Matlock Season-Premiere Recap: Not What You’d Expect

From 1986 to 1995, Andy Griffith enjoyed one of television’s most impressive second acts, playing a wily southern lawyer named Ben Matlock. Griffith was already famous for his role as North Carolina sheriff Andy Taylor in the ratings-topping 1960s sitcom The Andy Griffith Show, which was still playing widely in syndication in the ’80s and ’90s (and today). But he’d struggled to escape the shadow of that series before Matlock came along. With his light-gray suits, hot-dog-heavy diet, and folksy demeanor, Ben Matlock connected with audiences immediately.

He also joined a long line of lovable TV mystery-solvers who are far more cunning than they initially appear.

You can now add Madeline Kingston to that list. As played by Kathy Bates in the not-quite-a-remake, not-quite-a-reboot version of Matlock, Maddy is both charming and sneaky smart. In the opening scene of the series’ pilot episode, she takes advantage of being an unassuming older woman — invisible to the “important” people — to eavesdrop on a high-powered New York lawyer’s cell-phone conversation. Then she waltzes into the white-shoe firm of Jacobson Moore and tells them what she overheard — information that nets the firm $4,000,000 more than what it was expecting in a settlement negotiation. On the spot, the firm’s managing partner, known to everyone as Senior (Beau Bridges), signs Maddy on for a two-week tryout as an associate.

Ah, but there’s a twist. Senior has hired a woman he thinks is named Madeline Matlock. Maddy claims the last name is a coincidence. She also claims she’s returning to practicing law after a long layoff because her dead ex-husband stole all of her money and left her to take care of their ungrateful grandson.

None of these claims is true.

Remember how I called Matlock’s heroine “Madeline Kingston” earlier? At the end of the first episode, we see Maddy slip away from her co-workers and into a waiting limousine that takes her to the fancy mansion she shares with her not-ex-husband, Edwin (Sam Anderson), and their very grateful grandson, Alfie (Aaron D. Harris). Alfie helped Maddy concoct a clever plan after they watched a lot of episodes of their favorite show: the Andy Griffith Matlock. It turns out there’s a reason why this wealthy septuagenarian has hustled her way to an associate position at Jacobson Moore; her daughter overdosed on opioids, and she believes someone at her new firm was responsible for burying documents that could’ve held the pharmaceutical companies responsible.

This new Matlock series, like Ben and Maddy, is both easy to like and not quite what it seems. Aside from the basic concept of a gray-haired attorney schooling the youths, the two Matlocks aren’t that similar (yet). Griffith’s Matlock ran his own practice out of Atlanta, mostly defending people who were wrongly accused of murder. Bates’s “Matlock” is part of a New York firm and — in the pilot, anyway — working on civil litigation. Clear points of reference for the new Matlock include The Good Wife and Suits, in which politics and money are more prevalent than mysteries. The show also has a lot in common with Jane the Virgin, with which it shares the writer-producer Jennie Snyder Urman and a telenovelalike love of a closing stinger.

For the most part, this Matlock episode is a prime example of how to put together a pilot episode that is fast-paced, efficiently plotted, and grabby. Urman doesn’t overload this hour. When Maddy first arrives at JM, she meets the firm’s major players, including Senior’s son, Julian Monroe (Jason Ritter), and Elijah Walker (Eme Ikwuakor), the equity partner who runs the meetings and assigns the cases. Each of these characters gets a few scenes, long enough to leave a brief impression of their personalities and where they fit into the firm — and to tease that there may be more to their stories.

The rest of the episode jumps right into the action with a splashy civil case. Maddy’s two-week tryout sees her working with two other junior associates — the by-the-books go-getter Sarah Yang (Leah Lewis) and the more chill Billy Martinez (David Del Rio) — in assisting the icy and driven Olympia Lawrence (Skye P. Marshall), a former JM rainmaker who now wants to prove to her bosses that she can make just as much money for the firm with social-justice causes. But Senior’s patience is wearing thin with a case that has taken six months with no big payout yet: a headline-grabbing lawsuit against the NYPD on behalf of Raymond Harris (Rothaford Gray), who spent 26 years in prison after being hounded into giving a false confession.

Olympia means to prove that the police knew they arrested the wrong man, but without any investigative resources from her firm, she has been unable to chase down reliable witnesses. Enter Maddy, who may not be as facile with search engines as Sarah and Billy but who is very good at coaxing out useful information from people just by listening to them carefully. With astonishing rapidity, Maddy follows a trail from an old prostitute to an imprisoned mobster to a retired escort to a Greek restaurateur whose 911 call about the original crime was intentionally buried by the cops. The jury finds for the plaintiff and awards $20,000,000 — about five times what Olympia was asking.

If there’s one knock against this first Matlock, it’s that the central case is a little simple. If The Good Wife or The Good Fight (or, heck, any of the Law & Orders) had tackled a similar subject, the plot would’ve been a lot twistier and the situation more complex.

Still, Urman and director-producer Kat Coiro bring a lot of fleetness to the storytelling, including making the smart decision to intercut scenes of Olympia talking trial strategy with scenes of the trial itself, just like in a heist movie. And as with the rest of the episode, what matters most is what the case establishes about the people involved. We learn that Olympia’s superiors dislike her new focus on social justice and are trying to keep the firm from being associated with it. (The senior partners really didn’t want the Harris case to go to trial — something to keep in mind.) Also, we see Maddy briefly break character when she tells a nervous key witness she won’t be compelled to testify. Although she’s playacting as someone who wants to be a mercenary — to impress Jacobson Moore enough to get put on a pharmaceutical case — she’s compassionate at her core.

This is what should be the most fun to watch in the weeks ahead: seeing how long Maddy can keep her ruse going, especially as she gets closer to the people she’s secretly investigating. Bates does terrific work here with all the Maddy Matlock shtick, fumbling with butterscotch candies and ketchup packets and letting her sentences ramble on so long that people can’t tell if she’s making a point or just making conversation. Right from the start of the episode, she tells everyone outright that her superpower is being underestimated. Then everyone smiles and nods and underestimates her anyway.

Hot Doggin’

• Olympia is the non-Maddy character we spend the most time with in this first episode. We learn she’s having a fling with Elijah and is getting divorced from Julian, with whom she has 8-year-old twins. We also learn that Senior still supports his soon-to-be-former daughter-in-law (though perhaps not enough to make her a full partner). We’re given a reason to question her shifting career focus. Is she trying to make up for a past indiscretion? Or perhaps to monetize misery? Stay tuned.

• In addition to name-checking the original Matlock, this episode drops references to Perry Mason; The A-Team; MacGyver; Murder, She Wrote; and the “Macarena.” Flooding the zone with nostalgia! I dig the move.

• The original Matlock aired on NBC before moving to ABC toward the end of its run. The new Matlock is on CBS. When all is said and done, every network will get a Matlock.

• So what’s your level of Matlock knowledge? Did you watch the show in its original run? Have you watched the reruns on MeTV or Hallmark Mystery? Or do you mostly know it from that running gag on The Simpsons about how old people love the show? As for me, I was a teenager and a young adult during the first Matlock era, so though I was an Andy Griffith Show superfan (like so many other Gen-X latchkey kids who relied on syndicated TV shows on UHF channels to be our afternoon companions), for a long time my main point of reference for Matlock was, in fact, The Simpsons. But that’s not true anymore. I’ve been a MeTV and Hallmark junkie since I entered my 40s — I’m 54 now — and so I’ve probably seen every original recipe of Matlock at least once, if not two or three times. If that expertise turns out to be relevant going forward, I’ll bring it.