#cbs matlock

For those who don’t know, Maddie Matlock is not who she’s been presenting herself as for most of the pilot. She’s in her seventies, previously worked as a contract lawyer and is coming out of retirement while caring for a middle school aged grandson named Alfie after the death of his mother, her daughter, Ellie. She is also well aware of how older women tend to be over looked and knows how to use that to her advantage. But she’s using it to her advantage to make sure people accept other parts of her backstory at face value. For starters, she was a much more successful lawyer than she lets on, and doesn’t need the money. Her husband, Edwin Kingston, is faithful and never had a gambling problem, both of which she claimed during her first day at work. Most importantly, she has chosen the name “Matlock” as a nom de guerre to infiltrate the law firm of Jacobson and Moore. She and her family found an anonymous claim that the firm hid documents that could have taken opiates off the market earlier, in time to save their daughter. As the narrator of Jane the Virgin would say, “Just like a telenovela!” There are several time throughout the season when having a narrator make this remark would be appropriate, but no narrator. Anyway, a perhaps more useful analogy is Matlock (2024) is to prime time legal procedurals of the 1980-90s what Jane the Virgin was to telenovelas of the 1990s-2000s. But I don’t think I can get into that in more detail right now.

Despite the Jane the Virgin direct connection, Matlock (2024) really fills the hole of topical legal procedural with a twist that The Good Fight and The Good Wife left. (I do watch Elsbeth, the actual spin off of those shows. It is different, and I will get to it later. ) Like The Good Fight/The Good Wife it the cases are mostly civil and most of the work is done outside of the courtroom, which is such a change from what I remember of late twentieth century legal procedurals. The cases of the week tend to involve a lot of in the news discussion such as tech startups, abusive corporations acting as landlords, covert anti-union action from corporations, and various reasons people mistrust the pharmaceutical industry. Also, as plot, the cases of the week tend to slow down the more serialized plot. This captures the feeling of “the world seems to be falling apart, but I still have to go about my daily life,” in a way that I really admire. The solutions to cases are rarely absolute victories. There are often complications due to conflicts of interest. Maddie has to deal with more than one person who reminds her of her relationship with her daughter, and/or the case itself has an interesting parallel to Maddie’s personal investigation.

Which brings me back to discussing Maddie and her family’s double lives. The situation they’ve created for themselves is messed up, and the show knows it. The whole Kingston family is involved in the investigation including thirteen year old grandson Alfie, who sometimes wants to skip school or sleeping to work on it. Until recently they were based in San Francisco and this project not only required relocating to Westchester, but getting an apartment in Queens where Maddie and Alfie can pretend to live if anyone from work visits. Alfie also visits his grandmother at the firm on “Family Day”, helping in her espionage plans while he is there. There is always tension that they will be found out. But over the first few episodes when the plot seemed to include an “accident” that would expose them, then flashbacks would reveal how Maddie and her family planned things to get more access to information her new colleagues have. These scenes could just make the viewer feel relieved, but they also are unsettling. The people we’ve decided to follow can be manipulative and deceitful. Also the Kingston family dedicating themselves to get revenge like this sometimes seems to get in the way of their ability to heal and move on. Besides, it’s something of a leap to say if certain documents were not hidden, the whole pharmaceutical industry would stop making opioids and they also would cease to be available in any black market variety. Proving this malfeasance won’t bring back Ellie, nor make her parents feel better about any decisions they made during her life.

The office life part of the show relies on a tricky balance. The characters Maddie works with the most have to be engaging and likable, while the greater structure, and the mostly unseen partners retain some suspicion. Maddie shares an office with Junior Associates Billy and Sarah. I am going to take this opportunity to say that when Kathy Bates decides to wrap things up and retire, I hope Billy and Sarah get spun off so I can keep watching them. The Sarah character in particular seems to trigger a lot for me. She’s unapologetically abrasive in a way that reminds me of how when I was a teenager I thought the phrase “never change” sounded like a curse. She’s gotten far with her manner of being, but there are also ways it feels like self sabotage. In my early notes on Matlock I called her the “Petra” of this series, referencing the character from Jane the Virgin. I’m not sure how much I agree with this by the end of the season. But it’s worth noting that the actress who played Petra, Yael Grobglas, has a reoccurring role as a Jury Consultant named Shae. She is a minor antagonist, land always fun on screen.

The most important relationship Maddie h develops is with partner track Senior Associate Olympia Lawrence, played by Skye P. Marshal. They quickly become a kind of professional confidants, but reluctant to call each other friends. There is a tension between who is mentoring who, the elder person, or the one who has been at the firm longest. When we meet her, Olympia is in the process of getting divorced from Julian Markston, Jr., son of one of the firm’s partners. Olympia, her soon to be ex and his father have been selected by Maddie and her family as the people most likely to have destroyed the documents that could have taken opioids off the market. So some of the tension is will their burgeoning trust be destroyed be the reveal that Olympia is who Maddie would find most culpable? Or by the various ways Maddie manipulates her over the season? Also how can you worry about their personal conflicts when they are in trying to take down the most evil beverage company since iZombie’s Max Rager?

It’s worth noting that the Julians, Junior. played by Jason Ritter, and especially Senior, played by Lloyd Bridges, are used sparingly throughout the season. Maddie interacts much less with them, so there is much less dramatic tension with how a reveal of their culpability would play out. We’re told that they have a messed up relationship, but we mostly don’t see it. What we do see fits that description, but it’s not a tension for the viewer. The opacity around these characters makes you hope that they are the guilty ones, unto the show confronts you with how much that will affect the other characters we have met at Jacobson Moore.