This captures a pretty widespread feeling among Americans right now — consider all the women who mobilized for Democrats in the midterms — but it’s surprisingly rare to see it expressed in pop storytelling. Part of the dystopian character of Trump’s presidency is his ubiquity; he dominates the news cycle, late-night TV, and book publishing. Yet Trumpism has, with only a few exceptions, gone weirdly unprocessed by fiction, either written or filmed.
Perhaps that’s because people are desperate for a respite from Trump, or because the imagination can’t compete with the strangeness of reality. It means that while there’s an explosion of news stories about the current moment, there’s a lack of the sort of human tales that might help discombobulated Americans make sense of what we’re going through.
Sure, “Saturday Night Live” makes valiant attempts to parody Trump, but it’s hard to caricature a caricature. And there are shows coming out that seem at least obliquely inspired by Trump’s odiousness, like Ava DuVernay’s dramatic miniseries about the Central Park Five, a group of wrongly imprisoned teenage boys demonized by Trump, which debuts at the end of the month. But the feeling that makes otherwise sane people wonder if we’re all living in a computer simulation gone glitchy hasn’t yet been successfully channeled into any art that I’m aware of.
Except, that is, for “The Good Fight,” the only TV show that reflects what life under Trump feels like for many of us who abhor him. Its showrunners, the married couple Michelle and Robert King, have figured out how to alchemize our berserk era into entertainment. When historians look back at this ghastly moment — if there are still historians when it’s over — this fizzy, mordant cult series will likely be one of its richest artifacts. It’s a balm, a reminder, on days when I feel like I’m cracking up, that it’s really the world that’s gone crazy.
“It is therapeutic to be in the writers’ room with seven other writers who are incredibly smart and want to talk about the news in granular detail, and try to make sense of things,” Michelle King told me. Robert added, “We start every morning, before we even start talking about plot and character, just vomiting out the day’s news.”
There’s a character based on Milo Yiannopoulos, played by John Cameron Mitchell, and a mock version of “Pod Save America” called “America Goes Poddy.” The lawyers at Diane’s firm get their hands on the fabled pee tape, and, in scenes that pay homage to “All the President’s Men,” Diane receives information from a porn star who was impregnated by Trump and had an abortion. This season, the show has spliced animated musical shorts into every episode on subjects like Russian internet trolls, nondisclosure agreements and Roy Cohn.
“The Good Fight” is a spinoff of “The Good Wife,” the CBS drama about a lawyer, Alicia Florrick, who has to rebuild her life after her Democratic politician husband is caught with prostitutes. Diane, who was Alicia’s boss on the earlier show, is a glass-ceiling-breaking lawyer who keeps a framed picture of herself with Hillary Clinton. “In terms of making a show that reflects what people are feeling right now, we had the benefit of actually having created a character who deeply identified with Democratic causes,” Michelle King said.
Now in its third season, the series began with Diane in the dark looking stricken while watching Trump’s inauguration, and as his administration begins her life collapses. There are smart subplots on liberal racial hypocrisy and the social disruptions of technology, but much of “The Good Fight” deals with a glamorous, dignified liberal woman in late middle age being systematically unhinged by the Trump presidency.
Diane starts seeing the president everywhere. She has an affair with a guy from Antifa, microdoses on psilocybin, joins an underground Resistance group and takes up ax throwing.
According to the Kings, there are sometimes just weeks between editing an episode and broadcasting it, so while they don’t quite overlap with the news cycle, they’re not far behind it. “We’re making it as we’re showing it,” said Robert, adding, “So it does give us the opportunity to change things if the reality changes.”
“The Good Fight” doesn’t necessarily flatter liberals; most of its (very privileged) characters end up compromising their ideals. It asks how far people on the left are willing to go — and should be willing to go — when they lose faith in the political system. (Diane betrays the porn star in the hope of forcing her to go public.) But the off-kilter world of the show, where Trump exists as a constant atmospheric disturbance, is an only slightly heightened version of the reality that politically attuned liberals have been plunged into. “It feels like something’s come detached,” an old-guard civil rights lawyer played by Delroy Lindo says at the end of Season 1, speaking of America. “Like a piece of machinery that doesn’t sound right.”
It’s both a blessing and a curse for the show that it appears on CBS All Access, the network’s subscription-based streaming service. A lot of people who might love it will never encounter it, but it gets away with things that it couldn’t if more people were watching. Yet it’s not clear how long it can remain a chronicler, rather than a subject, of Trump-era culture wars.
Twice in the past month, there have been minor conservative uproars after scenes from the show appeared on social media. Several people on the right got upset over a recent monologue, delivered by the actor Nyambi Nyambi, endorsing Nazi-punching. “Are they attempting to chill the speech and expression of opinion of millions of people who don’t agree with their worldview?” asked RedState.
Then came outrage over a tweeted image from the show depicting a fictional list of National Security Agency target words. It was a nod to a plot on “The Good Wife,” and the list included a number of references for longtime fans. But the first words on the list — which was supposed to be a compendium of terms that trigger government surveillance — were “assassinate,” “president,” and “Trump.” Soon people, including Ronna McDaniel, chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, were accusing the show of threatening the president’s life.
Yet “The Good Fight” appears safe for now, and was recently renewed. Next season’s theme, Robert said, will be “the function of the press in a world where life has taken on a ludicrous aspect.” One of the central questions of our time is whether enlightenment tools can deal with a post-enlightenment information landscape. We need pop culture as well as politics to grapple toward the answer.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.