Paramount+ Is Canceling A Long-Running, Hit Series
They're canceling one of their very first.
Do you remember when Paramount+ was still called CBS All Access? The service launched in 2014, and by 2016 it had its first original scripted series — the legal drama The Good Fight, led by Christine Baranski as Diane Lockhart. Well, now Paramount+ is officially saying goodbye to the first original series that helped to get it where it is.
As reported by Deadline, season 6 of The Good Fight is set to premiere in September, and it will be the series’ final season. For many of the cast and crew, including co-creators Michelle and Robert King, the end of the series will be the end of a journey that began over a decade ago. While The Good Fight has only been on since 2016, the series is a spin-off and sequel to The Good Wife, which started broadcasting in Fall 2009.
Deadline spoke to the Kings, who said The Good Fight is ending mainly because of what’s proven to be an unsustainable workload. Along with The Good Wife and The Good Fight, Michelle and Robert King co-created the supernatural drama Evil. By the end of their work on season 5, Robert King said, the married writing couple realized “the double duty of Evil and The Good Fight was burning the candle at both ends.” But, in the case of the latter show, they envisioned “a very good out.”
As far as what that “out” will be like, they say to expect The Good Fight to end with something they’re comparing to apocalypse. “The thrust of this year is I think ending the world,” Robert King said. “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.”
That cataclysm may very well be a new civil war. Like previous seasons of The Good Fight, the upcoming and final season promises to deal with current trending topics like the potential Supreme Court overturning of Roe v. Wade, the Russia-Ukraine War, and a possible brewing Civil War in the U.S. The creators say that a lot of the inspiration for that comes from the attempted insurrection of January 6, 2021. “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,” Robert King said. “They want to settle things, which they can’t settle politically, violently.”
They also hinted at some rare violence in the final season. “And in years past, I think when there’s been talk about violence, it’s sort of metaphoric,” Michelle King said. “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.”
The final season of The Good Fight stars Christine Baransky, John Slattery, Sarah Steele, Michael Boatman, Nyambi Nyambi, Charmaine Bingwa, Audra McDonald, Andre Braugher, Alan Cumming, and Carrie Preston. The Kings warn fans that while they’re not ruling anything out, that you shouldn’t expect guest appearances from The Good Wife stars Julianna Margulies or Josh Charles. Similarly, they said there are currently no plans for 11th hour returns from former The Good Fight stars Cush Jumbo, Delroy Lindo or Rose Leslie.
