There’s rarely been a social controversy or a political fracas that the showrunners haven’t wanted to steer into, even if got the occasional blowback for its audacity, like an animated segment on Chinese censorship that was nixed by CBS , or a monologue about the value of punching Nazis that wasn’t kindly received by the alt-right.
Perhaps the funniest joke of all is that the opening credits, which both The Good Fight and The Good Wife would famously tuck deep into an episode, don’t appear until the end of the show — and even then, the expected images of exploding phones and televisions are replaced by cuddly animals.
The biggest messes after last season are the departure of two major cast members: Delroy Lindo as Adrian Boseman, the partner who brought Diane and her ChumHum account into the Chicago firm that would become Reddick, Boseman & Lockhart; and Cush Jumbo as Lucca Quinn, an associate who would get promoted to the head of divorce law at RBL in season three.
But Liz also hears from other highly placed RBL attorneys that it was a mistake to bring Diane and her now-departed ChumHum account onboard to begin with, and now’s the time to replace her with two Black partners and bring the company back to its original mission statement.
When we left off last season, Adrian was courted by the Democratic Party to run for political office, specifically DNC muckety-muck Ruth Eastman But when footage of the killing of George Floyd surfaces, Adrian doesn’t want to write a watered-down book anymore, and he won’t have his fury over racial injustice tempered by Ruth’s cynical Democrat triangulation.
Her adventures with Bianca last season had so little to do with the RBL business or the issue of the day that she already seemed to be starring in a peculiar spinoff, jerked around by the whims of one conspicuously wealthy client.
Despite his politics, his liberal colleagues at RBL respected his integrity, and it’s that integrity that got him into trouble last season over Memo 618, the super-secret conspiracy of elites designed to shield themselves from any legal consequences for bad behavior.
The “previously on …” structure also gives the show some freedom to comment on the major events of 2020, from the earliest days of the pandemic to the Black Lives Matter protests to Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death to Joe Biden’s election and the insurrection that followed early the next year.