This article contains Spoilers for the premiere of the new CBS drama Matlocknow streaming on Paramount+.
Normally, a spoiler warning like the one above should be for a show like Matlocka reboot of the Andy Griffith legal drama that ran for nearly a decade in the 1980s and 1990s. If you’re old enough, you may have seen the Griffith version in which he played lawyer Ben Matlock, whose advanced age and folksy demeanor left his opponents unprepared for his brilliant legal tactics. Or maybe you only know the title as a running joke in the early years of The Simpsonswhere it was the only thing that brought joy to Abe Simpson and his neighbors in the nursing home. Or maybe you don’t know the name at all, but see that it’s a legal drama starring Kathy Bates – who, at 76, is more than a decade older than Griffith was when he first played Matlock – on the CBS television network, and assume you can fill in the blanks from there.
Well, wait a minute, my friends! Because I am here to tell you that this new Matlock Is not what you think! Well, mostly it is. And then in some ways it is very, very, very not much.
For most of the pilot episode, the show actually seems to be a gender-swapped version of the old character, albeit oddly self-aware. Bates’ Madeline “Matty” Matlock always introduces herself as “Matlock, like in the old TV show.”
Editor’s recommendations This was the same approach used by the charming but short-lived Disney+ show Doogie Kamealoha, MD whose underage heroine, the doctor, was nicknamed “Doogie” because other characters had seen the television series Doogie Howser, MD(whose course coincidentally overlapped a little with the original Matlock ). Strangely enough,
The Simpsons never appears here, although some of Matty’s colleagues, like Jason Ritter as Olympia’s ex-husband Julian, are just the right age to understand the allusion. And if the new Matlock if it were just that, it would probably do quite well. Bates is just so charismatic and lively and the same CBS audience that Blue Blood had been on the air for 14 seasons, would probably settle for another formulaic drama revolving around an aging character who keeps proving he’s still got it. The pilot also contains references to other shows from the ’80sThe A-Team
And Cheersbecause everyone involved knows who the target group is.
She also has experience as a leading actress in a legal drama, but not very good: Harry’s Law a series by David E. Kelley from the early 2010s in which Bates ran a law office out of an old shoe store and her assistant insisted on continuing to sell shoes in between her legal deals. But that Matlock was created by Jennie Snyder Urman, whose great CW series Jane, the Virgin was never satisfied with his
formula, constantly switching back and forth between parody and original. (One of Urman’s tasks between Jane and Jane was the development of the CW Charmed reboot, which also happened to star an actress named Madeleine Mantock.) While she could do a completely straight-up remake of The Griffith Show, she has something else in mind. So here we go…
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The end of the
Matlock
Pilot shows a number of important points:
1. Madeline Matlock is not actually Madeline Matlock, but Madeline Kingston. 2. Madeline Kingston is a wealthy woman with a long and successful career as a lawyer. She is by no means the anonymous worker bee that she portrays herself to her new employers. 3. Madeline Kingston joined this firm because she blames it for the death of her daughter from an opioid overdose and is planning an elaborate vendetta against Olympia, Julian, and Julian’s father Senior (Beau Bridges). It’s OK if you need to take a moment to re-read that last point. I know it’s a lot. So what we have is not exactly a
Matlock remake, but something like a conspiracy thriller, whose heroine pretends to be the main character in aMatlock
Remake while secretly adding items to her murder board. Because of course this new Matlock now has a murder board.
What Urman has done is not unusual in the modern IP Is Everything television landscape. Simple premises are rarely considered sufficient, no matter how successful various brands have been with this approach the first time around. NBC’s attempt to Quantum leap couldn’t be content with just telling stories about a time traveler fixing the lives of people he impersonates for a few days, for example. Instead, a third to a half of each episode had to be devoted to what the team behind the time travel was up to back home, various conspiracies and bits of franchise lore, etc. Everything had to be made more complicated, with more characters and storylines, whether to take the pressure off the main cast (to be fair, Bates is 76 and has said this is her last role) or for fear of having viewers with short attention spans constantly jumping from one idea to the next.
However, Urman succeeds much better than most of her colleagues in integrating seemingly contradictory ideas, genres and tones. Large parts of each episode
Matlock does exactly what the title promises. While Matty is plotting with her husband and grandson to take down these supposedly evil lawyers, she is also making a largely good-faith attempt to join Olympia’s team and help them with their cases. She sweet-talks her way to evidence, calms both clients and opponents, and otherwise fully immerses herself in the role she is playing. These stories are not classics of the genre – several times in the three episodes I saw I had to look up my notes to remember what was going on in one of the cases – but they are just meant to be Kathy Bates delivery systems, and they do that job well enough.Popular
The conspiracy story proves a little more challenging, and not just because the general rules of television make it likely that at least some, if not all, of Matty’s targets will turn out to be innocent of the crimes she accuses them of. (If it’s one of those, bet on Senior, since Beau Bridges is a guest star and not a series regular like Ritter and Marshall.) But the problem is mostly that the plot is too frivolous relative to the obvious stakes. Much of it revolves around Matty’s grandson being a genius hacker, and there are various minor pranks, like Matty taking advantage of the company’s food arrangement to get a closer look at Olympia’s phone. All of that is fine — though, like the legal plots, none of it will be a candidate for the Heist Comedy Hall of Fame. But the silliness of the story belies the pain Matty’s family should actually be feeling — a pain so strong that they would concoct and execute such a ridiculous revenge plan in the first place. Urman’s usual tonal mastery isn’t quite there yet, though individual bits — like a dream sequence in an upcoming episode that more directly connects our fake Matlock to the real one — can be very amusing.The idea of remakingMatlock, even in the current Hollywood environment, seemed like a joke when CBS announced it. If anything, the twist seems to acknowledge the ridiculousness of it all by presenting us with a heroine who is just playing a role as someone like the Griffith version. Will that meta quality appeal to CBS audiences? I wouldn’t try to guess, but it’s an interesting experiment at least.
