This article contains spoilers for the final episode of The Good Fight.

Everything ends, but few television shows end well. The Good Fight, which just finished its six-season run, chose to leave viewers with a jarring final image: Donald Trump, red-capped in the middle a throbbing campaign rally, launching his presidential bid for 2024. Just a few days later, in real life, Trump announced he would actually be making another run for the White House.

It was a strange and surreal coda, fitting for a story that morphed over 13 years from a conventional legal drama to an almost psychedelic riff on what it feels like to be alive in 2022.

The Good Fight began as a spin-off from the popular series The Good Wife, which followed lawyer Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies) in the wake of her husband’s sex scandal that led to him stepping down as district attorney. Sharply written and critically acclaimed, that show was rightly fêted as one of the last great network TV dramas, before the streamers took over. But it was very much of the Obama era – steeped in a belief that the arc of history bends towards justice.

The spin-off shifted focus to Florrick’s erstwhile mentor Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski) as she joined a majority black law firm, where she was the only white partner. From the beginning, The Good Fight was spikier and stranger than its predecessor. And as the Trump years wore on, it became more concerned by racism, white supremacy, and the fragile state of democracy. The case-of-the-week format, which drives most legal dramas, drifted to the B-plot.

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In Baranski’s hands, Diane Lockhart emerged as one of TV’s best characters. She was a singular figure, a successful woman in her 60s, still learning and changing, with a bone-dry sense of humour and a trademark husky laugh. Partly the magic came down to longevity – all up, Baranski played Diane for more than 13 years across both shows, 216 episodes, almost unheard of in the age of streaming.

But The Good Fight truly found its rhythm when it paired Baranski with fellow Broadway star Audra McDonald, who joined in season two as lawyer Liz Reddick. Over time, the two women forged a deep friendship – one that was far more compelling than Diane’s across-the-divide marriage to a Republican gun advocate.

Ostensibly The Good Fight was a legal drama, but its chief occupation was a question for our times: what’s the right thing to do when the world is falling apart? In search of the answer, the show’s writers turned to the absurd, often to brilliant effect. Take the season four opener, which imagined an unsettling alternate reality where Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election, “lean in” feminism abounded, and #MeToo never went viral.