remaining name partners confront the messiness of their own authority.
Shrewdly, “The Good Fight” takes on the lingering effects of the former administration mostly through the eyes of its moderate supporters: Diane’s husband Kurt is back into the fold as part of the firm’s pandemic regroup.
That continues this season, as a number of judges and prosecutors make their return, playing the show’s courtroom patter like a finely tuned instrument.
As a judge presiding over an unsanctioned, literal backroom court, he’s the perfect synthesis of everything the show has been reaching for in its season-long newcomers and preoccupations.
She quickly ends up in the attorney deep end, and Bingwa brings a different kind of resolute energy that the show doesn’t get from any of its other performances.
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.