It’s About Time CBS Put ‘The Good Fight’ on its Summer Schedule

This summer CBS is going to try something new with one of CBS All Access’s most critically acclaimed series. Season One of The Good Fight will start popping up on the Sunday night CBS primetime schedule. The first two episodes will premiere back-to-back on Sunday, June 16 at 9 PM, followed by the next two episodes in the same time slot the following week. After that, the season will run its course all the way through the summer in the Sunday night 10 PM slot.

It’s a bold marketing strategy that’s clearly designed to both hype CBS All Access’s original library and to remind Emmy voters that The Good Fight exists, and that it is very, very, very good. (Personally, I think the most recent season was absolutely transcendent.) It’s also an obvious programming choice that should have been made a long time ago.

To put it simply: it’s about fucking time CBS airs The Good Fight during its summer primetime schedule.

When it comes to streaming services, CBS All Access may not have the subscription numbers or the name recognition that Netflix, Hulu, and Prime Video have, but they have one major advantage. CBS All Access has the power of linear. CBS is one of the original “Big Three” networks, and even as cable and streaming have scattered viewership, it has remained one of the top television networks in the United States. Basically, millions of people are tuning in on a nightly basis, making the network its own natural promotional vehicle for CBS All Access.

In fact, when CBS All Access launched The Good Fight, its very first scripted original, back in 2017, they leaned hard into this one promotional advantage they had over every other SVOD service. They aired The Good Fight premiere on CBS primetime, with a call to catch the second episode on CBS All Access. Going forward, only one other CBS All Access original would merit a similar linear debut, the splashy Star Trek: Discovery. Strange Angel, No Activity, Tell Me a Story, and One Dollar all had streaming launches and still struggle to make the same dent on the pop culture zeitgeist as “Star Trek: Disco” or even The Good Fight. Jordan Peele’s revamped version of The Twilight Zone may have earned a hot Super Bowl commercial, but it, too, fizzled from conversation when it launched exclusively on the streaming service without the boost of a linear premiere.

All this suggests that CBS All Access’s greatest champion is CBS itself. In fact, it’s been noted a few times that some of CBS All Access’s most popular shows come from the CBS library. When Decider spoke with CBS Interactive President Marc Debevoise last spring, he shared that many of the streaming service’s biggest ratings came from “some of the obvious broadcast programs you would think of, like Big Bang Theory and Young Sheldonand Seal Team and NCIS and things like that.” So, yeah, if CBS wants The Good Fight to attract more eyeballs, airing the first season during the doldrums of the summer “off-season” makes a lot of sense.

Of course, there’s another reason why it makes sense to plug The Good Fight into CBS’s summer line-up: it deserves the spotlight. The Good Fight is incandescently good. In just three seasons, it has managed to achieve both dramatic and creative heights that its parent show, The Good Wife, never did. (And that’s saying something considering The Good Wife is one of the best legal dramas ever to air on television.) Quite simply, The Good Fight is a show that’s owed a major spotlight like the one a limited summer broadcast run can afford. It deserves to spark debate and woo new fans.

More than all that, The Good Fight has a juiciness that lends itself to the heatstroke of summer. It juggles classic legal procedural beats with soap opera twists, theatrical storytelling, and political commentary. Basically, it’s feverishly fun and tailor-made for the summertime.

So when The Good Fight finally gets its broadcast run this summer, it shouldn’t be seen so much as an experiment, but a no brainer. It’s the perfect show for CBS’s summer schedule, as well as a brilliant show that needs Emmy buzz and a bigger platform. Plus, CBS already has three seasons filed away in their programming library. It may even be more cost effective for them to air The Good Fight this summer over spending millions producing a lame duck show that will get canceled before it lasts a full season!

Like I said, it’s about fucking time The Good Fight aired on CBS’s summer schedule.

You can stream the first three seasons of The Good Fight on CBS All Access. 

Where to stream The Good Fight