In the wake of its Television Critics Association panel for the The Good Wife spinoff The Good Fight, CBS has debuted the first full trailer for the spinoff, which will air on its streaming-only service, CBS All Access. The two-minute clip lays out the basics of the series’ premise: A year after the end of The Good Wife, Christine Baranski’s Diane Lockhart quits her firm and retires but is forced to start a new firm and go back to work when she discovers a Madoff-like financial adviser has stolen all of her savings.
At the panel, attended by Slate’s June Thomas, creators Michelle and Robert King said that episodes of the show will typically run about 49 minutes, although the first will be cut to 42 for its initial broadcast airing. (The nine others in the first season will remain streaming only.) The Kings said they had been planning, like Alicia Florrick, to put the world of The Good Wife behind them and leave the spinoff to others, but when their new CBS series, BrainDead, was canceled, they decided to be hands-on with The Good Fight instead. And they revealed that, in addition to returning cast members Baranski, Cush Jumbo, Sarah Steele, and Zach Grenier, the series will also feature the return of the Good Wife characters played by Rita Wilson, Jon Benjamin Hickey, and Matthew Perry. (The Good Wife’s Julianna Margulies has no plans to appear.) They also confirmed that the show will air in a different aspect ratio than its broadcast predecessor, because it looks “classy” that way.
But the real news, revealed by a different trailer shown only to the press at TCAs, is this: Diane Lockhart will get to swear. The initial teaser for The Good Fight stressed the show’s sexiness, but it wasn’t clear that the series would get to take advantage of leaving the Federal Communications Commission–controlled broadcast realm to loosen its standards. The TCAs trailer settled that question by opening with the scene in which Diane finds out she’s been swindled and responds with an emphatic F-bomb. (For broadcast, the scene was reshot with “Son of a bitch!”) TCAs journalists also got a peek at a man’s rear end in the trailer, so while there’s no indication that CBS is going the full HBO route, it seems like All Access’ standards will be more in line with channels like FX and AMC than the Tiffany Network’s mothership. So no Julianna Margulies, but more fucks and butts. Sounds like a fair trade.
