8 Things You Need to Know About The Good Fight Season 3

The resistance starts… on March 14. That’s the date CBS All Access has slated for the third season premiere of The Good Fight. And, if what the series’ creators and stars said at the show’s Television Critics Association panel on Wednesday is to be believed, it will be taking that title quite literally this season.

Robert King, who created the spinoff of The Good Wife with his wife, Michelle, says this season’s subtitle is “The Storm” and is based on President Trump’s somewhat vague October 2017 comment that we were in the “calm before the storm”—and what that would mean for his characters, who are very, very much not Trump supporters.

“This season is about finding what that storm [is], and it involves a lot of thoughts about how much is narrative trumping the facts in the present world,” Robert King says. “It [also] continues some of the thoughts [on] understanding how guardrails are coming off of institutions and what you do in those circumstances.”

Specifically, he says this season will look at what the resistance will look like for the series’ heroine—and Paste’s 2018 TV character of the year, Diane Lockhart, played by Christine Baranski. Watch the trailer below, and then check out the 8 things you need to know about The Good Fight Season Three:

Michael Sheen is joining the cast as charismatic and cunning chameleon Roland Blum.

Robert King describes Blum as a Roy Cohn or Roger Stone type: a self-server who can be liberal or conservative as long as it saves his skin, and “a lawyer who very much is into winning.”

Sheen, who was sporting quite the amazing beard at the panel, offered a more colorful description: “He’s a sort of trickster figure” whose goals are to “eat and fuck and disrupt and just poke people.”

“I genuinely prefer being him than me,” Sheen laughs. “I just want to talk like him all the time. It’s just kind of easier, or more fun.”

The animated comedic segments are back this season.

Last season, the series experimented with what Robert King describes as “the Schoolhouse Rock! version of impeachment.” This season, each episode will have one of these educational-minded pieces, which he says will take on topics like Russian troll farms or Roy Cohn.

Each episode will also give a character a soliloquy.

“A character, in almost a Shakespearian fashion, will talk about what’s going on in their head at that moment,” Robert King says.

Episode names will also change.

Last season, episodes were named for the number of days into Trump’s administration. This season, Robert King says they take a page from the Friends handbook, with titles like “The One Inspired by Roy Cohn.”

Last season was particularly prescient with regard to the news cycle. Will lighting strike again this season?

“I think everyone will cheerfully re-write if we’re in a different [administration],” deadpans Michelle King.

Her husband says that they have “a few backup plans if the world runs ahead of us, involving two or three pivotal scenes that we’d have to reshoot.”

That said, the series can be just as brutal about the left side of the aisle.

“We’re not real fans of shows that preach to the choir,” Robert King says, adding a reminder that The Good Fight is equally a “satire [of] the left… [R]acism in our show is not about the South or the KKK… it’s people who pat themselves on the back for giving to all the right causes are really kind of scumbags, too.”

He says this season will look at the racial makeup of the show’s predominately Black law firm, and show Diane and her colleague, Liz Reddick-Lawrence (Audra McDonald), find common ground over their mutual love of Prince’s “Raspberry Beret.”

Will there be more singing this season?

Yes, actually. Sheen sings The Jacksons’ “I’ll Be There” and Sarah Steele, who plays the intrepid Marissa Gold, sings “One” from A Chorus Line.

But don’t get too used to it. Robert King says “musical episodes never interest me” and that “I always feel like it’s a bullshitty TV thing.”

And as for million-dollar question: Will Alicia Florrick appear on The Good Fight?

No, Julianna Margulies (who can also sing, by the way!) will not be returning to her Emmy-winning role.

“It ends the story again and feels like an asterisk on an asterisk on an asterisk,” Robert King says, saying that they thought about bringing her back this year, but that “it always felt like that’s the end of the story.”