The Good Fight Is about Labor, not Law
I only want to do a few things in my life. Teach philosophy. Play oboe in a major orchestra. Spend two years in a writers room of a TV drama like The Good Fight. I like good TV. It’s de classe to admit, but I do. I grew up on it.
I don’t get to watch too much because I have a pile of kids, and a stack of books to read, so I’m only watching “The Good Fight,” and, oddly enough, “Temptation Island,” this year. The Good Fight and its predecessor The Good Wife are billed as legal dramas, but the court room stuff is the most boring. It’s also not about romance. At their heart and at their best, these shows are labor dramas. Not just about the internal politics of the law firm, but also the labor politics between firms. The series of labor and employer moves that drew Cary and Alicia together as allies and combatants was by far the most thrilling antagonism in The Good Wife, and now, in The Good Fight, the show-runners are doing something they’ve always fumbled with prior: add race. For the vast majority of its run, The Good Wife was bad about race, which is inexcusable for a show set in the court system in Chicago; however, it was getting slightly better before the series finale. And with The Good Fight, it’s still improving. It’s not there yet. They could use me in the writers’ room. But doing race well on a network drama is very difficult, and Season 3 Episode 4 was as good as you are going to get because it was a study in the normalized terror of White women.
Centering the show around Diane Lockehart and her feminist anxiety over Trump could have gone over the usual way. It could be Madame Secretary in a law office, with Diane having to prove her wiles in skewering a bunch of White guys. It would be utterly boring. However, throwing her in the middle of a predominantly Black firm was genius because Diane is the one who is structured in the dominant caste. It would be unbelievable that any of the Black guys would condescend to her. And the most believable thing they do in The Good Fight is refrain from writing a Black character, especially a Black male, who would try. Diane is the one who gets her White god daughter Maia a job. Diane is the one who brings in her White assistant Marisa, Eli Gold’s daughter, who is instantly promoted. Diane is the vanguard of White privilege running through the law office, and you aren’t supposed to be able to tell because White privilege is emanating from the White women, who invariably see themselves on the side of the oppressed in a world of Trumps and #metoo.
Diane joins the Al Qaeda of #resistance groups, and the best part of Diane’s militant resistance cell is how casual these high-toned White women are about crossing any ethical line to get Trump out of office. They are willing to do anything to go back to a status quo that was still murderous for Black communities. And this is juxtaposed as Diane negotiates working her day job in a predominantly Black firm.
If all it takes is a Trump victory for Diane to lose her moral compass, she never really had a moral compass. You just never noticed because the only other people on the scene were White guys.
I think the show is self-conscious that it is a labor show, and race and labor issues are tied, ever since Black people were brought over and terrorized into working the fields and cleaning up.
The labor fight in The Good Fight Season 3 Episode 4 was simply about how much worse almost all of the Black workers at the firm have it than the White ones. Maia has expertise and connections because of her parents and set. Marisa has expertise and connections because of her parents and set. The other White associates are similarly blessed, in a casual and believable way. If the law firm wants to do more than sue police departments, it needs to retain the White associates and the White clients who are comfortable with them, because money in the United States isn’t Black, it’s predominately White, so the firm pays White Associates more to keep them around and to keep their White clients happy.
It’s rational racism. How do you organize to address that? I have some ideas, but I’m enjoying watching the writers of the Good Fight work it out.