The Good Fight creators threatened to quit after CBS censored their "Banned in China" musical short

The New Yorker

Robert and Michelle King were taken aback when viewers treated their placard reading "CBS HAS CENSORED THIS CONTENT" on last week's episode as a joke. The Kings agreed to run the placard after CBS -- which had fully vetted the episode -- approached them to cut the Schoolhouse Rock!-esque musical short titled "Banned in China" less than two weeks before airtime, according to The New Yorker. In response, the Kings threatened to quit the show. But they ultimately came to what CBS called a "creative solution" to display the censorship placard. The Kings initially wanted the placard to run for the full 90 seconds of the musical short, but they thought it would come across as too self-indulgent. So they showed the placard for only eight and a half seconds. As a result, many viewers thought the placard was satire. “It did not occur to me that people would think that it was a joke—until, literally, we saw our family this weekend and people didn’t realize it had happened,” Michelle King tells The New Yorker. "Good Fight Short" singer Jonathan Coulton reveals that the "Banned in China" animated short referenced China banning predecessor series The Good Wife over a Season 2 episode. "The next verse of the song is about the way that media companies censor content, with animations of movie scenes being snipped out of film strips," according to The New Yorker's Emily Nussbaum. "Then comes the bridge, which lists other things banned in China, many of them symbolic images that Chinese citizens use on social-networking sites to evade censors. These include an empty chair (representing the late Chinese Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo), Winnie the Pooh (who is said to resemble China’s leader, Xi Jinping), and 'the letter "N" and Tiananmen Square'—a reference to the fact that the letter 'N' was briefly banned in China, because it was perceived as a coded reference to the elimination of Presidential term limits. One animation showed the Chinese leader, dressed as Winnie the Pooh, shaking his bare bottom. Another showed Chinese reeducation camps. The song is clear about one of the motives for American self-censorship: China is too big of a market for media corporations to ignore." Coulton said CBS' standards-and-practices division was concerned that the musical short would endanger CBS executives in China. Michelle King says she was “very surprised and upset" by the censorship, especially since CBS was aware of the musical short throughout its entire development.