The Good Fight season five is as sharp as ever

As thrillingly entertaining as it is smart, one of the best shows on TV returns with two challenges.

Most TV shows struggle to get past momentous changes and The Good Fight faces two.

Returning for its fifth season this week, the American drama bears little resemblance to its first episode, at least on the people front with most of its original cast members gone. Not to worry, Christine Baranski is still here, and that’s what really matters.

But the bigger shift it has had to navigate is that Donald Trump is now out of office. For a show that directly engaged with the absurdity of politics, media and social issues in Trump-era America, that can be a little unnerving.

What do you do if the person that fuelled the creative juices is now gone?

Well, Trump isn’t truly gone, and not just because he’s pottering around in Mar-a-Lago or holding rallies. The thorny dynamics that created his ascension still exist, the 74 million people who voted for him are still there so it’s not as if with his exit, America is automatically reborn.

Christine Baranski is one of the few original cast members remaining.

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That’s a lot of creative potential for The Good Fight’s writers to exploit, and they do, with storylines about cancel culture, social media companies’ protection from defamation and fake news, and the monetary cost of justice in the first episodes of the season.

The series is sharper and more incisive than it’s ever been, and it clips along at a brisk pace so that each episode never loses its momentum.

The Good Fight’s fourth season was cut short after its production was canned because of covid so the first order of the day is to wrap up arcs for Delroy Lindo and Cush Jumbo’s characters with both actors having already announced they were leaving.

The first episode of season five deals in part with Delroy Lindo’s exit.

What you get in the first episode back is an hour-long “previously on” package, but it’s all new material. The series races from March 2020 with the onset of the coronavirus, through George Floyd and Black Lives Matter, pausing at momentous turns such as Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death and the November election before culminating in the January 6 Capitol Hill riots.

For a series that’s drawn so heavily from the political Zeitgeist, The Good Fight was never going to be able to ignore the past 15 months.

But what’s impressive is that it’s managed to do it without making it seem like a slog or a traumatic triggering of an era few want to relive. Along the way, we learn something about the characters we’ve become invested in, and sit through one of the weirder philosophical debates that only hallucinatory Frederick Douglass, Jesus, Malcolm X and Karl Marx could muster.

For Diane (Baranski) and Liz (Audra McDonald), Adrian’s (Lindo) exit and the Black Lives Matter movement has stirred up real questions about the optics and ethics of having Diane, a privileged white woman, as one head of a black law firm.

Mandy Patinkin joins the cast in season five.

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It’s only from episode two that the series moves into the season proper. Two high-profile exits mean space to fill and one of those spots goes to Australian actor Charmaine Bingwa, who joins as a morally ambiguous junior associate with no qualms about representing drug dealers and murderers.

The splashier newcomer is Mandy Patinkin, who joins as an orthodox judge-not-judge operating out of a warehouse behind a copy shop. Like Judge Judy but without the cameras and even more antics, the concept fits in perfectly with The Good Fight’s blend of entertainment and serious commentary on the slow, expensive system of justice meted through the courts.

And that’s what The Good Fight does best, give you a rollicking time but also challenges you to think about the utter madness of the world we live in.

The Good Fight season five starts on Thursday, July 1 at 8.30pm on SBS and SBS On Demand

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