Entertainment

‘The Good Fight’ and ‘The Chi,’ Near Neighbors and Worlds Apart

From “Insecure” to “Atlanta,” “Luke Cage” to “Black Lightning,” “Power” to “The Chi,” “black-ish” to “grown-ish,” television is undergoing a mini-revolution in terms of African-American representation and creativity, onscreen and (to a lesser extent) behind the camera.

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By
MIKE HALE
, New York Times

From “Insecure” to “Atlanta,” “Luke Cage” to “Black Lightning,” “Power” to “The Chi,” “black-ish” to “grown-ish,” television is undergoing a mini-revolution in terms of African-American representation and creativity, onscreen and (to a lesser extent) behind the camera.

Perhaps an even more important measure of progress is a growing variety in the ways shows approach depictions of race. For a current comparison, we can look at two of the better series around, “The Good Fight” and “The Chi” — one a high-gloss courtroom dramedy and the other a surprisingly traditional kitchen-sink neighborhood drama. They are worlds apart in style but both are set in Chicago and deal in a significant way with race.

“The Good Fight” took a character, Christine Baranski’s Diane Lockhart, from a show focused on gender (“The Good Wife”) and switched the emphasis to race by making her a white partner in a predominantly black law firm. But it hedged its narrative bets: The first season balanced Diane’s challenges fitting in at her new firm with a story line about a Madoff-like financial scandal that didn’t have a racial dimension (and in which the principal characters were mostly white).

As Season 2 opens (it begins streaming Sunday on CBS All Access), that’s still the approach — two continuing story lines (outside of the legal cases of the week) that share Diane and several other characters, but are essentially separate, in their own bubbles. (And they remain segregated to some degree along racial lines, in a way that’s reasonably plausible.)

That’s a common structure for prime-time dramas. But it’s a problem for “The Good Fight,” because there’s a serious imbalance between the plots. Everything about Diane’s progress within the firm feels fresh and vital; nearly everything about the Rendell family and its Ponzi scheme feels tired and formulaic.

The difference is on display in the season premiere, in which Chicago’s black legal community turns out en masse for a funeral. Events there threaten the firm’s grip on billable hours related to the future Obama presidential library, and the ensuing story line — a neatly choreographed dance combining principle, ambition, personal animosity and coldblooded business — represents the show at its best.

The plot focused on the firm gets the best performers, too — Delroy Lindo, Audra McDonald in a new regular role as a lawyer, Brian Stokes Mitchell as a guest star. (The fraud story line, to be fair, includes one of the show’s current highlights in Jane Lynch’s arch portrayal of an FBI agent.)

This episode is also an interesting study in how “The Good Fight” handles having a protagonist, Diane, whom we’re conditioned to see as the smartest person in the room and who’s now the only white person in a room full of black lawyers. If she rides to the rescue in one scene, you can expect that she’ll get a comeuppance a few scenes later.

“The Chi,” created by Emmy-winning African-American writer Lena Waithe and about two-thirds of the way through its first season on Showtime, is also set in Chicago. But it and “The Good Fight” exist in worlds that will rarely if ever intersect. (“The Good Fight” tacitly acknowledges that when Jerry Adler’s Howard Lyman, now a judge, refers to himself as “a kid from the South Side,” a neighborhood he probably hasn’t seen in a long time.)

Waithe’s show is deeply embedded in the South Side, and has nearly no white characters. It’s entirely about race in the sense that it’s set in a minority community and its major dramatic arcs — involving turf disputes, killings, raising children, finding work — are predicated on the community’s economic struggles. But moment to moment it isn’t specifically about race at all.

That’s not new, though it’s still unusual in dramas — shows that take place in largely black milieus have been more likely to be comedies. Not every plot strand is stellar — the scenes involving ex-con Ronnie (Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine) being drawn in by the imam of a neighborhood mosque are a little platitudinous.

But overall Waithe has succeeded in putting a wide web of interesting and sympathetic characters on screen and telling their stories with a minimum of sentimentality and a consistent, welcome dose of low-key humor. The series “The Chi” often feels most similar to is “The Wire,” in that show’s more relaxed, less procedural moments, and when it clicks, it’s just as good or better.

Event Information:

"The Good Fight"

Streaming on Sunday on CBS All Access

"The Chi"

Sunday on Showtime

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