‘The Good Fight’ To End With Season 6 Tackling Roe v. Wade & Civil War; EPs Talk Possible Cast Returns; Premiere Date Set

Nellie Andreeva
·7 min read
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The upcoming sixth season of The Good Fight will be the last for the acclaimed series, which helped launch Paramount+ predecessor CBS All Access as its first original series. Production is currently underway in New York City on Season 6, which will premiere September 8. This wraps a 13-season run for Robert and Michelle King, creators and executive producers of The Good Wife, which aired on CBS for seven seasons, and co-creators/executive producers of the spinoff.

As usual, The Good Fight will be topical and reflect current events in Season 6, which has Diane (Christine Baranski) feeling like she’s going crazy, struggling with an uneasy sense of déjà vu, with everything from Roe v. Wade, to voting rights, to Cold War aggressions returning. Meanwhile, the lawyers of Reddick & Associates wonder if the violence that they see all around them points to an impending civil war. You can watch a teaser below.

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“What we thought that would be fun in a last season is there a déjà vu quality in returning to the greatest hits, not just Carrie Preston playing Elsbeth Tascioni and Alan Cumming playing Eli Gold but also some of the favorite hits of plot points,” Robert King said. “Maybe this sounds like we’re recycling but we want Diane to have a sense, haven’t I done this before? haven’t I done that before? That just felt like a way to be kind of meta and reflect what we thought was going on with liberals and progressives around in a sense that we thought these fights were done. And we were on a glide slope towards justice and Shangri-La basically. It’s comically too.”

The Kings famously had to tweak the first episode of The Good Fight after Donald Trump won the 2016 Presidential election filming a new scene of Diane looking stunned by the result. A Supreme Court decision on an effort to overturn Roe v. Wade could come in late June or early July, and The Good Fight would be able to reflect that.

“We’re still going to be shooting in June and we’re still doing posts in June, July and August,” Robert King said. “So that is within our ability, and we have areas where we can massage and return to them, not only by reshooting more, because this has been a very scattershot year of picking up this and picking up that because of Covid and other problems, trying to get people to shoot at the same time, so it will give us more leeway to do what we did in that very first episode of The Good Fight.”

While tackling political issues will bring a case of déjà vu, depicting violence is a new area for the show.

“The show has not had that much violence — we talk about guns but we never really see guns, which was Michelle and my sense of what we wanted to do with TV,” Robert King said. “But what clearly is coming around is a sense of a coming violence and coming doom and it’s put people in a paranoid place about where the country’s future is. Our show is usually about the liberal mind-set and psychology and how, it’s riding the surface of these years, not just the Trump years, but the post-Trump years. So I think we’re just reacting to the feeling of the zeitgeist, that things are getting more tense, that people are not as willing to settle things politically. They want to settle things, which they can’t settle politically, violently.

Added Michelle King, “And in years past, I think when there’s been talk about violence, it’s sort of metaphoric. In this instance, the law firm is surrounded by violence, there is violence in the streets in Chicago, and you will feel that very much throughout the season.”

In addition to Baranski, The Good Fight‘s Season 6 cast includes John Slattery, Sarah Steele, Michael Boatman, Nyambi Nyambi and Charmaine Bingwa, with Audra McDonald and Andre Braugher. Cumming and Preston guest star.

While there have been quite a few Good Wife cast members who have appeared on The Good Fight, a previous attempt to bring the original series’ lead, Julianna Margulies, on the spinoff fell through. There are no plans for Margulies’ Alicia to show up for the final chapter either, the Kings said.

“There’s one thing we should say, never say never but I don’t think so,” Robert King said. Added Michelle King, “That’s not our expectation.”

“First of all, we’ve been in touch with Julianna and Josh [Charles] just as friends and I think are committed to work with each other on other stuff we’re doing,” Robert King added. “I don’t think it necessarily will be on this.”

The answer is similar about three The Good Fight original cast members — The Good Wife alumna Cush Jumbo, Delroy Lindo and Rose Leslie — potentially returning.

“My guess is not Cush because of England,” Robert King said. “I wouldn’t commit what’s going on with Delroy or Rose Leslie. We’d love to work with them. Again, if it’s not on the show, it would be in theory on the next show. We all left on great terms together so we can grab them. It all comes down to what makes itself available and not make it seem like a Robert Altman movie of past characters from the shows. If you have them back, you want to have some significance and not just kind of drifting to the background of scenes.”

Robert King teased “returning some of our favorite judges our favorite attorneys from other episodes.” And he confirmed that Wayne Brady, who recurred last season and whose storyline ended in a cliffhanger, will be back in Season 6.

The Kings said that the decision to end The Good Fight with Season 6 came after they had finished Season 5. For the past couple of years they had been juggling their two Paramount+ series, The Good Fight and Evil, which originated on CBS.

“We did feel like after January 6, there was a certain number of stories we wanted to tell. And then Michelle and I were thinking about what was coming up, and we decided that this year that we were doing this kind of violent, Civil War year would create a very good ending for all the characters,” Robert King said. “So I would say it was at the end of last season, we kind of knew that the double duty of Evil and The Good Fight was burning the candle at both ends, but we also saw a very good out for the series.”

Added Michelle King, “It was a natural conclusion to the stories we’ve been telling to be talking about upcoming Civil War, which we’re dealing with in Season 6.”

Having that natural conclusion means that likely there will not be a future third installment in the franchise after The Good Wife and The Good Fight.

“To go back to what Robert said, we never say never but to our minds, we are writing an end,” Michelle King said.

Added Robert King, “If anything The Good Wife was a kind of a midway mark. The Good Wife was always about the education of Alicia Florick. And we felt that series ended that education, but it didn’t end the world. The thrust of this year is I think ending the world. I mean, it’s just like cataclysm. I’m not saying where we’re going but it feels like a curtain falling down and not closing but curtain literally caught crashing down on the stage.”

Robert and Michelle King serve as showrunners and executive producers of the series, which they co-created with Phil Alden Robinson. Ridley Scott, David W. Zucker, Liz Glotzer, William Finkelstein, Jonathan Tolins, Jacquelyn Reingold, Nelson McCormick and Baranski also serve as executive producers. The series is produced by CBS Studios in association with Scott Free Productions and King Size Productions. The series is distributed worldwide by Paramount Global Content Distribution.

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