Michelle & Robert King on Topical Issues Presented in The Good Fight

PREMIUM: The Good Wife creators Michelle and Robert King talk about supplying even more acerbic and pointed commentary to subjects pulled from the headlines in The Good Fight.

WS: How did The Good Fight come about?
ROBERT: When we finished The Good Wife there were 300 crewmembers that were like a family. A lot of them had been there since the beginning; in fact, marriages came out of The Good Wife. At the end of that run, since we were the ones walking away from it, there was this urging by one of the executive producers, why don’t you continue it as a streaming show? You don’t have to run the show; you can get someone else to run it. That was the first instinct. So it started purely as, what is the way to keep the family together while we could go off and do other stuff? Then the person who we brought in didn’t work out for many reasons, and we came on board. I would say the show didn’t really find its reason to be until two things happened: first, Michelle came up with the idea that Christine Baranski’s character, Diane Lockhart, goes to an African-American firm, because the show was really supposed to be a comment on and a following of the Black Lives Matter movement in America. Second, Trump’s election seemed to give the show a greater reason to be other than just a spin-off of The Good Wife.

WS: How do you incorporate topics from the news and how far ahead do you write? You were spot-on with everything that was happening! Did you have a crystal ball?
MICHELLE: No crystal ball but in the case of season two and the politics, we knew these characters were very political, so there is no way they are not going to be talking about politics. As for what’s going to happen, the [topics] are evergreen.
ROBERT: When we start the year, we’re writing three months before broadcast, and at the end of the season we’re writing three weeks before broadcast. So the average is probably about a month and a half before broadcast. The news cycle is changing so fast these days there is always the chance you will be behind the curve. As Michelle has said, you are kind of guessing that the pee-pee tape will still be in the news, unless it’s found. And you are also guessing that #MeToo is going to have some kind of presence and you are just betting that the argument about it won’t change radically. It’s that month-and-a-half gap that you are always worried about.

WS: Is it important that the characters are dealing with issues that are happening in real life?
MICHELLE: That is a great good fortune for us that our show is set in the world where Trump is the president. Because the choice so many shows have made is a fictional administration, which for us would be far more difficult.
ROBERT: The other thing is social media. Because of the changes in technology that are happening so fast, you want to be able to comment on something right as it’s happening, because tomorrow it might be something else. For us, there is also a funhouse mirror aspect of having the characters and the viewers wonder whether that happened really in the news or is a made-up story. We did that a lot this year.

WS: What creative freedoms do you have working for a streaming service as opposed to broadcast? Although, The Good Wife was everything I could ever have wanted it to be.
MICHELLE: Thanks. We were allowed to go pretty far on network TV.
ROBERT: The advantages are language. Look, I think people swear too much on TV already, but there is a heightening factor to certain words and a reality factor. We try to use it [when appropriate] until you get to the last episode where it’s nonstop swearing because Lucca Quinn is giving birth. So….

WS: Well, have you tried that?
ROBERT: [Laughs] Also, some of the #MeToo stories required nudity. There was one story inspired by the Bachelor in Paradise [alleged misconduct] situation so that required some nudity in order to talk about coercion and the fine line of coercion.

WS: How do you work together?
ROBERT: We start at the keyboard together, but I type and Michelle looks over my shoulders. And from then on, I take over the rewrites, and producing-wise Michelle is involved with casting, which is a big part of it, and wardrobe.
MICHELLE: And dealing with the network. Robert is working with the editors, and we are both in the writers’ room.
ROBERT: Because of the needs of showrunning, we divide ourselves up.

WS: Are you still based in L.A. as you were with The Good Wife?
MICHELLE: We used to be. Now we are in New York [along with] the writers, actors and editors.
ROBERT: Now the difficulty will be we have a new show on Showtime called Your Honor, which will be based in L.A.
MICHELLE: We are only executive producing that. Peter Moffat, who is a fantastic British writer, is running it and writing it. Liz Glotzer, who is the head of our TV company, is very hands-on producing it. She is also in L.A.

WS: Tell us about Your Honor.
ROBERT: It is an Israeli format about a judge in New Orleans who is probably the most responsible, moral, ethical man. He is a widower and his son, while driving, reaches for his inhaler because he has asthma, hits a motorcyclist and kills him immediately. No one sees it, so he runs. The show is about what you do for your family. Even though you are the most moral and upstanding person, do you want to see your son go through everything he would go through?

WS: How have you seen the role of the showrunner evolve over the years?
ROBERT: Oh my God!
MICHELLE: What has evolved maybe even more than the role is the fact that anyone is interested in the role and that people talk about it.
ROBERT: As for the history of the showrunner, it’s not a word in anybody’s contract. It is a term of art that was created by John Wells in the ER days. What’s fascinating about it is there are a lot of executive producers on a show yet there is nothing in the credits to tell you who the showrunner is. But when you watch a movie, you know who the director is. I do think what has evolved is the showrunner as auteur or star and that I’m sure is because of the mega deals coming out from Netflix. It’s strangely about how much attention and how much money is being thrown at showrunners.
MICHELLE: But it’s a necessary thing, too. We were speaking a while back to a network head and he was saying he just needed to know who to get on the phone with when things were going wrong. It’s sort of that simple.
ROBERT: So really what the showrunner title means is, who do we blame when things go wrong!

WS: Indulge me for a moment. Diane’s clothes are so beautiful, as were Alicia Florrick’s in The Good Wife; I salivate!
MICHELLE: I know, because Dan Lawson, our wardrobe designer, is a genius. He’s also the nicest person in the world. He’s very focused on the script and using clothes to tell a story. What I love is that he doesn’t try to impose a visual theme. It comes from character. Granted it’s heightened and more beautiful than what the rest of us own in our closets, but it’s not as though he’s saying, Well, I want to have everyone in blues because it’s a blue mood. That is so false and he never does that. He has impeccable taste and dramatic sense.
ROBERT: For example, I directed the episode in which we were a lot in Alicia Florrick’s (Julianna Margulies) head. And whenever we were in someone’s head, he would dress people in greys, but very realistically in greys, so that it would be slightly desaturated.

WS: When casting, do you always start with the character or do you sometimes see an actor who is so talented you want to fit them in?
MICHELLE: Typically it starts with the character on the page. We also have a tremendous casting director, Mark Saks, who goes to the theater five nights a week and is hyper-aware of who is available.
ROBERT: I think there have been ten times when it started with the actor and cast toward it, or built a character. One was Cush Jumbo.
MICHELLE: That was a very nice thing. Mark Saks had mentioned her to us because she had a one-woman show, and then Christine came to us independently of that and said, “I just saw the most incredibly talented woman. You must go see her; we should get her on the show.” And it was wonderful to be able to say, You know what, we’re already talking about it.
ROBERT: The other was Alan Alda this year. We knew he became available and wanted to do the show, so we fashioned a character for him.

WS: What can you tell us about season three?
ROBERT: We went into season two thinking we would never mention the word Trump. We wanted an optimistic year because there was so much Trump saturation, but then [it completely took a different turn]. So your battle plan only survives until the first punch is thrown.

What the third season is about is we have a reality-star president, and we’re also turning into a post-factual country, where facts aren’t as important. So we want to look at why that is the case and not just point outwards but point inwards toward entertainment and how that has created a society that is more interested in storytelling than in facts. For us, it’s about the world of the law, too, and to succeed in court is to tell the better story. This season we want to look more carefully at how entertainment is part of what is causing people to turn away from facts.