“The Good Fight” was the only TV show that truly understood President Trump.
A few did OK. “Jane the Virgin,” “Orange is the New Black,” “Madam Secretary,” “One Day at a Time” and “Superstore” all tackled ICE and anti-immigration policies. “American Horror Story,” for all the faults of its “Cult” season, properly pegged the fanatical behavior of his supporters. “Succession” comprehended family power.
Other shows failed, laughing at what should be terrifying. “The Conners,” “The Simpsons,” almost every late night show. “The Comey Rule” drastically misjudged how ready the population was to relive 2016.
But “The Good Fight” understood the last four years. It understood the mania, the paranoia, the fear. It understood the pee tape and Melania and #MeToo. Jonathan Coulton wrote songs about NDAs and Roy Cohn. Showrunners Robert and Michelle King pulled off an entire episode about Jeffrey Epstein’s frozen penis. Christine Baranski, playing lawyer Diane Lockhart, embraced the chaos.
From the very beginning, when Hillary Clinton’s defeat caused a last-minute rewrite to the pilot episode, the CBS All Access drama knew that the only way to showcase our new reality was to make it bigger.
“The Good Fight” will carry on. Trump’s presidency did not.
So what’s left?
Jimmy Fallon, whose hair tussle visually symbolizes the best evidence we have that the entertainment world was woefully unequipped to handle Trump, will have to find new material. There almost certainly won’t be 3 a.m. tweetstorms to mock and, God willing, no nepotism hires to scold.
TV will have to find a new Big Bad.
This is a chance for everyone to start over. The pandemic wiped out so much of TV, upending production on some shows and killing others as PPE costs rose. Hollywood gets to be creative, to go outside the box without either ignoring reality or producing a middling version of what we’ve already lived.
Some of the best shows of the last presidency were the weird ones: “Lovecraft Country,” which combined racism and aliens; “Dickinson,” a sexy, sapphic version of a young poet; “The Good Place;” “Homecoming;” “Fargo.” They took leaps and risks. Not everything worked, but the effort matters.
Trump worked his way into the very fabric of pop culture, into the music and movies and TV. He was impossible to ignore, even in the art forms that were supposed to provide an escape. His presence was overbearing on the news and in fiction. Now, Hollywood and the country face the same question: What’s next?
A fresh start. New villains. Better TV.
