14 Things You Need to Know About The Good Wife‘s New Spinoff, The Good Fight

“The Good Wife was really about the Obama years,” Robert says. “Any time there was an election on that show, it was really a satire of 2008, which was a very dramatic election. This [election] gives shape to a new show… beyond wanting to create all these new characters.” (The Kings re-wrote the pilot after the results came in.)

Technology and its connection to the real world will not be ignored.

“We have a new president coming in who’s very confused about tech stuff except how he can utilize [it],” Robert says. “Our show has always been obsessed with how tech is changing our world.”

It will still be politics as usual, though.

“More than the show being political, we have characters being political,” Michelle says. “What we have always tried to do is present our characters as intelligent human beings, whether they have conservative points of view or liberal points of view.”

One episode will feature a storyline in which a member of Delroy Lindo and Erica Tazel’s African-American-run law firm voted for Trump.

What does it mean for the The Good Fight’s content now that it doesn’t have to adhere to primetime broadcast standards and practices?

“You’re going to hear people talk the way they do in real life,” Michelle says. “These are educated people; they’re cultured. You’re not going to hear them sound drastically different. But they’re going to use the swear words you’d expect them to use in the real world.”

Baranski was more succinct: “If you’ve found out that you’ve lost all your money, even if you’re a lady, you’re going to say ‘fuck.’” (That word is used in the series’ trailer, but it will be “son of a bitch” for broadcast audiences.)

Aside from the swearing, how will the versions that air on CBS and All Access differ?

Not much.

“One version will be 49 minutes and 10 seconds and the other version will be 42 minute and whatever we’re allowed on network,” Robert says. “We’re cutting two different versions, one of which is cleaner for network TV, but doesn’t lose any content. I would say the biggest distinction is it’s shorter.”

“There was never a thought that it was going to be on a network,” though, Michelle says. “This was designed for All Access.” Robert adds that they “wanted the frankness of sexuality and… sometimes it’s hard to have the characters say ‘friggin’’ when you know they want to say ‘fucking.’”

The Good Fight’s serialization (or lack thereof) is comparable to Netflix’s The Crown.

“I was surprised how un-serialized that show was,” Robert says. “It created little dilemmas and sometimes big dilemmas that were like little short stories, like little strings of pearls. We’re hoping to do something similar there… We wanted to hold onto some of that Good Wife thinking.”

Rose Leslie plays a new character, Maia Rindell, a young lawyer who deals with family drama right off the bat.

“We meet her as a law student and so much happens to her in the pilot whereby her life is flipped with her father’s Ponzi scheme” Leslie says.

Will Julianna Margulies and Chris Noth’s Alicia and Peter Florrick, who were the focus of the first series, appear in this one?

“They’re mentioned, but I wouldn’t say constantly,” Robert says. “The whole point of the show is to treat it as if it’s real and you might walk into Carrie Preston [who played the quirky Elsbeth Tascioni in The Good Wife] walking down the hall… We talked to Julianna about the show and her relationship with it. Julianna and we agree that The Good Wife ended that story. It’d be kind of weird if she just came in and we saw her pushing a garbage can.”

That said, a lot of the characters from The Good Wife will be back.

“There’s like three of four [Good Wife actors] who might appear each episode,” Robert says, name-checking Jane Alexander, Denis O’Hare, John Benjamin Hickey, Rita Wilson, Michael Boatman and Matthew Perry. One familiar regular on The Good Fight is Sarah Steele, who played the opinionated Marissa Gold, the daughter of Alan Cumming’s Eli, on The Good Wife.

“It’s a wonderful revolving door of all the great actors working in New York and L.A.,” Baranski says.

Steele says her character has grown up.

“She has a different job that she didn’t get through her father,” she says, adding that she doesn’t think Marissa speaks with Eli every day.

What has Robert King learned from his short-lived summer series, BrainDead?

“Two words: Avoid satire,” he says. “It was a show that was trying to be as weird and anti-network as it could be, and it was a mistake to do that on a network. There are other streaming services that could have probably [done it]… I loved that show because I thought it was funny and accurate.”