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'The Good Fight': CBS All Access Censors Episode's Animated Short Over "Concerns With Some Subject Matter"
CBS All Access seems to be spending a good chunk of The Good Fight's third season having "good fights" both in front of and behind the camera. On Sunday, it was confirmed that recent episode "The One Where Kurt Saves Diane" was censored by the network over concerns CBS' Standards and Practices division had over subject matter presented by series creators Robert and Michelle King. Before the weekly animated short, a black screen with the words, "CBS HAS CENSORED THIS CONTENT" appeared.
According to sources close to the matter, Robert and Michelle King informed CBS All Access/CBS TV Studios that the creative decision had been made to replace the content in question with the censorship message detailed above. A spokesperson for the streamer confirmed that the posted message was the result of conversations and negotiations: "We had concerns with some subject matter in the episode's animated short. This is the creative solution that we agreed upon with the producers."
Here's TVLine's take on the subject matter in question:
"Based on the scene that led directly into the ultimately-excised short, the Kings presumably were going to clue viewers in on the morally flexible lengths some U.S. companies will go to in order to break into the lucrative Chinese market (which tied into the episode's B-story involving the fictional search engine behemoth ChumHum)."
The news comes on the heels of some unwanted attention thr streaming service received in mid-April over a questionable tweet sent out over CBS All Access' The Good Fight where a series of President Donald Trump-related "target words" were present in the posted image. Many pushed back on what they felt were at best not funny attacks on Trump, but the company responded with a statement clarifying the intent of the tweet in the context of the entire episode.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly in January 2019, Robert King descibed the series as being more of a "satire" of Democrats' reactions to Trump's administration:
"The Democrats are licking their chops at the possibility of turning the House over and impeachment. So it's really a satire of Democrats wanting to impeach a sitting president in a way that would make them angry if it were Republicans going after Obama … There's a lot of argument among them — especially because Michael Boatman's character is very much a Trump supporter. We wanted to see what the debate would be…"
The world went crazy in the THE GOOD FIGHT's second season, and now, in season three, the resistance does. Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski) tries to figure out whether you can resist a crazy administration without going crazy yourself, while Adrian Boseman (Delroy Lindo) and Liz Reddick-Lawrence (Audra McDonald) struggle with a new post-factual world where the lawyer who tells the best story triumphs over the lawyer with the best facts. Meanwhile, Lucca Quinn (Cush Jumbo) balances a new baby with a new love, and Maia Rindell (Rose Leslie) finds a new Mephistopheles in Roland Blum (Michael Sheen), a lawyer who is corruption incarnate.
Created by Robert King and Michelle King and Phil Alden Robinson, The Good Fight is executive produced by Robert and Michelle King, Ridley Scott, David W. Zucker, Liz Glotzer, Brooke Kennedy, and William Finkelstein. The series is produced by CBS Television Studios in association with Scott Free Productions and King Size Productions. The series is distributed worldwide by CBS Studios International.