The New Yorker Radio Hour - Why Christine Baranski Fought the Good Fight

Episode Date: November 29, 2022

The veteran stage and screen actress Christine Baranski first became a household name thanks to her Emmy-winning turn on the nineties sitcom “Cybill,” and her Tony-award winning work on Broadway. But “The Good Fight” took her to another level. As Diane Lockhart, a Chicago attorney and diehard liberal, Baranski captured the tensions of the political moment of Donald Trump, and the show ended its run this month. Emily Nussbaum could barely contain her excitement when sat down with Baranski at The New Yorker Festival in 2018 for a wide-ranging conversation about Baranski’s career and the timeliness of “The Good Fight.” This segment originally aired April 12, 2019. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. After six acclaimed seasons, the good fight is finally coming to an end. The finale aired this month. And the show's end is a bittersweet one, since in the minds of many critics and fans, it captured the tensions of our current moment, like no other program on the air. It starred Christine Boranski as Diane Lockhart, a Chicago-Rour. attorney who's a die-hard liberal coping with life in Trump's America.

I'm delighted to welcome Christine Beranski, who's not only a quadruple and probably more threat performer and a radical fashion inspiration, but my personal guide through today's political hellscape. Emily Nussbaum is a staff writer, and she writes often about television for the magazine. She talked with Christine Beranski at the New Yorker Festival, in 2018, kind of early in the run of the good fight. They spoke about the show's politics, the Me Too movement, and more. Beranski had a long career in theater before her breakout moment on television in the 90s as the hard-drinking buddy to Sybil Shepard's character on Sybil.

Here's Emily. Christine is a 15-time Emmy Award nominee. She's won two Tonys for the Real Thing and Rumors, and she has a house in Connecticut where she gets to go skinny dipping at night. So basically she's living the life. Welcome. Christine Baranski. Thank you.

We were talking backstage and we immediately went into a political rabbit hole. So rather than start with anything political, I'm going to start with a clip from Mamma Mia. Maybe we should all just sit around singing Abba song. This is the first Mamma Mia, of course. The second one just appeared this summer, which I thought was a public service because it... And then you go, you go from, God, this is really kind of silly and, oh, God. And then I realize the world really needs a couple of hours to still believe life is joyous and people get along and there's sensuality and a belief in love.

And there's just a goofy innocence about the movie that's really, as I said, it performs a function now. So I'm going to show another clip and we're going to jump right to the good fight. and this trip is called Trump derangement syndrome. This is deranged. This is the Trump derangement syndrome. You're just as bad as you're accusing him of being. No, I'm just done with being the adult in the room. I am done with being the compliant and the sensible one.

Standing stoically by while the other side picks my pockets, while the other side gerrymanders Democrats out of existence, a three million person majority. and we lost the presidency, a Congress that keeps the Supreme Court justice from being seated because he was chosen by a Democratic president. That's not what happened.

That is exactly what happened, Julius. Okay, then, take to the streets. Man the barricades. Because if that's what you really think, you've given up on the law. You've gone well beyond any... Actually, you don't know. I have a Smith and Weston 64 in my desk,

and I'm this close to taking to the streets. There's an uncanny... synchronicity to this character as I watch this my eyes welling up in tears as I watch this it's so of the moment Let's just brilliantly written but it really puts intelligent liberal-minded people who believe in the liberal democratic Tradition in society and in their country puts them in a workplace and lets them bump into each other and mix ideas and make intellectual arguments that are complex and not strident, but that this woman, this

Diane character for having fought the good fight all her life being a woman who probably followed Hillary into, you know, through Wellesley and championed her and had to, you know, knock on the glass ceiling many times and finds herself at this present moment living in a country where we're backsliding in terms of women's rights. It's a marvelous role to play, and it's a marvelous show to be on, because the writers just kind of take us into the belly of the beast and let us live in that world. And the Good Fight was supposed to be a show about Hillary being president, instead it was a show about Trump being president, which obviously transformed the show. We shot that pilot the days before and the days after the election, and then, of course,

we had to rewrite the pilot because the presumption was Diane was going to retire because there are no more glass ceilings to break and she got she gets the house in the south of France and then she loses her money but there was a speech

at the very beginning where she's talking about you know there are no more glass ceilings to break and it was written as a line thinking that Hillary Clinton was going to be the president and so that line was taken out and we had to rewrite the episode. So now it seems like Diane got the house

in the south of France because she didn't want to live in the United States. Every element of it just changes context. This seems like a good lead-in to a clip from Sybil. So let's go to a clip from Sybil. Champagne for everyone at that table. Champagne at lunch? Oh, we haven't had that since.

yesterday. Sybil, I have fabulous news. My prodigal son is returning. Justin is coming home for Thanksgiving. That's wonderful. I knew he'd come back. It's been three years, Sybil, without a word. You remember the night he left?

I'd just come back from that Save Our Fur's benefit. He told me he hated my entire pampered materialistic existence. Then he asked for $2,000 and left for Peru. Maybe being away three years changed his mind, or maybe the money ran out. Sybil, I don't want to celebrate another 40th birthday without him. I want to prove to him that I'm not something he has to run away from. And I'm going to start by showing him the best old-fashioned Thanksgiving we've ever had.

Well, except for that one in Aruba with Ivana Trump and Richard Simmons. Hey, I've got an idea. Why don't you bring Justin to my house? Everyone's in town. So I'm going to make a good old-fashioned Memphis Thanksgiving. I'm going to use all four Southern food groups. Sugar, salt, grease, and alcohol. It sounds tempting, but I can't.

Oh, come on. The whole family's going to be there, and you're part of my family. Did I mention there'll be alcohol? I'd love to, darling, but I want Justin all to myself this weekend. I'm even going to cook, all his favorite health foods. Oh, one question. Is it still correct to call it brown rice, or is it rice of color? I watched all these old sibbles, and I have to say, it is a very surreal show to watch,

because it is a real time capsule of the pure. of the period, like even like the... Look at the hair. Yeah. Oh my God. What was that like the first year that you were making Sybil because there really was this complete... And also actually I was wondering because you came as a largely as a stage actress

and television was in a very different stage. Oh, God, yeah. And there was still that conflict of, you know, if you did television, you were giving up the theater. I mean, now it's everybody's doing everything and actually everybody wants a job on television because there's so much great writing on television. But at that time, I was seriously conflicted. And I was in my early 40s by then,

and I had just, except for some films, I was really a theater actress and defined myself that way. Plus, they weren't shooting shows in New York. For the most part, all especially sitcoms were shot in L.A., and I had two children, and I didn't want to raise them in L.A.

So I just kept turning down pilots. And then they approached me about this. And the character was meant to be a kind of abfab, Joanna Lumley type. And I was doing the math on how much it would cost to educate my two daughters, and it seemed like the theater was not going to provide that kind of income. So I began to seriously consider it. But it was a really tortured decision.

and my manager who's here today, she'll tell you. I mean, she really had to talk me into it. And the night before I left, I almost called her in the middle of the night to say, I just don't think I can do it. It's too big a step. And I decided not to move the children to L.A., but that we would try my commuting back and forth. But it was a huge, for some reason, a huge psychological jump for me to go to Hollywood and to do a sitcom.

That said, If ever there was a sitcom that was right for me to do at that moment in time, it was that role. And in that show, Chuck Lorry wrote the pilot. And I did accept it on the basis of the pilot, which just, I thought, this character, she's just got those great, you know, whip smart one-liners. And the one line that sold me on the whole project was, when Sibbles just out of the blue says, you know something, you know what's amazing, Marianne?

And my response is, they make vodka from wheat. There's something there about that writing that I think I can work with this. And I told Chuck that, and he later confessed, it's not a Chuck Lory Line, it's his writing partner, Lee Aronson, who's a recovered alcoholic. But anyway, yeah, that character, within 13 episodes, I want an Emmy for that.

And to that I attribute, you know, I give it over to Chuck Lorry and the writing of that character. No one had seen that woman on American television. They'd seen Ab-Fab. But she was the first out of the gate. Sex and the City came later. But the woman with the martini, who was sort of a badass in her outfits and her attitude, That was the first of its kind, and boy, it changed my career. Those were really hard years.

I hated living alone in a hotel. I missed my kids so desperately, but it's why I'm here. It's why I had a relationship all those years with CBS. There was a turning point in my career. And who goes to Hollywood at 42 and, you know, is an overnight kind of star in that way that you become? a star because of television. I mean, I was a well-known theater actress, but not a celebrity,

not a star. No. That's Christine Baranski, talking with Emilino Spam at the New Yorker Festival in 2018. More in a moment. I wanted to talk about your long relationship with CBS. I'm wondering how people are responding to what's going on with Les Moon Viz.

It is shocking, but that's where the culture is, and it's a clarifying moment in our culture and I think it's going to be messy before it gets better, but I will miss less. I was wondering with you and your daughters who are a lawyer and it, like, have you had, when you've had conversations about what's going on, do you find there to be a generational difference between you and your perspectives on some of these issues, or is that not so true? Only slightly.

Well, yes, I did get into one conversation with my daughter about men's behavior and how I was raised. I was raised in a Catholic background in all girls Catholic high school. And it was just instilled in us as young women that men were that way, that they couldn't control themselves after a certain point. I mean, I literally was told if you let a man touch you

anywhere below the neck, he might turn into an uncontrollable wild animal. And it's your responsibility if you get pregnant. You have to control the narrative. have to control the narrative. And I told this to my daughter and she said, no, no is no at any point, at any point in the evening. If you, you know, no matter what's going on, I said, that's interesting. That's just not the way I was raised. I would never go to a man's room late at night. I just assume that he would, he might very well behave badly. And there's,

so there's that difference. But it's how we were raised. But I'm proud of my daughters. I think they're very savvy about their feminism, and they're not strident, but they're clear-headed about it and pragmatic. And one of my daughters did get a law degree, and she was really agonizing whether or not to go to law school. It's such a huge commitment. And I said, look, you can rail against the world,

but if you want to change things, you've got to know how the system works. And becoming a lawyer, as Diane did, you figure out how the system works, however flawed it is, and then you figure out how to change it. But, you know, blogging and, you know, railing against the machine with a lot of hyperbole, a lot of screaming isn't going to get us there. And I think at this moment in time for women, it's the most important time to be clear-headed, rational,

as well as passionate and angry. Channel the anger in an intelligent, clear, forward-moving way. It's so hard to talk about this stuff, because I always... I find myself feeling all those emotional feelings and wanting to escape from it all. You went to Oxford to study, right? I did. My other daughter, Lily, got a graduate degree

at Wolfson College at Oxford in anthropology. And when I took her there to help her move in, I was just utterly captivated by Oxford. And I, one of my deep regrets in my life is that I did not have a real college education and academic experience in that way. I went straight to Juilliard, which although it was a prestigious acting school, was trade schools. You know, I learned the craft of acting, and I'm happy I did, and that was my great passion. But I've always longed to go back to school and use more of my brain and my intellect. So there's a summer course called the Oxford Experience.

And next year, I'm signed up for the Duke of Wellington one week, and then the meaning of life the following week. So I'll do two weeks next year. Wait, the meaning of life just as a subject matter? Why not? Not like the Monty Python film. No, no. Just the meaning of life in one week at Oxford.

You should have me. back next year. I'll have all the answers. So this is it. Thank you so much to everybody for coming. And thank you to Christine Beranski. Emily Nussbaum speaking with Christine Baranski at the New Yorker Festival in

2018. The Good Fight had its finale this month, and you can stream all six seasons on Paramount Plus. I'm David Remnick. I hope you had a great holiday, and I hope you'll join us next time for the New Yorker Radio Island. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Emily Boutin, Breda Green, Calalia, David Krasnow, Louis Mitchell, and Gauphin and Putubuele. Along with Adam Howard, Jeffrey Masters, Will Coley, Jenny Lawton, and Michael May. And we had assistance from Harrison Keith Lyon,

Meher Batia, Amy Pearl, and James Napoli. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.