BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE VIA LEVEL AND GAIN
Ten years ago, composer David Buckley started working on a television series with creators Robert and Michelle King. The series would challenge its viewers emotionally and intellectually as they followed the story of a woman who — betrayed by her husband — leaps into a career as a hard-hitting lawyer.
This show was The Good Wife, and it ran for seven seasons before the 2017 launch of its spin-off, The Good Fight.
Now — as viewers are challenged emotionally, intellectually, and politically — David lays out a lively neoclassical score to represent the nature of the law itself. Using his rare life skill of composing a fugue faster than you can say “objection”, and navigating that fine line between comedy and drama, David helps forge the identity of the series and characters within.
As the United States election saga grips the world, now is as fitting a time as you can get for a conversation about The Good Fight. This is how David represents the show’s diverse 21st Century characters and narratives using the irony of a very old style of music.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Beware, it also contains a few spoilers for The Good Fight and The Good Wife.
Hi David. What are you working on right now, so soon after the latest season of The Good Fight?
We finished the first season of [Robert and Michelle King’s show] Evil, and we’re about to start the second. It’s a mash-up show: it’s sort of horror, but there’s still some legal stuff in there, and also religion and science. It’s fun as well.
Evil is on the main network television CBS – not CBS All Access, which obviously gave The Good Fight license to be a little bit riskier, and a little bit naughtier. The Good Fight could swear, and it could do things that network TV frowns upon – or absolutely forbids.
Before we continue with The Good Fight, tell me a little more about Evil. How do you even begin to score something that has those institutions of religion and science and horror – all in one?
What makes The Good Fight fascinating is that you need to navigate that course between the comedic and the serious and dramatic. That, for me, has always been a musical challenge. Obviously, you don’t want to suddenly feel like, ‘Here’s comedy music!’, or ‘Here’s serious music!’, because that would sound pretty binary and pretty dumb.
But with Evil, it’s a similar thing. There are scenes there that are very horror-driven: a monster will come out from under the bed, and we’ll have discussions about how far one should go with horror music. I might respond to it and think, ‘It should go at this level’. And I’ll get feedback – typically from Robert King – who will say, ‘No, I think that’s gilding the lily’. Other times, he’ll say, ‘We want to shock the audience here’.
Over the course of the show – a bit like with The Good Fight – you begin to build up a language that doesn’t feel like it’s ticking tropes. You get bits from here, and bits from there, and then it coagulates into something that becomes the ‘sound’ of the show.
I’m surprised to hear you say you’ll have that feedback about how far to push the score. You’ve spent more than a decade working with the Kings – so, of course, there has to be a level of trust that you can do your own thing. But how much do you like that feedback, and like to collaborate, rather than going it all alone?
It’s a good question. I knew when signing up to this job that it is about being a collaborator and being a team player.
With the Kings, I’ve been working with them for a decade. But even now, when I send them music – and I do send them music before every episode, so they can hear it and have time to say, ‘Change this, change that’ – we go through these processes.
I think Robert took a much greater interest in the music when we found this sort of neoclassical style; neobaroque, early music. I think he really felt more engaged. I think it made him a bit giddy for music in the show.
Why do you think that’s the case?
If we’re looking back at the scoring process for The Good Wife, I came in halfway through season 1. I didn’t actually start the show off. [And] we wanted to change things. We wanted to do it gradually, and we didn’t want to alienate viewers.
I started to think: there are obviously functional aspects of the music that need to happen – someone’s walking down a corridor, we need to move things along, we need a ticking-clock energy; or, there are dramatic events in the courthouse, we need dramatic music. But what really is their world, aesthetically? And how can I pull from that to make the score more distinguished, or distinct?
There were a lot of times where the characters would be listening to classical music – someone would put on a radio, and there’d be Handel playing. It’s a high-brow world – certainly The Good Wife. There are beautiful clothes worn by characters Diane Lockhart and Alicia Florrick, plush offices with leather chairs, expensive whisky bottles and decanters and glasses. Visually, in terms of the law, you were looking at quite an opulent make-up.
Also, the complexity of the way the law works, there is a sense of counterpoint in there. There’s a line of thought here, then a counterline or counterargument there. And it all just suddenly started to make sense.
For me, the style that we embraced really crystalised in season 5 of The Good Wife when, in many ways, dramatically things changed. I think it’s the most dramatic part of that universe.
That’s the season where Alicia’s love interest Will Gardner dies, right?
Yeah, Will dies.
I think for people who loved the show, that was a big moment. People were distraught by that. And everything became fractured at that point. Diane and Alicia never recovered from that.
It felt time for a musical rebirth.
Because of going from comedy to drama, we felt that this sort of classical or neoclassical language kind of permitted comedy to happen, without it sounding like we’d suddenly gone comedic. There was a little chord change we could make, or a slight change in instrumentation for a moment of levity, which could then resume with a serious driving thrust without feeling clunky or contrived.
I have a newfound appreciation for the complexity of scoring these seasons. You’re not just working with visual cues – you’re talking about the opulence of the setting, the counterpoint of the law itself, the characters and their relationships, and the comedy. There is such an enormous quantity of things you’re scoring.
Yeah. And Robert will often say the music doesn’t need to react to what the drama is doing. It’s curious because, in many ways, that’s entirely what my job is.
Especially on The Good Fight, Robert doesn’t want to fill it up with score. He hates the notion of the score being there for the sake of being there.
That’s interesting, because the score has so much presence.
There are episodes of The Good Fight that are really sparsely scored. I think it’s because the show’s good, and good shows can afford not to have music propping it up left, right, and centre. And then the music actually speaks when it is playing, because it’s allowed to come in with a point of view – whereas if it’s just been hanging around, it’s saying less.
I’m never going to have a working relationship like this again in my lifetime: if I could get a few more years working with the Kings, that would be fantastic.
When you say the music can pop in with a point of view, is this a way for you to be presenting yourself politically, in a sense? The Good Fight is undeniably political – specifically, left-wing. Does your music influence the viewer on some of those more political topics?
I’m definitely left-leaning. But I’m not actively thinking when I write something in the context of this show, ‘How do I make musical decisions which take on a political bent?’.
All I would say is that the [series] is overtly political; overtly anti-Trump and all things right-wing. But I don’t think they hired me or would fire me because of my political persuasion.
Of course.
I’m not actively making note decision choices based on political feelings I might have, or news I may have read. […] I don’t think musically I ever demonise anyone. I don’t think the music is ever saying, ‘These are bad guys, so let’s make the music bad and minor; and here’s our lovely shiny left-wing people, so let’s make their music major and happy’.
Even though the show is left-leaning – there’s no question about it, you said it yourself – I still think there’s space in there for people to make their own opinions.
I think the nature of these shows, being about the law, really helps viewers think for themselves.
Exactly. The law gives license for people to kind of realise that things can work out very differently to how you might expect.
I don’t think we’re trying to make a show – and musically, putting something in there – that doesn’t permit people to use their brains. One of the key attributes of the show is that people are allowed to use their brains.
So what did people think about your decisions in designing the score?
Once I went into this neobaroque, neoclassical, neorenaissance – whatever it is – I suddenly got a lot more fan mail from people, which I didn’t really get before.
In The Good Fight particularly, it often feels like you’re using these styles of music in an ironic way.
I do think there’s a level of irony there. There’s also a practical thing for me: I studied music at Cambridge University, and one of the things I had to do in my final exams was write a four-part fugue […] It’s one of the things I got quite good at.
I also left Cambridge thinking, ‘What am I going to do with this? Where am I going to get a job? So I can write a fugue in three hours – who cares?’.
So I was delighted when Robert said we’d found this new kind of language for the show. For me, it’s a bit of a victory that [I can compose in] a musical language I’m fairly intimate with.
I’m not claiming that the music itself is revolutionary. The chief irony to me is that the music concerns itself with archaic aesthetics and forms and instrumentation, whereas the plots themselves are totally present tense.
That dramatic dissonance between the older music and currency of the present-day storylines for me is just fun, and you could also say ironic.
It’s quite a juxtaposition. You’ve revived an old, white, dead style and used it to convey the experiences of culturally diverse characters in the 21st Century.
When The Good Wife ended, I thought, ‘That’s the end of that’. Then I remember getting a call about how it was going to come back on in this new incarnation – this spin-off, The Good Fight. [In the early days] Robert was explaining about this Black firm, and we were talking about Black music. When I first started the show, I remember trying to bring in some tribal drumming – and even some kind of chants – and there was a big, ‘No! Let’s not do that’.
It would have felt inappropriate – and potentially embarrassing.
Also inappropriate and embarrassing: Roland Blum.
Blum [played by Michael Sheen] obviously kicked things up massively. There was a pre-show conversation about what his music should be like, and Robert had suggested, ‘Let’s go really brash and brassy and big’.
I tried something like that – and it was like, ‘Nope, Blum is too big, brash and brassy’.
So what about Christine Baranski as the lead character Diane Lockhart? She doesn’t have her own leitmotif, but how much does she influence your style – or not?
There is an opulence to Diane, but she’s also real. She’s not a stock character. Like everyone else, she’s just trying to figure out this f*cking crazy sh*t as well.
The Travails of Diane [is a track I scored] which I think really sums her up. Within this theme, there’s an elegance – a clear melodic cello line – but also a world-weariness in there. She’s not sprinting. There’s something just a little bit more grounded.
I think that’s the same with all the characters. They do have three dimensions. Everyone is trying to figure stuff out. I say that the audience is left to make decisions; I think the characters have to do the same thing. They’re not pre-programmed with all the right answers, which I think informs the music as well.
Sometimes, the music can be more straight-forward. In The Good Fight season 4, there are the ‘upstairs people’ on the top floor, and we wanted to paint it as almost like Heaven up there; we wanted to give the illusion of this celestial, angelic sort of thing. I wanted to do something with a consort of three recorders to give the same sort of feeling of purity. That’s one dimension in terms of what it’s trying to represent.
The ‘upstairs people’ are certainly not as angelic as they seem! Now, within the context of all this, what was your favourite scene to score across the entire Good Wife/Good Fight world?
My favourite scene spanning the two shows would have been Alicia’s heartbreak.
I feel that Diane is in some ways better equipped – as her senior – at dealing with the crazy world than Alicia was. I remember scoring some scenes with Alicia when her eyes would mist up with a betrayal from her husband, or the unrequited love from Josh Charles [playing Will Gardner], and for me those will stand as some of the moments I enjoyed scoring. I just felt so connected with the scene when I was scoring those, and so privileged to have scenes like that to score.
Her pain still lives with me, even though she’s not been present.
Read the full story at Level and Gain, our sister publication about all things screen music.
Images supplied.
