Modernising Matlock
Matlock is returning to television, but this new version is more than a gender-flipped reboot. Creator Jennie Snyder Urman discusses her ambition behind the legal drama, partnering with star Kathy Bates and the “unimaginable” task of being a showrunner.
While Hollywood continues to plunder past successes for fresh hits, new US legal drama Matlock takes an original approach to its relationship with the classic 1980s series on which it is based.
Originally airing first on US network NBC and then ABC, Matlock starred Andy Griffith as the titular attorney Ben Matlock, who proved to be worth every penny of his fee when solving a number of intriguing cases.
Now four decades later, there’s a new Matlock in the courtroom. But as Madeleine ‘Matty’ Matlock, played by star Kathy Bates, explains in the pilot about her iconic surname: “Yes, Matlock like the old TV show, which was all I heard between 1984 and 1992. ‘You’re a lawyer like Matlock, you’re a lawyer like Matlock.’ And every time I’d correct them. ‘No, he’s just pretending. I’m a real lawyer.’”
It’s a fun and smart way to set out what otherwise might have just been a traditional reboot, introducing septuagenarian Matty as a witty, strong-minded force who talks her way into a job at prestigious law firm Jacobson Moore. There, she uses her unassuming demeanour and wily tactics to win cases and expose corruption from within.
“This is a different version, and without giving too much away about the show, there are some surprises,” showrunner Jennie Snyder Urman tells DQ ahead of the drama’s premiere on CBS and Paramount+ with Showtime this Sunday. “My feeling was the character uses Matlock the same way that I do as a writer, which is lulling the audience into something that they think they know and then totally surprising them with something else.
“She could then use that within the world to put people at ease and make people think they know her and know what she’s about, and then she can hide what she’s really after – and I was able to do that as well. I was interested in not doing just a straight gender flip [of the original series], but that the title had a specific significance to her in her life.”
Urman is best known as the creator of Jane the Virgin, a US take on Venezuelan telenovela Juana la virgen that ran from 2014 to 2019, telling the story of a Latina virgin (Gina Rodriguez) who becomes pregnant when she is accidentally artificially inseminated by her gynaecologist. Her credits also include the 2018 reboot of Charmed, Reign, 90210, Gilmore Girls and Emily Owens, MD.
The writer and executive producer had been looking for new titles to produce through her company, Sutton St Productions, when she came across Matlock and discovered the rights were held by NCIS: Los Angeles star Eric Olsen’s Cloud Nine Productions. They then invited her to partner on a remake if she was interested in writing something.
“I always love legal shows because they’re about the human condition and language, language being the thing that we use to build the world. I love that,” she says. “But I wasn’t really thinking that was going to be the next project I would write. I thought, ‘Well, I’ll take a walk and think about it and see if ideas come,’ because I really try not to say yes or no right away. The specific take of this version of Matlock then unfolded to me on the walk. By the end, I knew I really wanted to write about this woman who takes advantage of her invisibility in order to achieve extraordinary things.”
Writing for a woman in her 70s, however, is quite a different proposition from some of Urman’s other female characters such as the protagonists from Jane the Virgin and Emily Owens, MD.
“Maybe up until now I was looking a little bit backwards, and now I’m looking more forward,” the writer says. “I’m about to turn 50, so I’m like, what is this next phase of my life going to be like, right? Was that my prime or am I smarter than I was in my 30s? I know I am, but what does that mean to the world? What does that mean in the world? That’s really interesting to me.
“My mum is around Matty’s age, so thinking about that and thinking about the female experience as you grow, what society does and doesn’t value and how they do and do not value an older woman’s experience is all stuff that I’m so eager to dive into and think about. It’s been really Inspiring to me in terms of thinking about what the future could look like, how you stay relevant and what it means to love your work as you grow older. What if not everyone is meant to retire? All of those questions are so interesting to think about.”
Produced by CBS Studios and distributed by Paramount Global Content Distribution, the show’s cast includes Skye P Marshall as Olympia, Jason Ritter as Julian, David Del Rio as Billy and Leah Lewis as Sarah.
But Matlock is unmistakably Bates’ show, with the Oscar-winning Misery star leading the way. Urman originally met the actor for lunch, expecting to have to charm her. Instead, she was blown away by Bates’ response to the pilot script.
“Right away she was like, ‘I just love this material. I’m so excited. Let’s talk about it.’ So what a gift she gave me,” Urman says. “We just got to talk about character. I wasn’t auditioning [for her]. She told me the partnership between us was really important to her. She said, ‘Don’t leave me. We’re doing this. We’re doing this together,’ which is exactly what I had with Gina and really crave in my relationships with the actors, because we’re partners. Then the character evolves as I watch them and as I know them.
“It’s an incredible honour to get to work with her. We’re in contact constantly. She is the most hardworking and devoted partner. It’s really inspiring watching the rigour that she puts into the process and the scripts, and she’s shown me some of the inner monologues she’s written that link up with the monologues I’ve written. It’s just a really amazing partnership that I could never have anticipated, but one I’m so grateful for.”
Matlock arrives on screen as legal dramas enjoy a boom in popularity, one boosted by the rediscovery of Suits after it landed on Netflix. Urman’s own favourites include The Good Wife and The Practice.
It also ties in with the revival of case-of-the-week procedurals, which provide audiences with a repeatability and familiarity factor serialised dramas can lack.
“There’s something nice about having an episodic engine to a show where you know you’re going to get an answer or a sense of satisfaction at the end of one part of it,” Urman notes. “There’s something comforting about that. And I think it’s always like character – a legal show is only as good as the characters that inhabit it.”
It was devising the legal case in each episode that proved to be the most challenging aspect of making Matlock, which also features a separate legal case that traverses the full 18-part season, plus numerous character stories to boot.
“But legal was less daunting to me than medical because it’s the human condition,” Urman says. “Also, I can understand all the words. I don’t need a thesaurus or dictionary as I go. But with all of the ambiguities of law, of language and trying to find loopholes, the exercise of story-breaking feels a lot like what I imagine being a lawyer is in some way, which is like following a thread, pressure-testing it, wondering if it could lead to a different direction and what would happen if it went there.”
Urman also likens the storytelling aspect of a court to a theatre performance, where the lawyer characters lay out the case to the jury by presenting their own version of events.
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“Really, at the end of the day, we just go through character,” she adds. “What is that central dilemma that Matty is going to be feeling and what case is going to dramatise an interesting aspect of that, and then link them up in an interesting way that they feel connected and the legal stories don’t feel separate from the character stories. You want them all to kind of swim together.”
Those stories were all assembled in the writers room, with two weeks spent filling out “a big grid” with long and detailed character arcs. Then for every episode, each character has their own mini arc that means they all have growth and change in some way.
Notably, “we do our show with our cards up – what we want the audience to think – and then we do it with the cards down – what is really happening,” Urman explains. “So we have to break [the story] twice and make sure it’s true on both sides, which adds a degree of difficulty that we feel in the room. But it all comes from character and all those essential questions you ask about the character. What do they want? What is in their way? What is breaking their heart right now? What are they dying to understand or uncover about themselves or people in scenes with them?”
The weekly legal cases are inspired by news headlines, articles the writers have read and different cases the writers bring to the room. In particular, co-executive producers Nikki Renner and Sarah Rose Feinberg have backgrounds in corporate law and as a public defender, respectively, so they were also able to draw on their own experiences.
As the showrunner, Urman led the room and also the creative charge through pre-production, production – New York was recreated on the Paramount backlot in LA – and post-production.
“You’re the first one in and you’re the last one out, right? So you turn on the lights with the writers and then you’re turning off the lights at the end. It’s really an unimaginable job,” she says. “I try to explain it. My husband [cinematographer Jamie Urman] has tried to explain it. It feels unimaginable because it’s all-encompassing.
“If you don’t move quickly and make decisions quickly and problem-solve quickly, things get bottlenecked. So you constantly have to be available and passing on information at the same time as you have to keep the creative engines on, at the same time as you’re worried about the financial practicalities of the show. So it’s just all-encompassing.”
The premiere of Matlock comes after a 12-month delay owing to the US actor and writer strikes that took place last year. Urman had written the pilot script, filmed it and got a series green light before the industrial action delayed production. But the writers room then opened in October, when writers struck a deal to return to work, and Urman says she hasn’t had a day off since, speaking as filming is beginning on episode 17 of 18. The final script has also been handed in.
“I was meeting with writers, about to put together a writers room, and then the strike [began], so then I spent five months just being with my family and loading my brain with legal podcasts and stuff, things that could just be in the background of my head without really thinking about the show or working on the show, because I wanted to honour that [strike],” she says.
Urman then found herself on the traditional network television treadmill, writing, producing and editing numerous episodes at once – though without the added pressure of seeing them air at the same time. Viewers will finally get to see the show on Sunday, before episode one is repeated in its regular Thursday primetime slot on October 10.
“What was exciting when the strike was over was that everybody was really excited to get back. We picked up then and, because we were delayed a year, I got to have a longer pre-production than I would normally get on a network show, which I was really grateful for. I could really plot and plan meticulously before we started on the scripts.”
At its heart, much of Matlock is about the relationship between Matty and Olympia, who brings Matty into her team at Jacobson Moore. But Olympia, like many of the opponents Matty comes up against in the series, would be wise not to misjudge her.
“Underestimate her at your peril,” Urman says. “She is going to present herself as comforting and familiar as a butterscotch candy, but that candy coating is just the outer layer.”
tagged in: CBS, CBS Studios, Cloud Nine Productions, Jennie Snyder Urman, Matlock, Paramount, Paramount Global Content Distribution, Showtime, Sutton St Productions