About once per episode of The Good Fight, there comes a point where I can hold my silence no longer. Maybe it’s Christine Baranski hurling an ax. Maybe it’s a Schoolhouse Rock–style animated short about Russian troll farms. Maybe it’s Michael Sheen’s appearance as a flamboyant, shameless Michael Cohen/Roy Cohn/Roger Stone type named Roland Blum. The inciting incident may change, but the result is always the same: I pick up my phone, compose an all-caps text about what’s unfolding on my screen … and realize I have no one to send it to. That’s because I don’t know a single person, apart from a few peers who are literally paid to, who watches The Good Fight or plans on tuning into this Thursday’s third-season premiere.
Not that I blame them. Robert and Michelle King’s spinoff of The Good Wife, a procedural that ran for seven seasons on CBS, was the debut scripted offering of CBS’s stand-alone streaming service All Access. Since its premiere in 2017, The Good Fight has been joined by high-profile launches like Star Trek: Discovery; this April, All Access will debut Jordan Peele’s highly anticipated reboot of The Twilight Zone. Such attractions are meant to sweeten the deal of a rather tough ask: All Access costs $5.99 a month for access to a live CBS feed, All Access originals, and the back catalog of series like NCIS and The Big Bang Theory—including commercials. (All Access also offers a commercial-free version for $9.99 a month.) Compare that to Netflix, which costs between $9 and $16 a month for literally hundreds of original series, or even a closer analog like HBO Now, which also charges for access to a single network, but whose customers’ $14.99 goes toward a full slate of acquired films, not to mention Game of Thrones.
The business logic of sequestering The Good Fight behind a paywall is clear enough. Unfortunately, it also creates a Catch-22: To get viewers to pay up, CBS has to prove offerings like The Good Fight are worth the cost; to do that, CBS has to let potential subscribers see what they’re being asked to pay for. All Access does offer a one-week free trial, and The Good Fight’s series premiere was broadcast on CBS proper before the network wheeled up the drawbridge. Mostly, though, The Good Fight’s existence poses the TV version of a Zen koan. If someone comments on the Trump administration in a forest and no one can hear it, did they make a sound? If a satire limits its audience by default, can it truly have an impact? Last but not least: If a group of people make an excellent TV show and no one can watch it, does it really exist?
“No one” is, of course, an exaggeration. Last month, CBS announced it had reached 8 million subscribers across streaming platforms, a figure that includes both All Access and Showtime Anytime. As of August 2018, All Access had 2.5 million subscribers in its own right, which CBS claims has grown by more than 50 percent and started to skew younger over the past year, though the company did not provide specifics. (The median subscriber age had previously been 43.) That’s fewer than Netflix’s 60 million domestic subscriptions, though roughly on par with HBO Now’s 5 million. Some of those people must be watching The Good Fight, though like other streaming services, CBS All Access doesn’t release viewership statistics for individual shows.
And yet The Good Fight still feels divorced from a conversation it’s chasing with all the aggression of the legal sharks who make up its cast. Saddled with introducing an entirely new slate of characters and written largely before the 2016 election, the show’s first season reads, in retrospect, like a warm-up round. Its second returned with a renewed sense of purpose: to use its case-of-the-week procedural structure and current-events-adjacent subject matter—The Good Wife got its name from its protagonist’s de facto career as a political spouse—to channel the angst and absurdity of life under the current administration.
This setup has yielded many, many scenes that, were they to air on a more accessible platform, seem guaranteed a second life as reaction GIFs. In a particularly brazen example from the upcoming season opener, the heroine’s husband, an unemployed ballistics expert, takes a gig on a hunting expedition with the Trump brothers. There, he takes a Dick Cheney–style buckshot bullet to the shoulder, an incident he cannot legally discuss thanks to an NDA. Meanwhile, Eric posts a picture of a giraffe carcass to Instagram. The subplot captures much of what makes The Good Fight both great and great for this moment. Where the difficulty of one-upping real life has become a handicap for parodies such as Saturday Night Live, the Kings take it as a challenge; where shows like The Handmaid’s Tale translate the zeitgeist into unrelenting sobriety, The Good Fight adds a puckish sense of play that feels truer to real life.
The premiere also shows the chutzpah of casting immediate members of the president’s family as major, if offscreen, players in one’s story. The Good Fight is unabashedly rooted in a specific time and place—not just liberal anxiety under Trump, but this season, liberal anxiety tempered by the cautious optimism of midterm victories, yet laser-focused on 2020. (Baranski’s Diane Lockhart joins a guerrilla #resistance group that toys with QAnon and courts celebrity endorsements.) The Good Fight demands to be seen right now, while the conditions its writers and viewers are responding to still apply. Such topicality makes the show an awkward fit for streaming, let alone a streaming service where dispatches from a nation in disarray feel more like shouts into the void.
The Good Fight may be an especially pressing example of a show marooned from its potential audience and a hobby horse for this particular TV critic. But it’s not an isolated one, and may in fact be the canary in the coal mine for the future products of the ever-proliferating number of streaming services, and even conventional networks, not named Netflix. This year alone will see the launch of major offerings from Apple and Disney, two of the world’s largest corporations; WarnerMedia, NBCUniversal, and even the haute Criterion Channel are soon set to join the fray. All of these will cost money. Many will use original content to justify their price tags. Most will not have the power of Star Wars, as Disney+ will with The Mandalorian, to compel would-be customers. There will only be more Good Fights, and fewer people willing to inflict yet another recurring charge on their bank accounts in order to see them.
At least some providers are aware of this problem. The upcoming second season of Killing Eve, which originally aired on BBC America, will now be simulcast on the channel’s corporate cousin, AMC, a platform with more name recognition (and in more cable packages) than the spy thriller’s original home. An analogous move for The Good Fight would be a pivot to the CBS-owned Showtime, preserving the show’s frequently exercised right to profanity while putting it in a better position to garner buzz and the eyeballs that come with it. But Killing Eve was never tasked with helping launch an entirely new subscription product; as long as CBS remains committed to All Access, The Good Fight will remain a carrot to be dangled instead of a story to be widely appreciated. Television has always been an awkward, contentious, occasionally fruitful marriage between art and commerce. Sometimes, the commerce ends up obstructing the art.