The good fight is impeccable this season. How do you get the idiots to watch?

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The good fight Is on an amazing run right now

It was heartening throughout the pandemic to hear from friends and family how many people are force-feeding The good woman. And I understood why everyone who sampled it became obsessed. The wife of the politician dealing with his scandal was a juicy hook. Kalinda was the best character on television, until she was the worst. Alicia and Wills’ sexual chemistry made me live practically in a cold shower.

I can’t remember the last time I was as shocked by a TV episode as I was by the dramas of season five, Your Honor, an hour of TV trauma that my therapist and I are still working on. Then there was the shows superhero in a sleek blazer, royal Diane Lockhart, played by Christine Baranski, and the ending slap I felt on my own damn face.

Whenever given the opportunity to rejoice over someone’s excited conversations on The good woman, a series that probably ranks in my top 10 favorites, I end with the logical question: So have you started watching The good fight Next?

Inevitably, and bewilderingly, the answer is almost always no. Make it make sense. There is a series of sequels to the series that you just devoured and loved, and critics have praised it for the past five years at such volume that there is an epidemic of TV journalists whose vocal cords have ejected from the throat.

Why the hell isn’t everyone watching?

I mention it now because The good fight, a series that should have won the Emmy award for Best Drama twice, may be having its best season ever. The seventh episode of the fifth season aired this week on Paramount +, continuing what is among the most thrilling episodes of a television series this year.

No series engages the real world with such acuteness. Weren’t talking about those sticky, headline stories on Law and Order: SVU that everyone insists that they are campers and fun to be around when in reality they are mostly exploitative, cheesy, and almost impossible to watch. The past seasons of The good fight covered everything from Trump’s surprise victory in 2016 and the pee gang to news headlines covering the Baccalaureate in paradise alleged sexual assault, the infamous Shitty Men list, the insufferability of Milo Yiannapoulos and the location of Jeffrey Epsteins, er penis.

It’s not just that the series finds surprising and clever angles in speeches that may already seem saturated. It’s somehow, and in a way I’ve never seen on any other TV show, that he manages to stage every episode with some kind of emotional mirror. It manages to reflect the range of feelings you have as a person who experienced this news but may not have had the space to process it. It sounds hokey, but it’s so crisp and cleverly done.

This has been especially true this season. It kicked off with an episode that has gone through the trauma of the year since the series last aired: The Pandemic, Black Lives Matter, the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Trump’s election threats.

After enduring an overwhelming number of other series that all faltered with their ambitions to cover the same topics, the idea of ​​another TV series doing a series of condescending surface-level episodes on COVID-19 was up for grabs. about as appealing as stepping into a crowded bar with unmasked patrons as a spooky, vaccine-resistant variant of the virus roams the country. (Oh wait)

Sure The good fight approached the pandemic in a powerful and inventive way, yes. But he also used this emotional mirror with a startling effect.

Do you know that feeling of the last few years, where fear and dread turns into an anxiety-inducing suspicion that everyone has lost their minds or that you have lost their mind? It’s like there used to be some kind of safety line that tied you to reality, but someone cut it while you weren’t looking and now you’re spinning in space, looking at reason, grace and dignity fade away as you play ping pong against other people having the same unsettling experience.

In a way, the show captured that. It is also extremely fun.

Recent episodes feature a storyline in which Mandy Patinkin runs a kangaroo court called Courtroom 9 at the back of a copy shop that is becoming popular because it rejects laws and statutes that protect the powerful and often make a true justice. In a world where a state governor will show a slideshow of himself touching dozens of men’s faces to defend against sexual harassment, Courtroom 9 delves into the insanity but with a message: Every Complainant and accused must look each other in the eye and say I respect and love you after a decision. Respect? Love? In this climate?

There was an episode that described what life was like in a hospital in the spring of 2020 for a COVID-19 patient who buried himself inside me in a way I could never shake. Several episodes questioning the involvement or not of peoples in the January 6 insurgency were fascinating. The show made headlines last week when a vision from RBG, played by all-time legend Elaine May, arrived to advise Diane. It wasn’t gimmicky or rude, as it may sound. It was beautiful and moving.

This week, the new episode opened with a slideshow of photos of Kevin Spacey, Louis CK, Scott Rudin and R. Kelly on Ave Maria, almost like the world’s most disgusting reel memoriam honoring the harmful morons. Then the characters started discussing the details of Armie Hammers’ alleged cannibalism in relation to the crop cancellation and I almost screamed. It’s wild that a show exists that would dare to touch that.

No show has the swagger of The good fight, whether it is having recently dared to turn the audience against Diane, the protagonist, or to wait sometimes 20 minutes after the beginning of the episode to launch the opening credits (really a kick of the ball). Now there is only one thing you can do to really impress: freak out watching it.