Give CBS a huge standing ovation, even if it may cause you some aches and pains in the process. They’ve managed to add yet another subcategory to the overarching idea of a reboot and, in the process, kept the industry in the dark for months before springing a surprise that certainly was newsworthy.
Since spring, and actually well before that considering this was a project first commissioned for the semi-aborted 2023-24 season, we’ve been anticipating the “return” of the geriatric-appeal favorite MATLOCK, which had a healthy eight-year run on NBC (and, briefly, ABC) during the glory years of “Must-See TV”, carving out a consistent, if older, audience as counterprogramming primarily on Tuesday nights with the overarching appeal of Andy Griffith’s return to series television after nearly 15 years, trading in his rural North Carolina sheriff’s uniform for a classy Southern gentleman’s suit and an Atlanta law firm. For decades, it has remained a staple of daytime reruns for the Consumer Cellular crowd, currently on MeTV, often in rotation with even more enduring classic legal procedurals like PERRY MASON.
So there was some strategic merit to utilizing this title for a show now featuring the irrepressible Kathy Bates as the lead, and the summer-long promotions reinforced that this was certainly not fully connected to the Griffith version. Bates is playing a New York City-based veteran attorney who just happens to go by the name Madeline Matlock, and in the opening scenes she and the show dogwhistle their way into the comparison. She disarmingly references the connection, with the exact dates of the original’s arc, to a room full of Gen X and Millennial attorneys, and to many the reference draws nothing but blank stares. What Bates does share with Griffith is a long history of success in entertainment and a significant gap between their last broadcast series. We last saw Bates in a somewhat similar role in NBC’s well-received HARRY’S LAW, from the fertile mind of David E. Kelley. It was a potentially stellar combination that drew her to her first TV series role at age 62 13 years ago, taking full advantage of her unique combination of dramatic and comedic nuance and legal quirkiness that Kelley championed with the likes of L.A. LAW, ALLY McBEAL and BOSTON LEGAL. But at that time broadcast networks actually had enough scale and options where audience skew mattered. And HARRY’S LAW was far and away the oldest-skewing series on broadcast television. It did manage to get a renewal, but ultimately was a casualty after a mere 34 episodes.
Those that did remember that effort may have fallen into the same category of “been there, done that” opines that I was processing as I watched the pilot episode that aired in a “special preview” time period following 60 MINUTES last night. CINEMABLEND’s Laura Hurley echoed my thoughts in the review she dropped late last night:
Kathy Bates was clearly having a lot of fun with the role of Madeline “Matty” Matlock from the very beginning, and the episode actually did a great job of showing rather than telling about Matty’s diminished circumstances. (Or so I thought, anyway, but more on that in the next section!) But I’ve watched a lot of legal dramas in my time – including three that literally have “Law” in the title – and I just wasn’t getting hooked by what seemed to be a pretty average case with a predictable resolution. Matty was clearly clever, but that’s not necessarily enough to make a hit show… my biggest takeaway from Matlock’s pilot was that it was fine, and not a bad way to spend an hour, but it wouldn’t be appointment television for me.
And then, one of the best-kept secrets to air on CBS since Sue Ellen Ewing’s holding the smoking gun was sprung, which DEADLINE’s Lynette Rice eagerly dropped literally seconds after the show’s conclusion on the East Coast feed:
Viewers expecting a simple gender-swapped version of the classic TV show starring Andy Griffith were treated with an unexpected twist at the end of the episode.
Instead of seeing the sweet little old Madeline “Matty” Matlock go home to her modest house and cat, we find out that this brilliant, 60-something lawyer is actually on a secret mission to bust up the law firm that could have prevented opioids from killing so many people (like her daughter, whose son she is now raising with her husband.). Matty’s targets are Olympia (Skye P. Marshall), a senior attorney and key rainmaker with a thirst for justice; Olympia’s ex-husband/attorney Julian (Jason Ritter), and his father Julian Sr. (Beau Bridges), who heads the firm that Matty wants to destroy.
And this elaborate and surprising plot twist came just as we were hearing the brassy theme of the original show in a cover version from two of Olympia’s underlings in what we THOUGHT was the coda. Hey, that connection worked for S.W.A.T. and ONE DAY AT A TIME, so, why not? But entrusted to the likes of a showrunner like Jennie Snyder Urman, who broke conventions with the quirky and buzzworthy JANE THE VIRGIN, we probably should have expected something like this.
As Urman confessed to Rice how and why we got what we got:
When I was thinking about what I would do if I were to adapt this title, I was like, what would be different? Of course, I was going to start with a female protagonist, but I didn’t want to just do a gender swapped version that wasn’t interesting. So I started to think that maybe she is using the name Matlock. I gave myself sort of a challenge. I can continue to tell the audience they’re underestimating her but then they’re fooled at the end. I knew I wanted her to have a spine of steel throughout the show, that it had real stakes, that there was something real and deep we could explore in terms of grief and loss and our responsibility to each other, the responsibility of the legal profession in terms of what is your responsibility to public health versus your job as a lawyer to not do something that would hurt your client. I had read an article about a law firm that was sanctioned for hiding documents in the opioid crisis, and that stayed with me for a long time. I had read all of those books before Dopesick, and I remember I tried to get the rights early on, so that was all in my head at the same time. You never know what the soup of is going to be like, how the synapses are going to connect in your brain. Why would a woman like that want to go back into the law firm? What could be deep and meaningful enough? Then the story unfolded. So I pitched it, from beginning to end.
DEADLINE So the sweet little lady that we see at the beginning … are we going to find out, away from the law firm, that she’s far from that?
URMAN In the pilot, you really have to feel like you’re enjoying a fish-out-of-water comedy. And then all of a sudden, the ending comes and you’re surprised. Starting with episode two, you’re on the inside with her. So you get the privilege of knowing she’s on her secret mission. She’s a spy, basically. Is she going to get caught? Is she not going to get caught? We start to expand the home life, and you start to learn more about who Madeline Kingston is. You start to learn more about her family, about her marriage, about her grandson, about her daughter. You’ll meet her daughter eventually in flashbacks and sort of go to that core, that moment when Matty decided that she has this plan. Is she going to get caught and excited when she outsmart someone, or worried when she doesn’t outsmart someone?
DEADLINE The hardcore part is definitely not comedy.
URBAN No. I like a range of tones in one piece. We can laugh, and then we can go to something much more serious, as long as we take the character seriously and her circumstances seriously and are honest about her emotional life.
DEADLINE So will we see Matty at home addressing how she hates having to play the nice little old lady at work?
URBAN Well, at the end of the pilot, she’s like, ‘these f–king butterscotch candies.’ She’s not a fan, but they sell little lady to her. Madeline Kingston is a much more direct, much more driven, and a harder character than Matty Matlock. We do get into the differences of who she is, where the Matty Matlock persona came from. You’ll learn about that. We really try to keep revealing things as the show goes on.
So this is most definitely NOT a companion piece to ELSBETH, even though CBS’ initial thinking is to pair the shows together on Thursday nights, where it will land on October 10th with an encore ahead of its official premiere a week later. Perhaps the thought process is to take advantage of the weekend arc that allows for extended delayed viewing. I’m not buying it. This show deserves a showcase Sunday night slot, perhaps this very 8 PM slot with further opportunities for larger and broader audience with football overruns, as an adjacency to HBO drama that typically air in the 9 and 10 PM hours. I’ll be especially curious to see how last night fared, especially since FOX decided to take a page from old-fashioned counterprogramming with their own NFL lead-in to preview its BAYWATCH/911 evocation RESCUE: HI-SURF last night. Regardless, after a launch this buzzworthy there will be hope that this episode will be seen on Paramount+ at some point over the next 17 days and build enough of a cumulative base of curiosity that a cliffhanger like this deserves.
How this unfolds, both plot-wise and strategy-wise, will at least have me coming back for more. And I don’t even like butterscotch candies.
Until next time…