A funny thing happened on the way to the “Matlock” reboot.
The CBS drama caps off its first season on Thursday with a two-hour finale, but it’s already one of TV’s most compelling surprises of the year. Other reboots of recent note — like HBO’s “Perry Mason” and both “Magnum P.I.” and “MacGyver” on CBS — made straightforward plays at harnessing their potential audience’s nostalgia. Though new actors took on the iconic titular roles, the basics of the premises and characters largely remained the same. Why risk rocking a boat that already proved stable once?
It’s not a particularly exciting line of reasoning, but it does make sense. Taking risks isn’t particularly encouraged at a time when it’s increasingly difficult for any show, reboot or otherwise, to grab enough viewers for a network’s liking. So an incredible amount of credit is due to the “Matlock” team — led by showrunner Jennie Snyder Urman — for rejecting that logic completely and coming out so much better for it.
Before the series premiered in the fall, all we really knew about it was that none other than Academy Award winner Kathy Bates would star — an exciting development, but questions still remained. Was she going to be playing high-powered lawyer Matlock in the same vein as Andy Griffith, who anchored the original show from 1986 to 1995? Would she put her own spin on it? And was “Matlock” going to be a case of the week show all over again or what?
As it turns out, Urman and company had a very different plan all along. In fact, their “Matlock” isn’t a reboot of “Matlock” at all. Instead, Bates stars as Mattie, a grieving, furious mother who revives her law career to investigate the firm she believes is responsible for keeping a notorious opioid company in business, thus leading to her daughter’s untimely death.
In fact, the only reason the show’s called “Matlock” is because her cover story acts as a direct nod to the show itself. Mattie adopts a kindly Southern grandma persona and the last name “Matlock” to disarm her corporate co-workers with a cutesy story about how fun it is to share a name with her favorite TV lawyer. With this entirely meta twist revealed so early, the show was off and running on its own track. By day, Mattie works cases at the law firm; by night, she’s digging deeper and deeper into a sprawling corporate conspiracy.
I’m not sure how much CBS had to keep the show’s true direction under lock and key before it aired; I daresay that a new series starring Bates would attract plenty of curious viewers no matter what (though perhaps her short-lived stint on NBC’s “Harry’s Law” begs to differ). Either way, I won’t deny the ultimate reveal’s impact. Though I went in thinking I knew exactly what to expect from 2024’s “Matlock,” I was thrilled to realize I was entirely wrong.
While there’s no doubt in my mind that Bates would’ve done a fine job playing a straight-up Matlock, it’s been far more fun to watch her hone an entirely new character on her own intriguing journey that’s full of the kind of narrative trickery that Urman (formerly of the cheeky, self-aware telenovela “Jane the Virgin”) is so practiced at producing with style. I can’t wait to see how the season ends, and how much further Mattie can get from “Matlock” in season 2.
The two-hour season finale of “Matlock” airs Thursday at 9 p.m. on CBS.
