Why 'The Good Fight' is the Trump era's best political drama: It understood liberals

The great American TV shows about politics — which should now include Paramount+ legal drama "The Good Fight," whose finale aired Thursday — tend to focus on liberals rather than conservatives. In scripted TV, the real partisan divide is where those liberals fall on the earnest-to-cynical spectrum.

NBC's "Parks and Reaction" and "The West Wing" were aspirational at heart, promoting the view that competent people of good will can defeat political inertia to make the world a better place. It takes endless stamina and almost inhuman optimism to get a city park built in Pawnee, Indiana, but bureaucrat Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler) ultimately outmaneuvers her libertarian boss and the public-comment saboteurs who had other plans. President Jed Bartlet (Martin Sheen) had it relatively easy in the orderly Washington imagined by