Matlock Recap: Rope-a-dope

During the years that the writer-producer Jennie Snyder Urman spent working on Jane the Virgin, she learned the art of ending episodes with a stinger: a moment of spine-tingling surprise to make the audience gasp and sweat. But who would’ve thought Urman would bring that knack over to Matlock, of all shows? Each of the first two episodes of this amiable little legal dramedy has suddenly and unexpectedly ratcheted up the suspense in its final minutes. I don’t know if we can expect a little stinger at the end of every Matlock; but so far, the schtick is really working.

Before we get to the tense ending of Matlock’s second episode, “Rome in a Day,” let’s break down the setup. What makes the closing “gotcha” so effective is that it comes after an episode where Matty’s masquerade is imperiled by her own self-doubt. She shows signs of weakness from the opening scene: a dream sequence (featuring the original Matlock theme!) in which the Jacobson Moore leadership team questions her identity, all because when she originally introduced herself, she forgot that Andy Griffith’s Matlock moved to ABC for three years after NBC canceled it in 1992. (Is this Urman publicly upbraiding herself for making that mistake in the pilot?)

The underlying anxiety that inspired that dream shadows Matty throughout the episode. She knows that during her first case with Jacobson Moore, she almost fumbled her opportunity because her emotions got the better of her, and she chose to reassure a reluctant witness rather than ruthlessly coercing some important testimony. So this week she reminds herself to control her emotions and avoid sloppy mistakes.

Matty has a carefully laid-out plan. She times her arrival at the office in order to spend time in the elevator with Olympia and Julian, knowing that they’ll be doing their children’s custody handover and thus likely arguing — giving Matty the opportunity to take Olympia’s side and curry favor. She’s clearly having fun making these kinds of moves and playing the part of the chatty, self-deprecating old lady who overshares. She even reinforces the “Madeline Matlock” character’s money troubles by asking Julian if she can share her daily dinner allowance with her grandson Alfie.

But Matty can’t control every potential situation that might arise or plan out every possible reaction. This week she gets tripped up by Sarah, who still isn’t happy about having to share Olympia’s attention with this elderly interloper. When Sarah grills Matty about why she takes the bus instead of the subway if she lives all the way out in Queens, a frustrated Matty loses her patience and snaps a little. The facade, fleetingly, cracks.

Matty tries to soften Sarah up by sharing credit with her in front of Olympia, but the boss ends up resenting the implication that she’s insufficiently complimentary to Sarah. She then sidelines Matty during an investigation and later chastises her for thinking she has the right — nay, the “privilege” — to question an accomplished Black woman’s hard-won authority.

This is all bad news for Matty, who is supposed to be earning Olympia’s trust and eventually gaining access to her passcodes so that the tech-savvy Alfie can start digging through the JM archives to try and find the dirt they’re looking for about the firm’s alleged opioids cover-up. But while she has told Alfie to be patient — “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” after all — she’s still visibly and audibly disappointed in herself when she talks to him on the phone and confesses that tricky office politics might be her undoing.

To make matters worse, when she tries to deploy one of her superpowers — demonstrating genuine empathy with a client by using her own daughter’s death as a way to bond with a fellow parent — the client gets angry at the suggestion that she might be “asleep at the wheel” as a mother. The day ends with Matty crying in her husband Edwin’s arms. (“Today was really hard,” she sobs.)

All of these setbacks are good storytelling choices, for a couple of reasons. For the sake of the long-term viability of this series, Matty shouldn’t be invulnerable. It adds drama if she’s at real risk of failing. (This is a lesson I’m hoping the Elsbeth team will learn for season two. When Elsbeth gets everything right all the time, that show can feel undercooked.)

For the sake of this particular episode, the slip-ups lead to a fun payoff. At the end, as Matty is “headed home to Queens” with a sack full of per-diem pasta for herself and Alfie, she takes a moment to criticize Olympia’s managerial style, calling her manipulative. It seems like another example of Matty’s mask slipping, endangering her mission. That possible blunder then snowballs into a full-on disaster when Matty leaves her bag of food behind, prompting Olympia to drive out to Queens with the dinners to make peace.

Now, I’ll be honest: I figured out pretty quickly that this had to be a ploy and that the Queens apartment would actually be real and be occupied by Matty and Alfie. (The cross-cutting to the limo pulling up to the Kingston mansion didn’t fool me, but it was a nice touch regardless.) What I did not expect was that Matty and Alfie would’ve set up a surveillance camera outside the apartment door, using it to sneak a peek at Olympia as she used her passcode(!) to unlock her phone. Well played, fake Matlocks.

You may have noticed that I haven’t yet mentioned this episode’s case-of-the-week. That’s no oversight. The courtroom part of this show remains one of its weakest elements so far. I did like that this week we got a murder case instead of a lawsuit, because that’s truer to the original Matlock. A woman whose shy, developmentally delayed son is accused of sexually assaulting and murdering a customer at the bodega where he works; and through careful breaking down of discrepancies in the eyewitness testimony, Matty and the other junior associates are able to help Olympia prove that the bodega owner’s son actually committed the crime and then manipulated the security video to make it look like his friend did it.

The case mainly matters for two reasons: (1) It raises the question yet again of whether Olympia’s commitment to social justice is sincere or financially motivated, given that she takes this case because the client is related to a woman in one of her big class action suits; (2) After the Jacobson Moore team wins, Matty steals a glance at the victim’s family, and we can see on her face that she knows her triumph won’t ease their tragedy. “At least they got justice,” Olympia reassures her. That thought, of course, is what Madeline Kingston is clinging to, hard. “Justice means everything,” she replies.

Hot Doggin’

• I don’t want to keep comparing Matlock to The Good Wife/The Good Fight, but the whole running gag this week about the crusty judge who went to the University of Michigan and Olympia’s attempts to soften her up with football analogies seemed very much like the kind of thing one of Robert and Michelle King’s shows would do — only the Kings would be slicker about it. The joke here lands awkwardly.

• Much funnier: Matty banters with one of the witnesses in the bodega case, becoming very interested in the exact timing of his defrosting a pot pie during Family Feud and cooking it during 60 Minutes. (Sarah, to a baffled Billy: “Some kind of geriatric mating ritual.”)

• Can’t say I’ve really been grabbed yet by the Olympia/Julian divorce drama or the Olympia/Elijah secret romance. That said, there’s a funny moment this week when Julian claims he let their kids eat a huge amount of ice cream after bedtime because bodegas only sell gallon cartons, and then later Olympia is at a bodega and shakes her head ruefully at a bunch of mini-cartons in the freezer. Also, it’s worth noting that when Julian chastises his dad for always taking Olympia’s side rather than supporting his flesh-and-blood son, Senior replies, “Most kids haven’t done what you’ve done.” Mysterious!

• Toward the end of this episode, Senior briefly makes Matty’s bad dream true by mentioning she got the Matlock air-dates wrong when they first met. But she’s prepared. “I don’t count the ABC years,” she says.