'The Good Fight’ Fans Won’t Be Without The Clever, Timely Legal Drama For Long

The good fight never ends… but sometimes it needs to take a moment so everyone can catch their breath and mop their brows before diving back into the fray. When does The Good Fight Season 3 premiere? With the CBS All Access spinoff about to air its Season 2 finale on May 27, fans are probably wondering how long they'll have to wait for their next fix, the next ringing of the bell, the next round of the fight. And fortunately for them, it is only a matter of when — not if.

Viewers can go into the finale episode, "Day 492," secure in the knowledge that the network brass has already renewed The Good Fight for Season 3, per Deadline. The renewal came earlier this month, ahead of the tenth episode, and is a sign that CBS' streaming experiment is going well. The Good Fight was the flagship series for All Access, the network's new standalone subscription streaming service, and the fact that it will now be heading into its third season serves as proof of concept for the risky scheme.

(The Good Fight isn't CBS All Access' only success story, either. Star Trek: Discovery is about to warp into its own second season; the Will Ferrell-produced comedy No Activity was recently renewed, according to Deadline; and they'll soon be joined by the upcoming period drama Strange Angel, also per Deadline.)

"The Good Fight is a perfect example of what we strive for a CBS All Access original series to be: thought-provoking, boundary-pushing and, most of all, incredibly entertaining," the service's executive vice president Julie McNamara said in the show's official renewal announcement, as reported by Variety. "We can't wait to see what [creators] Robert and Michelle King, their creative team, and the incomparable cast will bring to audiences in Season 3."

That announcement didn't contain any indication or tease or even a vague hint about when exactly audiences can expect that third season — but it's not too hard to guess. Season 1 of The Good Fight premiered in mid-February of 2017, and Season 2 bowed in early March of this year; it's reasonable to expect Season 3 to debut around the same time of year, so fans can expect Diane Lockhart & Co. to return in the first few months of 2019.

Perhaps the more relevant question is, how long can viewers expect this round of the Fight to go on for? While the spinoff's inaugural season contained a relatively scant 10 episodes, its sophomore season upped the ante to a more standard-for-cable 13 episodes. So how many episodes will there be in the third season? While sometimes shorter is sweeter when it comes to TV, I'm sure fans would take as much Good Fight as CBS would give them; and The Good Wife used to be a shining example of how to balance episodic and serialized storytelling over the course of 22 episodes. And there's certainly no shortage of bizarre real-world cases to pull from to pad out a full 22-episode season.

The Good Fight was extremely topical — sometimes scarily so — throughout its second season, featuring cases including sexual assault, police brutality, Russian pee tapes, and even the (hypothetical) impeachment of President Trump. While it might be fun to speculate about what timely subjects the show might tackle next year, honestly the world is spinning too fast these days to even try to predict what will be relevant in 10 months. What's timely now won't be timely then, and a million things we could never have seen coming will undoubtedly have happened between now and early 2019.

Perhaps the most pressing question isn't when Season 3 will happen or how long Season 3 will be, but… what kind of world will Season 3 be arriving into? Whatever the country looks like next year, few shows are as prepared to tackle it as insightfully and entertainingly as The Good Fight.