The Good Fight, a legal drama so mercurial you sometime want to shout “objection!” as it airs, returned to SBS last week, parachuting the show’s protagonist, progressive Chicago lawyer Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski), into an alternate reality where the historic burden that had motivated and menaced her was absent: in 2020, Hillary Clinton is President of the United States, not Donald Trump. “Yes!” the legal eagle shouts in delight, literally popping a champagne bottle.

“Are you microdosing again?” Lockhart's assistant asks, referring to her predilection for psychedelic relief when the idea of Trump having actually won the election is raised; for good measure, Merrick Garland and Elizabeth Warren are on the Supreme Court. Like all good what-if scenarios, the fork-in-the-road moment has some unexpected blowback, with Trump’s defeat meaning a different real-life figure had not been exposed as a monstrous criminal. Instead, to her horror, Diane is representing this person.

As 2020 moves towards the next US presidential election at the beginning of November, images and echoes of Hillary Clinton are all over our television screens. If her loss to Trump in 2016 is a pivotal moment in the 21st century, a before and after schism, then we’re at the point where the medium sees her as a figure of fascination, and one that is now creatively pliable. Clinton is a documentary subject, a fictional character, a symbolic figure, and a contrary framing device to Trump’s presidency.

There’s long been a Clinton undercurrent to Hollywood’s scripted dramas. The former first lady’s time as secretary of state during Barack Obama’s administration was obviously the inspiration for Madam Secretary, which Clinton eventually had a cameo on as herself alongside Tea Leoni’s fictional diplomat Elizabeth McCord. Beyond that, the wild insider plots and personal dynamics of both House of Cards and Scandal wouldn’t have been such juicy viewing without Hillary and Bill Clinton’s marriage, and the headlines that pursued them, as a kind of cultural kindling. It’s Whitewater paranoia as plot twists.