The Couple Behind TV’s Boldest Shows
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One day last fall, as Robert and Michelle King were being driven from Manhattan to Connecticut, to film “Evil,” their irreverent spiritual-horror series on CBS, they described the day they accidentally got engaged. “Oh, this story really makes me sound like a Catholic asshole,” Robert, who is sixty-two, said, looking at once amused and chagrined.
At the time, in 1987, the couple had been dating for four years. Robert was a devout Catholic, the middle child of seven in a tight-knit Italian-Irish family; Michelle was a secular Jew, the only child of Holocaust survivors. Because Robert was set on a Church wedding, they’d scheduled an “informational” meeting with his parish priest, planning to have a tentative discussion about whether that was even possible. Instead, when Robert asked if they could marry in the Church the priest misunderstood—and pulled out a calendar. The couple were too shy to object. On the drive home, they had a bemused conversation: should they tell their parents that they’d set the date?
It’s the kind of charming origin story you might hear from friends of friends at a dinner party—likable types with a reflex toward self-deprecation. In an era in which TV showrunners are often celebrated as towering art monsters, stomping their signature onto a tame medium, the Kings are refreshingly life-size: a family-oriented, hardworking couple, orderly in their lives and so polite that it’s hard at times not to feel rude around them. Robert is warm and voluble, with a fringe of steel-gray hair and baggy jeans; Michelle, who is sixty, is more of a fashion plate, in leather boots and hip tortoiseshell glasses. She’s an introvert, and he’s an extrovert, drawing her out with the refrain “What do you think, Michelle?” They apparently have a twisted sense of humor, which their loyal friends and colleagues repeatedly bring up, then refuse to elaborate on. “They’re very circumspect,” the actor Kurt Fuller, who plays a psychiatrist in “Evil” and has been the Kings’ friend since the eighties, said. “But not always—you get ’em in a certain mood.”
The Kings’ careers have been defined by a shared set of values. They are for pragmatism. They are against pretension. They are worker bees, proud of their ability to navigate within systems. They are repelled by didactic art, even when (especially when) they agree with the message. They admire moderation, to an extreme.
Yet somehow these mild-mannered institutionalists have produced, in the past thirteen years, some of the most iconoclastic shows on television—joyful, cracked visions of moral chaos full of rude wit and formal experimentation. The Kings have not only broken more rules, with more sophistication, than many of their more auteurist peers; they’ve done it on CBS, the most conservative network with the oldest audience (and, more recently, on CBS’s maddeningly wonky paid streaming service, Paramount Plus). There are no stable couples on the Kings’ shows; there are no systems that can be trusted. They are mavens of order whose art is all about a world that is falling apart.
The Kings’ breakout series, “The Good Wife,” which ran on CBS from 2009 to 2016, was at once a sleek legal procedural and a spiky antihero drama, with themes of systemic corruption that resembled those on “The Wire,” only danced backward, in Louboutin pumps. The show was critically acclaimed, but, like its trophy-wife protagonist, easy to misread, and often sidelined in the public imagination as a “women’s show.” In 2015, the Kings launched a production company, King Size, aiming to spend more time producing the work of others: it had been exhausting to grind out twenty-two hours of network TV each fall, as opposed to eight or ten a year on equivalent cable dramas.
Then Donald J. Trump became President, a moral shock that destabilized them and transformed their art. After a truly gonzo sorbet—the satirical zombies-in-D.C. show, “BrainDead”—they began serving up challenging new creations spiced with an angry absurdism and political directness. Their current shows, “The Good Fight” (a spinoff of “The Good Wife”) and “Evil,” have little in common on the surface. But both hold up an off-kilter mirror to our warped world, as if to help viewers see the distortions more clearly.
“The Good Fight,” like “The Good Wife,” is set in Chicago—where Alicia’s boss Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski) is a partner at a Black law firm—but it seems to take place in an adjacent universe, in which surreal events blend with real ones. Trump is President, and Diane, a lifelong liberal, is losing her grip on reality. She microdoses; she joins an all-female Resistance squad; at one point, she nearly hacks the 2020 election. It’s a dark comedy that replicates the vertiginous sensation of living in post-maga America, with stories ripped from headlines that already seem like satire.
“Evil” is even stranger. A kinky, philosophical noir-horror series saturated with black humor, it is intensely Catholic—in both senses of the word. On one level, it’s a religious spin on “The X Files,” centering on a team of investigators working for the Catholic Church: David Acosta (Mike Colter) is a priest in training; Kristen Bouchard (Katja Herbers) is a lapsed-Catholic psychologist; Ben Shakir (Aasif Mandvi) is an atheist scientist from a Muslim family. Each week, they look into exorcisms, U.F.O.s, and other spooky phenomena, while battling Leland (Michael Emerson), a satanic “tempter” who has wormed his way into the Church’s hierarchy—and into Kristen’s mother’s bed.
The Kings often describe “Evil” as an extension of their own lifelong dispute about the origins of human malevolence: Robert believes in demonic influences, Michelle in psychology and sociology. But the show never feels like an abstract debate: it has a thrum of anarchy and sex, gliding confidently from campy shockeroos to sincere emotion. Episodes overflow with bizarre images, like a succubus who mounts her victim, then calmly removes a retainer and sets it on the night table. Glimmering beneath the show’s pulp mythology is a moral seriousness: after its heroine, Kristen, ice-axes a serial killer who threatens her children, she’s empowered, as if liberated by her sin, then thrown into spiritual turmoil. It’s Dostoyevsky, only funny and filthy, and on the same platform that hosts “NCIS.”
“The Good Fight” and “Evil” are both shaped, superficially, like lawyer-and-cop procedurals—the case-of-the-week shows that are the mainstay of CBS. They’re not hundred-episode movies; they’re not Dickens or Scorsese. There’s a long tradition of creative carpetbaggers from Hollywood, Broadway, or fiction-writing newcomers eager to elevate a low, hacky form. The Kings are not among them. Television was where they found their liberation—often for the same reasons that others put it down. “It’s always practical,” Michelle told me. “It makes you look at all art that way. Like, if there’s a gorgeous sculpture of a ballerina in an unusual position, I always assume, Oh, there was something wrong with the marble. They had to cut around it.”
In early fall, the “Evil” writers’ room met, on Zoom, to break the first episode of Season 3. One day, the goal was to choose an A plot—some case for the team to investigate. To speed up the process, Robert asked the group to “stress-test” two potential stories: one involving a “soul-weighing” scale, inspired by a fringe-science experiment from 1907; the other about a rescue from a Uighur-detention camp.
During the first brainstorm, the mood was effervescent. Initially, the writers tried to imagine what it was like to lose one’s soul. “Your favorite song, you no longer love it—or you look at your child and say, ‘I fucking hate you,’ ” Ione Lloyd, a playwright from Brooklyn, said. Everyone threw out ideas for the story, with writers typing silly jokes into the chat box (“Blasphemer? I barely know her”). The fizz faded when they moved to the second idea—although Dewayne Darian Jones, a TV writer who described himself as a “gay, former Deep Southern Baptist,” made a case for its social relevance, comparing the idea to a zombie allegory they’d done about Amazon unionization. Robert heard him out but shot the idea down: there was no horror twist yet—and, worse, no ambiguity. “If a show tries to teach me something, all it teaches me is to change the channel,” he said.
When the pandemic hit, the Kings, like everyone in Hollywood, were forced to scramble. “Evil” had just aired its first season, on CBS; for Season 2, the show was bumped to Paramount Plus, alongside “The Good Fight,” where the audience was smaller but the rules looser. The pandemic forced “The Good Fight” to end Season 4 midway through, although the Kings managed to land that truncated year on a bravura final image: a shot of Jeffrey Epstein’s penis, floating in a cryogenic jar. For much of 2020, the Kings retreated to an Airbnb in California with their college-age daughter, Sophia. Yet somehow, during that lost year, they produced “The Bite,” a sharp zombie satire about COVID-19, by using Zoom to film temporarily unemployed Broadway couples like Audra McDonald and Will Swenson in their apartments.
Things were easier now that the Kings were back home in New York, in their elegant apartment on the Upper East Side. When asked how they could work with their spouse, their comeback was that they didn’t see how anyone could do such a big job without one’s spouse. They divide the responsibilities: Robert oversees the writers’ room, directing, and editing; Michelle supervises hiring, casting, costuming, and makeup, along with the vast, invisible labor of functioning within a network. Both handle design. In their scripts, he’s strong on dialogue and humor; she’s strong on structure. They sat in separate Zoom boxes, with Robert upstairs, near a treadmill, and Michelle downstairs, by some glass candleholders. She was silent until, every few minutes, Robert asked her a question, often about tone or taste.
While “The Good Fight” room was politically varied, in the “Evil” room the aim was spiritual diversity: one writer was raised in a fundamentalist-Christian cult; another has a Muslim father and an atheist mother. Four of the eight writers are Black. Although race is not the show’s explicit subject, the theme was organic to many story pitches for Season 3, from a plot about hoodoo mysticism to another about an African American “financial dominatrix” working for reparations. There was some nervous chatter about “Evil” ’s vulnerable position as a small show on a big network. “Will we get cancelled if David throws the Bible?” one writer asked. “Not on streaming,” Robert said.
Most of the day’s focus was on solving problems that the writers themselves had created—the definition of serial storytelling. One of the first orders of business was resolving a cliffhanger from Season 2: a kiss between Kristen and Father David. The writers pitched baroque ideas for the sex scene that would follow—among them, David treating Kristen’s body like a “human rosary.” Robert was interested, urging them all to watch a smartly done dual-masturbation scene from the TV comedy “The Other Two.” Then he turned to Michelle: “Are we veering too far into Catholic porn?” No, she said, although she worried about exploiting the cast. That wasn’t a concern, he joked: the actors had gone in for weirder stuff in the past.
Next, the room turned to Kristen’s four daughters, whose overlapping dialogue is a trademark of the show. When the writers pitched rude behavior, Robert recalibrated them: “Let me remind you of how Michelle and I see the sisters—they’re the Marx Brothers. They bring chaos with them, but they’re benign.” Kristen’s free-range parenting style—hands-off, but warm and comic—offered a respite from the show’s darkness. “It isn’t depressing when she goes home,” he said. Suddenly, a story emerged, as if by magic. Maybe Leland, the show’s villain, could pose online as a child, in a plot to bond with Kristen’s most alienated daughter—only to have the four sisters trick him instead. The Zoom boxes lit up, as everyone giggled at the idea of Leland, a worldly schemer inspired by the narrator of C. S. Lewis’s novel “The Screwtape Letters,” being driven mad by phone notifications. It was the type of thing that the show loved to do: twist a moral horror into dark comedy (then do the reverse).
“How creepy and repulsive is this?” Robert asked Michelle.
“It’s exactly the right level of creepy and repulsive,” she said, smiling.
Ione Lloyd, the playwright, raised a concern: should they clarify that Leland wasn’t really a pedophile—just a satanic tempter!—for fear of alienating viewers from their “lovable villain”? Robert disagreed: it was more powerful to leave the darker suggestion in the mix.
Dewayne said, “You know, I have never seen Leland as a funny, warm villain.” He reminded the room of an episode in which Leland bragged about sending a teen-age boy to prison, knowing that he’d be raped. The Zoom boxes went quiet. It was the puzzle they were always trying to solve together: just how ugly, how perverse, should the show get? The headlines they drew on—from incel suicide to the Tutsi genocide—were bleak. But “Evil” was an entertainment, too. The show’s tricky tonal blend—violent, but not nihilistic; moral, but not moralistic—was hard to nail. In a shared Google Doc of plans for the season was a blueprint for the year: “Start out more bizarre because streaming but don’t go too far.”
Robert King met Michelle Stern in 1983 at the sock wall at Frontrunners, a Brentwood shoe store where they were co-workers. He was twenty-three and an aspiring screenwriter; she was twenty-one, a senior at U.C.L.A. At first, they kept their workplace romance under wraps. “That’s about as scandalous as it gets with us,” Michelle said.
Robert grew up in San Jose, where his dad worked as a computer programmer. His mother, a homemaker, was a fiery Catholic liberal, with a poster in the kitchen of the Watergate conspirators, whom she x-ed out one by one as they were convicted. With seven kids, money was tight—his dad built three-level bunk beds to fit in everyone—but it was an idyllic, supportive upbringing. “We lived in one of those brand-new subdivisions with hundreds of kids all over the place, and Robert was directing everything,” his sister Nancy, who played Hitler in one of his many Super-8 projects, said. When he was eleven, he lugged home some nineteen-twenties movie seats, to host screenings of Buster Keaton films.
Robert had hoped to study film at CalArts, but he missed the deadline, and enrolled instead at Westmont College, a Christian school in Santa Barbara that his older brother was attending. It was a strict, strange place that forbade dancing, drinking, and premarital sex. It was also an easy place to offend people, which Robert relished—you could get a gasp just by saying “fuck.” He became a cheerful campus renegade, getting two plays produced: “Chat,” a Tom Stoppard-influenced drama about how talking undermined the Christian faith, and “Cut,” about an actress who, after losing a role to an amputee, cuts off her arm.
From the start, he and Michelle were a tight, happy couple—and their families adored one another, unfazed by the religious difference and thrilled at Michelle’s organizing influence. (When Robert finally got a checking account, his parents hugged Michelle.) But breaking into Hollywood felt daunting. They were middle-class kids with no connections. When Michelle became an assistant at a small, family-run movie company, one of her colleagues found Robert a screenwriting gig with the schlock auteur Roger Corman, whose factory ran on unknowns. Under Corman, Robert wrote a martial-arts ripoff, “Bloodfist,” which became a cult hit; he wrote “The Nest,” a goofy thriller about killer cockroaches. He learned to work fast and cheap, but he was paid almost nothing. He and Michelle never joined Corman’s notorious scene, with its porn stars and its wild parties. Kurt Fuller said that Robert, in all their years of friendship, had never mentioned working with Corman.
Finally, in 1987, King found an agent, and for the next decade or so he wrote steadily for the movies. There was “Phantom of the Mall,” a slasher flick with Pauly Shore; “Clean Slate,” a comedy about an amnesiac detective, starring Dana Carvey; “Speechless,” a rom-com with Geena Davis and Michael Keaton. On one level, King was a success. He was getting movies made, in multiple genres, even if they tanked (sometimes profoundly—he wrote the script for “Cutthroat Island,” a pirate movie, starring Davis, that is one of the biggest bombs in history). But being a screenwriter was a crushing experience, like a slow poisoning. By the time his projects débuted, they were unrecognizable, chewed up by the whims of movie stars and directors. Playful dialogue became macho or didactic—or stranger, but not in a good way. Julia Schachter, a script supervisor who became Michelle’s best friend when they were assistants, told me, “I remember him talking about a studio meeting he had, early on. They said, ‘Can we do it . . . with dogs?’ ”
Michelle was just as burned out. By then, she was reading scripts at M-G-M, but she felt out of step: the office was dominated by flamboyant oxygen eaters who thrived on years of nothing happening, broken up by long lunches. The politics were grinding. “People would get promoted, and, inevitably, they, you know, had an uncle who was running the company or their dad was a big director,” she said. Whenever the chessboard shifted, or another strike rolled through, she’d find herself out of work.
Then, around 2000, when the Kings were hitting forty, they joined forces—and jumped mediums. It was a galvanic decision. They’d never considered writing for television, because nobody they knew did: it was a step down. But, after “The Sopranos” opened a door in the industry’s imagination, Ron Underwood, who had directed “Speechless,” asked the Kings if they had any TV-ready ideas. They did: “The Line,” a thriller set on the border of Tijuana and San Diego. Excited, they sold the script to ABC and scouted a pilot—only to get a hard pass. In retrospect, Michelle told me, the show’s blueprint had been naïve: it had no major white-male characters.
Still, the next year they were hired to write another pilot for ABC. Network TV was a relief to both Kings. It was no-nonsense: you got a yes or a no, then you moved on. After three failed pilots, one was picked up: “In Justice,” a midseason replacement, on ABC, about an organization like the Innocence Project. Robert worried that the concept, which had come from the network, might feel preachy, and it did; the show lasted thirteen episodes. “It was a bit—I found it—I mean, I wouldn’t watch it,” he said.
By then, the Kings were feeling desperate again: in 2007, the Writers Guild of America had gone on strike, and they’d been “force majeured” out of their ABC contract. That season, they pitched two shows. One was a “Don Quixote” adaptation. The other was cannily constructed to appeal to CBS. The network wanted a single-woman drama like TNT’s “The Closer”; its president, Les Moonves, favored formulaic procedurals like “C.S.I.” Both Kings had been transfixed by a rash of recent political sex scandals, and by the crumpled faces of wives like Silda Wall Spitzer. Nancy King, a defense attorney at the time, had been talking to them about the trend of stay-at-home mothers returning to the law.
These inspirations came together in “The Good Wife,” the story of a governor’s wife, Alicia Florrick, who joins the white-shoe law firm Lockhart Gardner as a first-year associate after her husband is caught taking bribes and sleeping with hookers. (Robert and Michelle also considered calling it “Scandal.”) The Kings’ Trojan horse narrowly made it past the gates: Moonves greenlighted the show at the last minute, and only if they could secure a star, which they did in Julianna Margulies. Initially, CBS assigned a showrunner to supervise them; she lasted nine episodes. After two decades, the Kings were finally holding the reins.
“The Good Wife” became a rare hybrid, a broadcast show with “cable” themes, nimbly combining episodic plots with serialized arcs. The show had a prescient focus on digital law, with plots that explored the blurred line between public and private, covering crypto way back in 2012. Each year, the Kings made bolder leaps, often by necessity. When Josh Charles, who played Alicia’s love interest—her foxy, cynical boss Will Gardner—left the show, they killed his character and plunged Alicia into a season of atheistic despair and borderline alcoholism. By the finale, she’d evolved into a cool-eyed power broker, her corruption indistinguishable from her liberation. “We always thought of it as ‘The Education of St. Alicia,’ ” Robert said. “How does she learn that being good isn’t enough?”
By the seventh season, the Kings were out of plot—and exhausted. Reviews were good, but the show got low ratings, in a Sunday-night slot regularly bumped by football, and although Margulies won two Emmys for best actress, the series wasn’t in the running for Outstanding Drama, an honor reserved for gritty cable fare like “Breaking Bad.” There was conflict behind the scenes, too, which led to the show’s own version of fake news: a bar scene between Margulies and Archie Panjabi, who played the flirty investigator Kalinda, was spliced together from footage shot separately. (Neither King would comment on what led to this scenario.) The Kings, looking for an exit ramp, had started pitching new shows—one about Vatican City, another about female Israeli soldiers.
Instead, the one to get picked up was “BrainDead,” which ran in the summer of 2016. Both Kings say that, of all their shows, it hews closest to Robert’s personal vision. Inspired by the government shutdown of 2013, the series was a radical shift from the sleek halls of Lockhart Gardner: a sci-fi comedy about killer bugs from outer space that infest the brains of congressmen, turning them into hyper-partisan maniacs. Kooky and structurally inventive, it had traces of Robert’s Corman roots, with heads exploding without notice. But at heart it was a clever centrist fantasia, a Tea Party-era satire about the dangers of extremism. Trump appears at its fringes, still a joke, not a threat. The show’s shrewd theme—that grubby but collegial favor-trading might preserve democracy better than ideological purity—was about to get stomped on by history.
Meanwhile, CBS was pushing for a show that the Kings didn’t want to make: a “Good Wife” spinoff. Once again, practical and artistic concerns collided. When Christine Baranski, who played Alicia’s Waspishly elegant boss Diane Lockhart, got an offer from NBC, the Kings stepped up to keep her in the fold. Michelle, seeking a fresh angle and savvy about critiques of CBS shows’ lack of diversity, suggested that they set the series at a Black-led law firm. CBS agreed to limit each season to ten episodes; the series would help launch its new streaming platform; and the Kings wouldn’t have to run it—for that role, they hired Phil Alden Robinson, a film director. Everyone knew that Hillary Clinton would soon be President. “The Good Fight” was designed to be a show about Diane, a liberal feminist boomer, as an ironic diversity hire in a post-Obama utopia.
On November 9, 2016, Baranski was filming the show’s pilot with Delroy Lindo, who was cast as her boss, Adrian Boseman, when, during a break, they all glanced at their phones and the mood went numb. A few months later, Robert was present during a reshoot of the pilot’s opening scene: Diane, in pearls, frozen on her stylish loveseat as she watched Trump’s Inauguration—then flinging her remote on the floor in disgust. More recently, Baranski—sitting in her own living room, a few blocks from the Kings’ place—described the notes that Robert had given her. “He said, ‘Drop your jaw, open your mouth. No, really—open it as wide as you can. I know it feels phony, but just really—feel like Lucille Ball.’ I go”—she gaped like a Looney Tunes character. “ ‘Oh yeah, that’s the image.’ ”
By then, the network’s collaboration with Robinson had broken down. The marble was bad, so the Kings cut around it, and a show about feminist triumph became something better, an embodiment of that Looney Tunes jaw-drop: a corkscrew shoved into the heart of the Trump era, with plots about the pee tape and Milo Yiannopoulos, Black Lives Matter and Project Veritas. Starting in Season 2, episodes featured “Schoolhouse Rock”-style cartoons, on subjects like N.D.A.s, with songs by the cult singer-songwriter Jonathan Coulton. There were nervy thought experiments, like an episode in which Diane woke up to discover that Hillary Clinton was elected—and that, as a side effect, #MeToo never happened and Harvey Weinstein was Diane’s client. Baranski, whose husband died a few years before the show débuted, felt profoundly connected to her character’s disorientation: she spent her days playacting Diane’s rage and grief, her nights bingeing on MSNBC.
Improbable as it seems, “Evil” was meant to be a more mainstream show, maybe even a CBS blockbuster. But in its way “Evil,” too, was a response to a frightening era of cruelty and mendacity, to the rise of a legion of trolls, fixers, and frauds. “I don’t like when the truth isn’t clear,” Robert told me. If the Kings’ “Good” shows were about navigating a corrupt world, “Evil” was about a starker, broader subject: the struggle to find meaning in a culture that often seems to be tipping, quite literally, into Hell.
By November, the first episode of “Evil”—a mere brainstorm only a month earlier—was in full swing. The Kings had hammered out a script during a long weekend. Robert was directing, something he does once or twice a season, including an elaborate silent episode in Season 2, set at a monastery; making it had nearly killed him, he said. Visual bravado was tough on a budget, but the Kings, and their director of photography, Fred Murphy, tried to give each show a distinct, non-network look: on “The Good Fight,” sleek horizontal compositions, to frame power dynamics; on “Evil,” vertical shots that drew the viewer’s eye upward, to mimic the show’s theme of gazing at something “beyond the human.”
For “Evil,” Robert also had a specific aesthetic model: the 1955 movie “Night of the Hunter,” the only film directed by the British star Charles Laughton. A bracing black-and-white homage to the silent-film era, the psychosexual thriller, in which Robert Mitchum played a sociopathic preacher, used uncanny images isolated on an inky background, a look that “Evil” had never replicated to Robert’s satisfaction. At a production meeting, he suggested trying again: scenes in Father David’s rectory bedroom could be shot to suggest darkness framing the set, “as God would see it, almost, like there’s nothing beyond our walls.” He chuckled and added, “Let’s play, and if it doesn’t work the only one who is embarrassed is me, for pushing for it in the little time we have.”
On the soundstage, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, Robert gave gentle notes to the actors. “Let’s just embrace the staginess,” he told Katja Herbers, as they worked some slapstick with an envelope. “We’ll get more filmic later.” During the sequence in which the daughters pranked Leland, one of the girls froze up on a line in which she urged her sister to pretend to have cancer. “I swear, if you laugh no one on the Internet will blame you—they’ll blame the writer,” Robert reassured her. “That’s you—they’ll blame you!” the girl said, laughing. A designer showed him three zombie-head jars, and he picked one; later, he experimented with plunging the zombie head down a toilet. He looked exhausted, but he radiated joy.
Between takes, we talked about Robert’s tastes. An insomniac, he watches TV—seemingly all of TV—in the middle of the night, from critics’ darlings like “Station Eleven” to reality shows like “Below Deck.” His opinions were as lively as any critic’s: he loathed “True Detective,” summarizing it as “the kind of show where a baby ends up in a microwave”; and he loved “The White Lotus,” although he wondered if it didn’t show its ideological underpinnings a bit. Among his heroes was Ben Hecht, the screenwriter behind a startling range of classic films, on whose philosophy he had modelled his own: an omnivorous, energetic embrace of multiple genres, with little concern about status.
Michelle was more guarded about her opinions and, at times, inscrutable—a Magic 8 Ball wrapped in a puffy Patagonia coat. Did she enjoy classical music? “Not really.” Did she like Ben Hecht? “Probably not.” When I asked her what she was best at, she said that she was best at figuring out what everyone else was best at.
But she was witty and direct about Hollywood. “There’s no question in television that can’t be answered by either ‘time’ or ‘money,’ ” she said, as Robert struggled to get the envelope scene done quickly. She had no regrets about her life, except for not having switched to TV sooner. “ ‘We have to get something on the air’ is great,” she said. “It focusses everybody.” In the movie business, people leaned into “bad behavior, with a small ‘b’ ”—flakiness, rudeness—out of the need to “make themselves into characters.” In contrast, her TV colleagues, especially the women—had impressed her as “grownups,” her highest form of praise. The TV industry was full of “people who go to bed early because they need to get up early, and who vote and are civic-minded.”
The Kings are passionately pro-labor, their marriage having overlapped with the 1988 W.G.A. writers’ strike, a formative experience: Michelle got fired and Robert turned down a scab gig, although they badly needed the money. Now, however, she was one of the managers—a diplomat and a strategist, with much of her work done privately, via e-mail. At one point, the production team discussed a tricky schedule change, which meant pushing the show’s designer to rush plans for a “business” demon (on a treadmill, with a towel around his neck). Robert noticed Michelle’s face.
“What’s that look?” he said.
“It never hurts to apologize,” she said, simply.
When I asked which King was more cynical, they both laughed and pointed to Michelle. Her parents—who had hidden in Holland during the Second World War, then met in L.A. in the fifties—had built a rich, rewarding life. Her mother was a nurse, her father, a high-school teacher (and, for a short time before her birth, an actor—he once played a pipsqueak thug in a gangster film). But, like many children of survivors, Michelle was hyperaware of how fast the world could pivot into darkness. As Robert filmed a scene, Michelle told me she feared that the #MeToo movement was over. She said it with a dry-eyed Realpolitik: a door had opened and then shut—and she could see people’s empathy dwindling, turning into lip service. Her own experiences hadn’t been awful, mainly old-fashioned bosses calling her “dah-ling.” But she’d seen her share of cruel behavior glamorized as the cost of genius. Monstrosity was always a risk when you climbed the ladder, she said—for her and Robert, too: “Being a showrunner is a very infantilizing job, if you let it be. If you run naked and crying and hungry onto the set, wardrobe will run out with a robe! Catering will run out with food and an assistant director will dry your eyes.”
Several people spoke to me about Michelle’s generosity as a mentor. Her friend Julia Schachter had a running joke with her husband: when you wrote Michelle a thank-you note, she wrote one back. But she had a canny awareness, too, of how one might be taken for granted. Nichelle Tramble Spellman, who wrote for “The Good Wife,” told me that Michelle gave her excellent career advice: “Bring a guy with you when you have a meeting. Then see if the person that you’re meeting with always looks to him.”
The Kings had another shared value: truthtelling. One day in Greenpoint, during a break while filming a showdown between a secular shrink and a fierce fundamentalist nun, Robert joined me near a video monitor, where we talked about the liberation Kristen had felt after she picked up that ice axe, the sense that all bets were off.
People fantasized about committing such a justifiable murder, I said. “I think they do,” Robert replied, smiling. It was part of a lifelong debate between the Kings. “Michelle thinks she can be an ethical person—and she is an ethical person—without a Ten Commandments kind of law that guides you. And some authority that applies it. While I think that, without that, people will always fall apart. They’ll pretend they’re not falling apart, but inside of them that’s only because at some level they do believe in the Ten Commandments, and in some—in a force that keeps them away from the bad thing.” Without God, it was too easy to deceive ourselves about our own decency.
This bothered me: couldn’t people behave well without the threat of Hell? Yes, Robert said, but they’d inevitably backslide “unless there’s”—he stopped, then shrugged helplessly. “This is a crazy time to be talking that way,” he acknowledged. “Because eighty per cent—I mean, almost every Protestant Christian—believes Trump should be President! Which I find insane and, obviously, evil. And they believe that Biden is burning in Hell.”
When we first met, Robert had described himself to me as a “David Brooks conservative.” (Or possibly a Bill Kristol conservative, at least the recent Bill Kristol, he joked: “Who knew? Bill Kristol!”) He’s anti-abortion; he’s pro-Israel. Although his electoral politics are mainstream Democratic, as are Michelle’s, he admires a broad set of iconoclastic thinkers, including Hecht, whose identity was transformed by a post-Holocaust Zionist conversion, and the libertarian satirist P. J. O’Rourke, whom he had wanted to write for “BrainDead.” But he knew that it was his faith that made him an outlier in Hollywood, even among friends. At one point, in the wake of a conversation about abortion, Robert began to argue that some progressive politicians had been “acting like assholes”; Michelle chimed in, “Off the record!” Robert said that it was O.K. to put the exchange on the record, adding, “It feels like everybody should be in the minority about one thing or another—to know what it’s like to have your opinion be the exception.”
A few months later, when abortion rights were in greater peril—but before the leaked Supreme Court memo—he spoke less glibly: though he personally opposed abortion, he didn’t think that it was possible to resolve the question through public policy. It was a conflict with deep roots in his family. Nancy King described their childhood home as a joyfully argumentative place where everyone sparred over dinner, testing their ideas in an atmosphere of mutual respect. Then, one night, the women, who were all pro-choice, argued bitterly with the men, who were mostly anti-abortion. Robert’s father spoke up, his voice atypically serious. “We are never going to talk about this again,” he said.
Robert often spoke about their work as rejoinders to a certain TV drama in which a decent person makes a stirring speech, then comes out on top. “In life, the more idealistic person is the one who ends up in the gutter,” he told me. In a line in “Evil,” a schemer confronts the heroes with bad news: “Have you ever noticed people are getting meaner? They yell at each other more. They hit each other on airplanes. . . . Do you know what it means—all this anger and hate? It means your team is losing. The doom you feel? It’s justified.”
The people Robert admired the most, he said, were quietly good—moral without being showy. He mentioned a dentist who had helped Michelle’s grandfather—a poor immigrant the dentist knew only casually—get a bank loan to buy a bicycle shop; the dentist had never even told his own daughter about his generous act. “There are really perceptive things in the New Testament,” Robert said. “But one of the most perceptive things is: Behave well, but shut the fuck up, basically. You know, don’t advertise it.”
It was difficult to hold that position in a culture that rewarded, and often required, self-promotion. In their years on TV, showrunners had become increasingly public figures. To stay on the air, they had to jockey for press coverage, brand their personalities, and flatter their fanhoods—a task full of trip wires, if you didn’t want to be a huge phony. Lately, Robert had tiptoed onto Twitter, which he was good at, posting, along with promotional videos, hints of his passions: an essay about whether Dorothy Day was perceived as too left-wing for the Vatican to make her a saint; a plea for Criterion to redesign its app interface so that viewers could search for screenwriters. Under a bleak publicity shot of Buster Keaton in “Pajama Party,” he wrote, “This hurts my soul. The funniest man in cinema history. I want to gouge my eyes out. Never be talented, need money and grow old.” Beneath a black-and-white shot of Roy Cohn and a young Roger Stone, he wrote, “If Evil had a family tree, this would be its roots.”
Workplace shows on television often look suspiciously like shows about making television. Sometimes they’re about a frustrated boss who tries to corral creative oddballs; sometimes they’re about brilliant teams solving problems inside huge, shadowy organizations. Even in this context, the Kings’ series have been unusually self-reflective, starting with “The Good Wife,” which satirized Ryan Murphy and Aaron Sorkin, among other TV grandees. “We do not worry as much as we could about offending the people above us, our betters,” Robert told me. “We did that one story that was a reaction to having a boss who was accused of being a rapist, which was, you know, very much about—I mean, we tend to write about our being part of a corporation. And the feelings of being complicit.”
The boss in question was Moonves, who was fired in 2018 following allegations of sexual assault. (Moonves denied any wrongdoing.) The story line began on “The Good Fight” in 2019, with an episode titled “The One About the Recent Troubles.” Both times Robert mentioned it, he checked in with Michelle—and once, reading her glance, added, “Oh, I’m sorry, ‘inspired by’? Or can I even say that?” In the writers’ room, he was more freewheeling. After someone joked about CBS’s founding father, William Paley—a bully and a womanizer—rising from the dead to attend an “Evil” notes meeting, Robert cracked, “He wanted to give us some advice about Hell and how it was.” He paused. “Oh, that’s not very nice.”
In “The One About the Recent Troubles,” the lawyers at Diane’s firm found out that its beloved, recently deceased founder, a civil-rights hero named Carl Reddick, had coerced his secretary into performing oral sex. The partners, including Reddick’s daughter, Liz, played by Audra McDonald, struggled with their shame and shock, but ultimately they got the secretary to sign an N.D.A. It was a typical Kings reversal, refusing to offer viewers the fantasy of justice available elsewhere on CBS. Later that season, they added an ironic twist: when the firm went public with its #MeToo scandal, one of its most immoral clients, the Google-like ChumHum, dropped it. Like any corporation, it feared bad press more than bad acts.
Did the Kings get pushback at CBS? “Not at all,” Michelle said. She and Robert had deep, collegial relationships with CBS executives, who, they said, were as shaken up by the revelations as they were. Robert said, “Les Moonves was the God over there. There was no other God but Les. And then—it just was cut off like a spigot once the article came out.” Such ethical dramas were not new to the Kings: they had friends who’d worked for Scott Rudin, who inspired an especially slicing episode of “Evil” in which a cruel theatre producer was haunted by a demonic Amazon Alexa. When Kim Masters published a piece in The Hollywood Reporter detailing allegations of sexual assault against Chris Noth, who starred on “The Good Wife,” the Kings said that they couldn’t comment on the accusations, but Robert added that they were friends of Masters’s, and that her reporting could be trusted. (Noth has called the accusations “categorically false.”)
In recent years, many of the Kings’ most layered, self-reflective stories have been about institutionalized racism, both on “The Good Fight” and on “Evil,” another show about a sketchy global corporation—the Catholic Church. On “Evil,” David wrestled with doubts about becoming a Black priest within a white institution. One of the show’s most unsettling plotlines painted network police procedurals themselves as not just copaganda but as a satanic-tinged tradition that could be traced back to “Dragnet.”
These themes were more explicit on “The Good Fight,” in which the show’s firm—made up of a varied Black élite, ranging from a Catholic Trump supporter to a Nigerian-born leftist—comprised a built-in debate society, with no single person representing the “Black” perspective (unlike “The Good Wife,” whose law firm, a “Good Fight” character once joked, was “as white as the Trump Administration”). Story lines mirrored the very controversies that were embroiling networks like CBS, with pointed plots about racial pay disparities, inclusivity consultants, and human-resources investigations.
Still, there was an inherent tension to any Black show with a white star and white creators. In 2020, when two of the show’s Black stars—Delroy Lindo and Cush Jumbo—left, the season that followed staged a cunning meta-plot: younger associates grumbled about Diane Lockhart’s becoming the firm’s new co-lead partner, particularly given her marriage to a Republican gun advocate. As Diane weighed her options, she was visited by a vision of Ruth Bader Ginsburg (played by Elaine May), who urged her not to cede her power. In a heel turn, Diane leveraged her relationships with rich white clients—and, implicitly, their greater ease with a white woman—to preserve her position. Or maybe it wasn’t a heel turn: as ever on the Kings’ shows, Diane made a strong case for her choices. After all, she’d brought those clients in.
Nyambi Nyambi, who plays the legal investigator Jay DiPersia on “The Good Fight,” was fascinated by the show’s forthright dialogue about race and power. (“Have you noticed the firm getting whiter?”) A classically trained actor, Nyambi praised the Kings’ writing as thrilling to perform, and at times Shakespearean, with scenes that included hallucinatory debates with Frederick Douglass and Karl Marx. But he expressed equal admiration for the Kings’ willingness to listen to Black collaborators and not to “fake the funk”: “I love that the show is not afraid to ask these questions, not only of society but of the firm itself, of the show itself. It makes me trust them more.”
Aurin Squire, a playwright, has written for the Kings since “BrainDead,” and he is a key presence in both the “Good Fight” and the “Evil” writers’ rooms. Squire has few illusions about race and TV-making; he’s heard many stories from his peers about white showrunners who grabbed credit or exploited subject matter. What he respected about the Kings, he said, was their refusal to mouth cant. They were “dialectical thinkers,” he said—open to being wrong, and open to being challenged. One day, when Robert was on the verge of dropping a plot about left-wing vote-hacking, on the ground that it was unrealistic, Squire—a Black gay Buddhist who grew up with a Baptist Republican mother and a libertarian father—intervened: “I was, like, ‘Are you kidding me? Do you realize how disenfranchised Black voters are? You’re saying there’s no altruistic person who’s Black who wouldn’t try to correct the hundreds of years of wrongs done, and done legally? Of course there is a moral argument for it.’ ”
Squire saw Jeremy O. Harris’s “Slave Play” soon after it opened in New York City, and encouraged other “Good Fight” writers to get tickets. Although most of them disliked it (including Robert, who found the satire “overbroad, a little Carol Burnett”), they all got a bit obsessed. The result was “The Gang Is Satirized and Doesn’t Like It,” an episode that managed to savage both “Slave Play” and “The Good Fight.” In it, a former employee writes “C**KSUCKER IN CHAINS,” an overripe satire in which a Diane-like lawyer coos, “I’m here to make white people feel more comfortable,” then uses a dildo on a version of Lindo’s character. The show’s white audience roars—the bad kind of laughter. The fictional lawyers are offended; they’re also turned on. Diane experiments with kink; Liz has her first interracial fling; and the show’s Black Republican, Julius, grows a moral spine. The characters’ lives have been transformed by exactly the kind of art they disapprove of.
The Kings were frank about their status as white showrunners, including their own learning curve. “One of my worst fears is using people in the room as experts on their race,” Robert told me. But timidity didn’t make for good art, either. They had ambivalent responses to modern debates about representation. When I mentioned a Sarah Silverman podcast that discussed “Jewface”—the issue of non-Jewish actors playing Jewish characters—Robert, confused, asked, “Is she joking?” In the shifting discourse about representation, the Kings were in a liminal position. They weren’t part of a rising vanguard of Black artists, like Donald Glover and Michaela Coel, with the expertise and the latitude to push lines of offense. But the Kings, especially Robert, bridled at creators who adopted more facile strategies—blandly inclusive casting and writing designed to uplift rather than to interrogate. Instead, their shows displayed the bumpy seams of their own presence, resistant to reassurance when discomfort made more sense. When a “Good Fight” fan on Twitter complained about a story line, asking if the next season would be as bad, Robert wrote, “No, it will be worse. The world keeps changing and so do we.”
In 2011, “The Good Wife” aired an episode called “Great Firewall.” In it, a Chinese dissident is tortured after ChumHum, the fictional search-engine company, turns his I.P. address over to the Communist regime. Lockhart Gardner made high-minded arguments against ChumHum, which turned out to be a pretext: our heroes were helping another tech company hurt the competition—and that company would also play ball with China. Alicia was horrified, but her boss Will spoke plainly to her: “Who do you know who is doing something for the right reason? I would love to meet them, because my guess is after five minutes of questioning, we’ll find the wrong reason.”
After the episode aired, China barred CBS from distributing “The Good Wife” there. It was déjà vu for Robert: in 1997, his movie thriller “Red Corner,” in which Richard Gere played an American attorney doing business in China, had been banned by Beijing, along with “Kundun” and “Seven Years in Tibet.” The experience gave Robert a sour taste of Chinese cultural power—after that crackdown, there were no more Chinese villains in films. When, in 2018, Disney filmed a live-action version of “Mulan” near the Uighur concentration camps, Robert saw echoes of Hollywood’s cowardice during the Holocaust.
In 2020, the Kings wrote another story about China into “The Good Fight.” The A-story again centered on ChumHum, with an earnest courtroom sequence in which a Uighur activist delivered wrenching testimony. But the show also had one of its high-concept “Schoolhouse Rock” cartoon segments—a Jonathan Coulton ditty called “Banned in China.” Mind-bendingly self-referential, the sequence, created by Gear Head Animation, told the story of how “The Good Wife” had been banned a decade earlier, then showed scenes of editors preëmptively snipping footage to insure Chinese distribution. It also included a stream of images that were barred in China, including Winnie-the-Pooh, a symbolic stand-in for President Xi Jinping.
For more than a decade, the Kings had embraced the network system, a clear hierarchy that everyone understood. They’d turned in the lyrics and the sketches to CBS; Standards had O.K.’d everything. Then, just before the episode was set to air, they got a call: the network was cutting the animated segment. At the time, Michelle was in a hospital in Los Angeles with her mother, who was dying from brain cancer. Separately, the Kings reached the same conclusion: they had to quit. What rankled most wasn’t the censorship but the sinister violation of protocol: this ruling came from above.
The phone calls that followed, with CBS brass, weren’t emotional, Michelle said—in fact, it was a relief that their ethical choice felt so clear. But, as the Kings were preparing to negotiate their exit, their lawyer suggested another strategy. Maybe they could display a placard telling the audience that the segment had been censored.
The solution struck a chord. It was clever; it was provocative. The Kings could make an ironic statement about Hollywood self-censorship in an episode about Hollywood self-censorship—a very “Good Fight” approach. No one would get laid off. Best of all, it was a reasoned compromise—the model of adult functioning that they respected most.
Robert edited the segment, which opened as the Coulton segments always did: with an animated shot of a curtain ready to rise. This time, however, the screen froze on a placard that read “CBS CENSORED THIS CONTENT.” He added a trace of retro static, for some style. But, as the editing progressed, the Kings decided that forcing viewers to stare at the placard in silence for ninety seconds, the same length as the song, was too punishing—and maybe self-aggrandizing, as if they fancied themselves a pair of Andy Kaufmans. They cut the time to seven and a half seconds.
The night the episode aired, the Kings were at a family gathering, and Robert’s brother asked Michelle if it was a gag. She was aghast—and when the Kings went online they saw how badly they’d miscalculated. Their own code had worked against them: led by their desire not to be self-indulgent, not to be brats or narcissists, they’d created precisely the sort of ambiguous joke/not a joke that was a hallmark of the Trump era.
Three years later, the Kings tried to identify where they’d misstepped. “Were there any procedural things that we could’ve done differently, except not write it?” Robert asked Michelle. “No, no,” she said. “Because we checked every step of the way. We were blindsided.” Robert was particularly disappointed that viewers had missed seeing the segment itself, which was so much livelier and more damning than any earnest monologue could ever be. “I watch it about once a month, because it’s so entertaining,” he said.
By January, the “Evil” episode was in the editing phase. The Kings had just returned from a long-delayed vacation in Maui, coördinated with forty-two family members—a luxurious break, although they’d worked there, too. “The Good Fight” room was in session, overlapping with the filming of “Evil.” The irony was hard to miss: six years earlier, the Kings had been desperate to stop making twenty-two episodes per year, only to wind up making twenty, on two simultaneous series. They were also producing a Showtime drama, “Your Honor”; filming a comedy game show, “Would I Lie to You?,” for the CW; and developing other projects, including “Happy Face,” based on a podcast by the daughter of a serial killer.
One day, Robert was in his office, running a “blue-sky” brainstorm for Season 6 of “The Good Fight.” Directly in front of him and to his right were two immense, hypnotic paintings by Jose Ramírez, a Chicano artist from Los Angeles, whose gem-toned work the Kings had spotted at a Santa Monica coffeehouse. Their living-room wall featured a gallery of his work, including a canvas in which the Devil whispers in Trump’s ear while COVID-masked protesters gather beneath a sky exploding with yellow lightning bolts—an image at once kitschy and intoxicating, violating easy categories of taste. The paintings in Robert’s office were personal commissions. One showed a colorful, orderly city full of trees, tended by peaceful figures holding rakes or guitars, beneath a deep-blue sky. In the other, the sky was red and the citizens cowered in terror, threatened by Klansmen and soldiers with bayonets. The paintings were homages to “The Allegory of Good and Bad Government,” a fresco series, by the Gothic artist Ambrogio Lorenzetti, designed to remind local magistrates of the stakes of their daily decisions.
The season’s theme for “The Good Fight” was “Civil War”—for the country and, maybe, the firm. On Zoom, Robert steered a lively conversation about self-criticism inside institutions, which jumped from Communist Chinese “struggle sessions” to boomer exasperation at millennial talk about trauma (or “trow-ma,” as the boomer writer Billy Finkelstein gruffly pronounced it, to everyone’s delight). As they considered a story line in which a character takes a hallucinogen, Robert ticked off the strategies they’d used to justify the show’s surrealism, adding that, lately, they needed no excuse. Strange things just happened; that was realism nowadays. A writer agreed: “Seeing the people I’ve grown up with, over Christmas, it’s as if somewhere we took a wrong turn and we’re living in a parallel universe. You’re yelling through a glass wall.”
Everyone nodded sympathetically. The writers, whose politics varied, had a relaxed rapport. They’d been together throughout the explosive past few years, hashing out the news as it happened, confronting one another, comforting one another, then weaving those clashes into a story. Despite the cynicism of “The Good Fight” and the darkness on “Evil,” both shows contained within them a romantic ideal that was primal to the Kings’ lives: that people might build deep relationships with others with whom they disagreed—even love them. On “The Good Fight,” when Diane, struggling with her own across-the-aisle marriage, asked her vision of Ruth Bader Ginsburg how she could possibly remain friends with Antonin Scalia, Ginsburg spoke about pasta and opera, then landed on a blunter declaration: “I don’t like bland people. And a lot of the people who agree with me politically are bland.” It was an idea that felt both outdated and sustaining.
In May, the Kings and I spoke again. A decision had just been made public: this would be the final season of “The Good Fight.” In their Goldilocks industry, it was a happy outcome—a TV show that ended not too late, as “The Good Wife” had, or too early, like “BrainDead,” but just right. The sixth season of “The Good Fight” would take new risks: it was a violent one, with intimations of the end of democracy and, maybe, of the world. The Kings hoped to keep making “Evil,” though, as Michelle noted, “We recognize where our contractual power starts and ends. We are masters of our own fate, but not the fate of our shows.” They had four more years left on their deal with CBS, and no plans to retire.
In our conversations, the Kings were often gun-shy about analyzing their shows, wary of sounding pretentious. Once, when Robert blurted out something about wanting to “make art, not craft,” he immediately apologized. It was clear, however, that now that they had tasted creative control they would never cede it—even if, as Robert once joked, that might leave “just Michelle and me in Central Park, reading it out loud for four people and a dog.” The first year of “The Good Wife,” the Kings had had to unlearn one of their strongest impulses, which was to be deferential. “We were getting older,” Robert told me. “And we knew we only had a few years left. It really felt like: ‘This is it—or we’re out of the business forever.’ I think that gives you a lot of bravery that wouldn’t be there otherwise.” There was a line on “The Good Wife,” he added: “If I make this mistake again, I want this to be my mistake.” ♦
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