A recent The Good Fight episode replaced a cut sequence with a weird censorship message

By Sam Barsanti | May 5, 2019 | 7:52pm

Aux Features TV

A recent The Good Fight episode replaced a cut sequence with a weird censorship message

Photo: CBS All Access

CBS All Access’ The Good Fight—a follow-up to The Good Wife with a stronger emphasis on fighting—recently got renewed for a fourth season, but that vote of support from its streaming home doesn’t mean the show is one of those runaway hits that can get away with whatever it wants. According to TVLine, the most recent episode of The Good Fight actually got flagged for some kind of bad content by the network’s Standards And Practices Division, but rather than just cutting it out or reworking it, series creators Robert and Michelle King convinced the network to allow them to replace the sequence with a black screen and the extremely dramatic words: “CBS HAS CENSORED THIS CONTENT.”

We don’t know what the content was exactly, but that would defeat the purpose of censoring it, but it was apparently part of an animated short that tied in with a B-plot about a fictional search engine called ChumHum and the—in TVLine’s words—”morally flexible lengths some U.S. companies will go to in order to break into the lucrative Chinese market.” If we read between the lines, then, the implication is that something about big companies doing questionable things to get Chinese money offended CBS, making the very direct censorship message into just as much of a statement as the animated short probably would’ve been. And CBS was okay with this, so maybe The Good Fight can get away with a whole lot.