Evil and The Good Fight might just be the best two drama series airing this summer. Remarkably, both hail from the same creators: Robert and Michelle King, partners in life and work. Oddly, both stream on Paramount+, a nascent network not exactly breaking records in the viewership (or buzz) department. And wrongly, neither has found any success at the Emmys.
The Good Fight, particularly, has thrived since its 2017 debut, despite a lack of surrounding attention. (New episodes of its fifth season stream Wednesdays.) Stuffed with inside jokes and audacious asides, the Good Wife spinoff feels, at this point, tailored for a giddy, tiny audience—one that does not, seemingly, include the Television Academy. The CBS All Access–turned-Paramount+ drama has amassed just two Emmy nominations over its run (for its music), and none in recent years. This, even though The Good Fight remains one of TV’s most acclaimed shows, and even though its CBS predecessor, starring Julianna Margulies, scored multiple drama-series nominations and acting wins.
For a critical darling without mass appeal, you’d think awards recognition would be important for survival. Yet not only have The Good Fight and Evil both pressed on, but faith in the Kings remains sky-high: The showrunners just signed a new five-year, reportedly eight-figure deal with CBS Studios, deepening their relationship. Robert shrugs amiably when asked about the pact. “They let us, kind of, do what we want,” he tells Vanity Fair over Zoom, with Michelle nodding in agreement beside him. “I mean, it’s very odd…. We’re thrilled that they want to keep doing it, let us spend their money. But it’s crazy.”
The dynamic makes for a sharp contrast to the Kings’ experiences at CBS proper, where they worked around broadcast-network restrictions, and helps explain The Good Fight’s evolution. Conceived under the expectation that Hillary Clinton would be elected president in 2016, the show instead morphed into a surrealist, nightmarish depiction of the Trump era, sprinkling in Schoolhouse Rock-esque animated shorts and, continuing in The Good Wife’s tradition, stellar character-actor guest spots. Christine Baranski stars as attorney Diane Lockhart (reprising her Emmy-nominated Good Wife role), a Clinton-era liberal whose perspective is challenged as she joins a predominantly Black law firm. Good Fight confronts racial tensions and adjacent political issues with flair, while veering into territory that could fairly be described as batshit all the same. (By season 2, the firm had come into possession of the infamous, possibly fictional Trump “pee tape.”)
Increasingly, it’s a show in conversation with itself. Take the opening credits: For years, The Good Fight has tested for how long into an episode the sequence could be held—paying homage to a classic Monty Python trick. The fifth season premiere, inventively structured as an hour-long “Previously On” segment, nods to the previous season having concluded earlier than intended due to the COVID-19-caused shutdown (and gives stars Delroy Lindo and Cush Jumbo a creative spin on their pre-planned exits). The opening credits appear only and finally when the episode finishes, and instead of featuring the usual operatic series of explosions, cute toy animals wander into frame. “We don’t know who [our] faithful fans are, but we know they’re faithful fans,” Robert says. “It felt like a nod to them like, ‘With Biden in, it’s all sweetness and sunlight and rainbows’—which is a joke too, because of course it won’t be.”
Taken together, The Good Fight plays like a timely screwball experiment, threaded by provocative story lines and a heavyweight cast. “The niche audience allows us some freedom,” Robert argues, before turning toward his partner. “Oh, you look like you’re going to disagree.”
Michelle weighs in, as prompted: “Well, only in that, regardless of the size of the audience, we’d be making the same show…. Unless we were being stopped, this would be the show we’d want to make.”
The Kings know television. Though they’ve been married far longer, they’ve only been working together since The Good Wife premiered; their writing is suffused with an intimate, playful knowledge of their medium’s history. The Good Fight’s fifth season premiere also features a direct visual cue to L.A. Law; every fourth-season episode’s name began with “The Gang,” sending up the meme-worthy title cards of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Robert told IndieWire in 2019 that the entire third season was “a meta year about TV and entertainment and the façade they have.”
There’s a twisted poetry to The Good Fight operating, rather brazenly, at the center of media’s bumpy streaming revolution. Indeed, the show tests the bounds of what television can do; a kind of reverence for the form comes through in the way it’s so exuberantly deconstructed. It doesn’t escape the Kings that this attention to episodic detail gets lost elsewhere in streaming. “We don’t run away from the fact that it’s TV—most people who are flooding into streaming right now are running towards doing eight-hour movies,” Robert says. “If you’ve ever sat in an eight hour movie like Napoleon, they are tedious as hell.” Adds Michelle, wryly: “We’re a little more old-school.”
And perhaps that’s part of why they fly under the radar. David Nevins, who oversees Paramount+’s scripted originals, recently conceded to Vanity Fair that CBS All Access was “a narrow universe” that limited The Good Fight’s initial audience. “CBS All Access wasn’t really encouraged to grow because I think when Les Moonves was in charge, he still had a very network-centric, upfront view of the world,” Robert says now. “There was Star Trek and then there was us, and I don’t think there’s enough flow between the two.” He continues, of the migration to Paramount+: “Oh my God, there’s an industry now. Suddenly you’re given a brass band when you write.”
Still, no attempted influence from the new network has spilled over. The Good Fight may benefit, in that regard, from being a fifth-season show—since it’s neither new nor especially popular, it skirts the mainstream, the weirdo quietly hanging around in the background. “We do not get told, ‘Stay away from this topic,’” Michelle says. In the one moment CBS truly intervened, censoring a 2019 short about Chinese censorship (the irony!), the Kings responded by placing a placard where it was supposed to air that read, “CBS has censored this content”—a compromise after the Kings threatened to quit.
The Good Fight remains a passion project—Michelle sees “no signs” of the series slowing down, so long as CBS lets them continue—as the creators build a larger TV empire around it. Evil is running stronger than ever (among critics, anyway); they just executive-produced the Bryan Cranston-led Showtime miniseries Your Honor; and more is on the way. The Kings have been at it for 12 years now, and seem to have the process figured out—just in time for another expansion. “I don’t understand how anyone does it without a partner,” Michelle says. “If you were romantically involved with someone that wasn’t involved in [this] business, A, they probably wouldn’t get enough of your time, and [B], I think they might get bored of all the talk that surrounds it.” (It helps, too, that they got into writing jointly later in life: “We already had our rhythms.”)
The Good Fight was not eligible for Emmys this year (the currently airing fifth season debuted after the voting deadline), and Robert King acknowledges that the lack of awards recognition can sometimes make it hard to hold on to cast members, “because they’re good enough where they can get awards attention wherever they go.” But does the lack of Emmy attention bother them personally? “I want to hear what you say,” Robert says, turning once more to Michelle.
She accepts the request. “Since we started this jag in 2009, we have been nominated and won a lot of awards and I have greatly appreciated every single one of them,” Michelle says. “And the ones we’ve lost or not been nominated for, I haven’t lost a single moment of sleep over.”
Robert chimes in, ever slightly, relatively perturbed. “My ego is big enough to think they’re just not seeing the show,” he says.
He’s probably right. If finding out who killed Jeffrey Epstein wasn’t enough to get Emmy voters’ attention, it’s possible nothing will. The Kings appear to have realized this, and aren’t about to do anything differently. Why should they? The Good Fight’s many wild detours and shake-ups come about, in any case, as a way of “either amusing ourselves or amusing our family,” Michelle says. Sounds like a fun way to make TV.
She grins. “It is for us.”
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