Despite the enormous favorable reviews for
CBS's reimagining of Matlock I didn't jump on the bandwagon until the
end of year awards for 2024. When Kathy Bates managed a spectacular and
well-deserved upset of Anna Sawai at last year's Critics Choice Awards it was
clear that Matlock had a chance to make an imprint at the Emmys that
fall: the first time any network drama had done so since This is Us came
to an end. It didn't quite pull that feat off – Bates was the only Emmy
nomination the series got - but by that
point it was clear the show itself was bigger than the larger then life actress
playing the title role. Skye P. Marshall had been nominated for multiple awards
in the lead-up to the Emmys and the series itself deservedly took the Best
Network Ensemble at the 2025 Astras.
By that point I'd started watching the
series and though I'd come in halfway through Season 1, the writers had
generously been provided detailed 'Previously On…" moments at the start of
each episode for me to catch up very quickly. By that point I was aware that Matlock
was in fact a reboot in name only or certainly one that I hadn't seen in
endless reimaged versions of IP in more than twenty years of watching these.
Bates was playing a 76 year old intern named Maddie Matlock and made it very
clear that the Andy Griffith TV show existed in this universe. She was a single
grandmother raising her grandchild on her own after her husband died and she
needed to get back in the workforce. She was hired at the law firm Jacobsen Moore
and became one of the paralegals working for Olympia (Marshall) an associate
trying to find her way up the partnership track. Her chief rival for that role
was Julian (Jason Ritter) her ex-husband and the son of the senior management
partner (Beau Bridges in a recurring role).
But the series made it clear at the end of
the pilot that everything Maddie said was a lie. She had been a corporate
attorney and a criminal one for more than thirty years. Her husband was very much alive and they were
raising their grandson together. And she
was on a sacred mission to bring down the firm. Maddie had learned fairly recently that
Jacobsen Moore had concealed documents about a prescription drug that could
have brought an end to the opioid crisis at least ten years earlier. Countless lives could have been saved but the
one she cared about the most was her daughter.
Matlock unfolded as a brilliant combination of the courtroom drama with
a serialized storyline, much in the same way that The Good Wife ended up
mastering in its later seasons. Maddie
spent her time trying to get intel about who had withheld a crucial document
from the case that could have revealed the truth. She had her equivalent of a murder
board in her study, a list of suspects and enough money and a loyal family that
were helping her. Edwin (Sam Anderson) was able to do enough research and their
grandson Alfie was their major tech support guy, even though it took a lot for
them to read him in. The goal was to find a smoking gun and when it was done
Maddie planned to contact The New York Times and set up an interview to
bring the whole thing down.
Much of the brilliance of Bates's
performance was that she knew a rule that a character she played in her first
major TV role on Six Feet Under made clear: at a certain age, people
think senior citizens are invisible and/or harmless. By taking the mannerism of
Andy Griffith's country lawyer, she was able to do a low in that season to lure
so many of her younger colleagues into a false sense of security and manage to
hack, bug and manipulate many of the attorneys. This did bother her in some
case, particularly as she grew closer to Olivia, but Maddie remained laser-focused
on her mission all season.
Then, at the end of the first season, Olympia
finally figured out the truth and confronted Maddie. With no choice she revealed everything. By
that point Maddie was certain that the individual at the firm who had withheld
the document was Julian and was determined to have her interview. By this point
the two were formally divorced but Olympia could not accept that the father of
her children would do such a thing. So the biggest revelation of the season
finale was in fact that Julian had done such a thing at his father's directive.
Matlock has been an extraordinary series because while it occupies
some of the moral gray areas of much of Peak TV, in many cases it shows things
in clear black and white. This is true of its title character. Maddie is not a
difficult woman such as Patty Hewes or Alicia Florrick or the antiheroines that
occupied Shondaland or that we've seen on Netflix. She's acting on a righteous purpose out of a
kind of vengeance for her daughter's life. But even though she is laser-focused
on her mission, she clearly agonizes over what she's doing the longer she stays
at Jacobsen Moore. To be sure, there are some clearly monstrous people in
management and there's clearly a ruthless cutthroat attitude, but as is the
case with most of these firms the more you get to the rank-and-file, the more
decent the people are. This is particularly true of the two members of Maddie's
team the equally part neurotic and cutthroat Sarah (Leah Lewis) and the
essentially good-hearted son of a family of cops Billy (I wouldn't get attached
to David Del Rio for much longer) The two of them want to go up further and are
hyper-competitive to a point that adds much of the humors that part of the show.
The closer Maddie gets to them, even
Olympia, she feels unhappy about the manipulations and lying she does. But the
difference is every night she goes home to Edwin and Alfie and she's reminded
of why she's doing this. Sam Anderson is
particularly brilliant played the former academic who is in his own way just as
good an actor as Maddie is and has less tolerance for any of the BS that the
firm is putting up. It's because of this that I'm comfortable calling Maddie a
heroine because she has a moral center and she is not cold and heartless.
Ever since she burst on to the scene in her
Oscar winning performance in Misery it had always been difficult for anyone
who partners with Bates in a scene to get lost in the power of her work. The
thing that makes Matlock a great show is that all of the actors are
capable of sharing the screen with her and in many cases, matching her. The best
of this is Marshall who The White Lotus and Severance kept her
from getting an Emmy nomination last year and absolutely will be in the
rankings in the years to come.
The aura of Shondaland has done much to
make so many African-American heroines by default be heartless or solely focused
on ambition at the expense of one's personal life or soul. The brilliance of
Marshall is that while she has that ambition she is always a human being first
who knows that her race and gender have stacked the odds against her but is
determined to succeed on her own merits. You can see that she is a younger version of Maddie and it is why
they connect and reluctantly build a friendship.
Olympia knows that she swims in an ocean of
sharks and believes (with some reality) that she has a target on her back. At
the start of the series Senior makes it clear she and Julian are competing for
the partner this year and that only one of them will make it. The fix would seem to be in except it doesn't
take long to realize that Senior has no more love for his son than anyone else
and has treated him with disdain his whole life. When Olympia is finally named
partner at the end of last season the implication is pretty clear that this was
a dig at his son far more than any respect for Olympia's value for the firm.
That Olympia takes the manipulations of
Maddie so harshly is in a way understandable: her entire career at Jacobson
Moore she's always felt like a pawn in the game of the partners and that her
husband was being used against her. But unlike
Maddie she's still far too capable of showing compassion to those around her.
Julian manages to avoid going to prison because he plays on being the father of
her children and it's clear that while Olympia does it, she hates what's she
doing.
Jason Ritter is a revelation as Julian. Ever
since he became well known twenty years ago for his brilliant work on Joan
Of Arcadia he has been typecast – usually brilliantly – as playing decent
men. We see hints of that from time to
time in Matlock, particularly whenever he's being manipulated by his father,
but particularly in the second season the writers are leaning into the idea
that there's a part of him that really doesn't think he should take
responsibility for anything. During the first five episodes of the season, he tries
to steal evidence from his wife, kvetches
when he has to take a role with the rank-and-file to build a case against Senior
and seems more interested in appeasing his father and finding the leak rather
than have to face the consequences of his actions. Madeline is clearly
conflicted about what happened between her and Olympia but she has no remorse
in gaslighting Julian called him "an entitled trust-fund baby". And honestly watching what happens to him this
year, even when his ex-wife and Maddie are manipulating him, its nearly
impossible to feel sympathy for him.
Matlock also spends a lot of time dealing with the personal fallout of
the death of Kathy. At the end of Season 1 Alfie's father showed up on their
doorstep after nearly a decade of no one knowing who he was. It's clear from
the start that he is still an addict and that Alfie, who's lived his life
without a mother, desperately wants to believe his father can get clean. As we
see in flashbacks Edwin and Madeline know all too well this dance and actually
lived through it when Kathy was pregnant with Alfie. They've done everything in
their power to shield Alfie from the heartbreak and the cycle of addiction but
now that its on their doorstep, they know all too well what he's going to go
through and it breaks both their hearts.
As I made clear in multiple reviews at this
site, the future of television is clearly female. Two candidates for the best
dramas of the 2020s at this point are the female led The Gilded Age and Yellowjackets;
two comedies that will be listed among the all-time classic that debuted
this decade are Abbott Elementary and Hacks as well as the
recently concluded Somebody Somewhere. Some of the best shows that have
led network TV to this moment are Hugh Potential and Elsbeth, which
immediately follows Matlock. All
of these series have at least one female showrunner; the overwhelming majority
have received multiple nominations and awards for the female cast and creators
in the last five years. And in many of them they take a hard look at women of a
certain age and look at them with a kind lens even if they are flawed. I am in
disagreement with those who argue the golden age of TV is dead and buried. But
if that means we're out of the era of the White Male Antihero and into one of
the (basically) Decent Female Heroine, well, given the world we live in these
days, we kind of need more Madeline Matlock's then we ever did Walter Whites or
Tony Sopranos. They're certainly more fun to hang out with then those
guys were – and I prefer her company to Olivia Pope or Wendy Byrde's, too.
My score: 4.75 stars.
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