As usual, this episode is a fascinating exercise in alternate reality: How would the “fake news” issue and the frothing rage of right-wing media, and the concept of a “deep state” working against the elected government, look in a very different world where the President hadn’t, you know, hired the King of Fake News as his advisor?
In this episode, The Good Fight takes on one of the thorniest issues currently facing the tech world—and by extension, the actual world—when Neil Gross comes to the firm and asks them to come up with a plan of action for him to deal with trolls and racist or misogynistic harassment on his social media platform.
Previously on Homeland: A social worker took Franny away to a state-registered youth home after being tipped off by a Secretly Evil Dar Adal; Quinn was trapped in a safe house in the country with Astrid, after Dar Adal made a deal; Dar finally told Quinn about how Carrie woke him up to get information out of him; Javadi showed up to New York and got Saul to agree to set up a meeting between himself and the President-Elect; Keane was criticized by a vicious far-right talk show host named Brett O’Keefe.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day!
An amazing human on the internet wrote a hilarious in-depth study of the art collection of Mike and Carol Brady (at wearethemutants.com, found via Longreads). Favorite excerpt: “The wall space in the office vestibule suffered three different paintings in five years. This had a disorienting effect on the kids and may explain why Greg once abducted a goat.”
Margaret Atwood, whose Handmaid’s Tale is going to be on Hulu soon, penned an essay about the book’s sudden relevance to the events of today (via NYTimes).
Vulture writes of The Good Fight‘s strange dualities and inner contradictions. The article is full of clever and unexpected insights. The one thing I think they miss is the duality of the white privilege on the show–the white characters are forced to confront their privilege, yet they are only front-and-center on this show because of an inherently conservative TV structure where known quantities (more likely to be white) get top billing.
We can never resist a good long article on Rebecca Solnit, feminist hero, and inventor of mansplaining. (via Elle)
Well, it was probably inevitable that, at some point, The Good Fight, which opened its pilot with a closeup of a second-wave feminist watching Trump’s inauguration in absolute horror, would eventually take a bigger swing at the president. In this episode, they really go for it, portraying a case whose entire outcome is swayed by one ill-thought-out tweet from the President himself.
We’re back to getting very little real action on Homeland—on the other hand, there is major payoff from a plotline that I was afraid was going to be forgotten forever.
In this episode, Matthew Perry returns to the universe of The Good Fight as Mike Kresteva, the cunning, shameless liar who made life hell for Alicia back in The Good Wife. He is so deep in the role as to be almost unrecognizable as the erstwhile Chandler Bing—it literally took me almost a full episode the first time he showed up, to realize that he was who he was. And he’s fun.
OK guys. I, your dilatory Nashville recapper, have been looking forward to recapping this TRAGICALLY MISOGYNISTIC episode for so long now, and since then, this show has descended into such a pit of bathos and absurdity that I almost… almost… feel bad about making fun of it. But I have assuaged my guilt by reminding myself that the real sufferers here are not the creators of this show but the people who are watching it.
So here’s what I’m wondering: has a high-quality premium cable-style show ever also been a classic procedural, with single-episode cases of the week?
We know that the prestige premium cable drama is the model The Good Fight’s going after. The Kings frequently defended themselves against any The Good Wife-directed snarking that they had to write 22 episodes a year, and it’s not easy to maintain tight-as-a-drum plot development with that pace of work. Now, with The Good Fight, they’ve landed themselves on a paying-subscribers-only location, with twelve episodes a season. But as we’re learning, a slower pace of production and a more expensive outlet doesn’t mean the drama is inherently deeper.
In last week’s episode, the action finally ramped up, coming from two surprising directions in a show that has always focused on terrorism from abroad. In this week’s episode, things get even more exciting—without interfering with the integrity of the show’s new socially conscious direction.
Adversion 