The discourse about TV reboots has already run its course multiple times in our current era of streaming and prestige television. There are a lot of them. It happens to almost every hit show. Sometimes it works, most of the time it doesn’t. They better not try it with The Sopranos. And so on.
The most successful are often the ones that come out many decades after their source material was popular, allowing the reboot to insulate itself from comparisons to the original. CBS’s Matlock, in which Kathy Bates takes over for Andy Griffith as the titular lawyer, comes out almost 40 years after the original show’s premiere, and yet, in a creative twist, repeatedly makes sly nods to its remake status.
Bates sheepishly introduces herself as “Madeline Matlock, like the TV show,” when she sneaks her way into the offices of Jacobson Moore, hungry for a job after losing everything to her late husband. She quickly proves herself resourceful, using her status as an elderly person to her advantage.
Like the original Matlock (and Columbo, and Miss Marple), Bates’ version plays up her folksy old-lady persona, turning up the Southern twang when presented with a particularly cagey witness, or bringing baked goods to the office to ingratiate herself with her coworkers. As the season progresses, cases are often solved at the eleventh hour thanks to Matlock’s last-minute sleuthing, assuming that most everyone will underestimate her. “There’s this funny thing that happens when women age,” she explains in the pilot. “We become damn near invisible. It’s useful, because nobody sees us coming.”
The tense push-and-pull between ancient and modern serves as the backbone that the show is built around without getting too deep into “kids these days” territory. Matlock, as an associate, works alongside two other junior lawyers of millennial age (David Del Rio and Leah Lewis), and their banter about old TV shows and dating apps provides many of the episodes’ humorous moments.
Working under steely-eyed hotshot lawyer Olympia (Skye P. Marshall), the three often butt heads trying to figure out ways to get on her good side. Matlock herself has a particularly hard time with one case in a later episode involving a drug addict who keeps relapsing, finding it difficult at first to feel compassion for someone she sees as self-destructive. In a loud bit of visual metaphor, one of the partners at the firm (played by Beau Bridges) sits in an office full of lavish dark woods and jewel-toned fabrics that immediately clash with the giant high-rise window made of glass and steel.
There’s another major twist at the end of the premiere that defines the rest of the show. I’m not supposed to reveal it here, but it’s a good one, allowing this iteration of Matlock to set itself well apart from its predecessor. It also allows Bates to do more than just the charming homey act—which she is good at, but would be wasted on someone whose talent has such a wide range. Without a little bit more, the show wouldn’t be particularly grabby. With this added detail, the season has an arc, and the episodes have more of a sense of urgency.
Like its main character, Matlock the show has more to it than you’d think it does on the surface—even though Bates playing an aged yet savvy lawyer who uses her appearance as a weapon already sounds like a fun time. The way it leans into that initial hook proves that creator Jennie Snyder Urman (Jane the Virgin) knows that that alone wouldn’t be enough to sustain a show like this in a television landscape so saturated with twists and turns. Madeline Matlock will sniff out the smoking gun that will send a perp to jail just as soon as she’d offer him one of her butterscotch buttons.
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