“Matlock” transforms into an essential pleasure

Strange things happened in our living rooms during the pandemic.
“Everyone was back on the couch, watching television and film,” Skye Marshall told the Television Critics Association. “And for the very first time as an actor, I felt like an essential worker.”
And strange things happened in TV offices, as people scrambled for new ideas … or, preferably, new old ideas. That’s sort of what sparked “Matlock” (shown here with Jason Ritter, Kathy Bates and Marshall) which is — like its title character — deceptively brilliant.
Eric Christian Olsen was continuing his 13-year stint as an “NCIS: Los Angeles” co-star, but also getting started as a producer. “It was the height of the pandemic,” he recalled. “It was all the uncertainty and chaos.”
So people suggested going with something certain and steady. They mentioned old TV hits that could be rebooted.
“I remember looking through a list and seeing ‘Matlock’ and being overwhelmed with the sense memory of sitting on my grandma’s floor, watching the show … in Rockford, Illinois, (on) shag carpeting,” he said.
The show started in 1986 (when Olsen was 9) and ran for nine seasons, with Andy Griffith as a lawyer who hid his cunning under a folksy facade.
The usual ideas were tossed around. Maybe a reboot could center on Matlock’s son, 45, or granddaughter, 27, or …
Then Jennie Snyder Urman, the “Jane the Virgin” writer-producer, came up with a fresh idea. Like the original character, Madeline Matlock would be an older person, easy to overlook. She would be no relation to the original Matlock – he’s just a TV character, after all – but would share his cunning. She would use it to soothe witnesses and to deceive her colleagues.
“This is a show defined by contradictions,” Urman said. “It’s something new, but it’s based on something old. I wanted it to feel folksy, yet sophisticated; nostalgic, yet modern; comforting, yet unsettling.”
And then – near the end of the first episode – she threw in a mega-twist.
We won’t spoil that here, because it’s best to see the full hour. It will show up twice on CBS – 8 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 22, then again on Thursday, Oct. 10 – and will be on Paramount+. A week later, it settles into its regular spot at 9 p.m. Thursdays, in front of “Elsbeth,” a show it’s similar to … until it isn’t.
The show’s twists require subtle changes, depending on who Matlock is dealing with. “I get to play all of those levels with everything I’ve learned in the last 50 years,” said Bates, 76.
It’s been a busy stretch, including four Oscar nominations (winning for “Misery”), 14 Emmy nominations (winning for a guest role on “Two and a Half Men”) and much more.
She’s had rich, meaty roles. “My mother … would always wish that I’d not play all these characters that were afflicted.”
Now she plays someone who drifts between warmth and pain. Bates, a Memphis native, sometimes gives Matlock a soothing semi-drawl. It’s “accent, no accent, accent, no accent,” she said. “It’s trying to stay on top of all of that, but it’s a lot of fun.”
Soon, she settles into a top-dollar law office, an imposing creation.
“When I thought this was a reboot, I rolled my eyes,” set designer Adam Rowe said. Then he found it was much more and took the job.
He created the offices for the pilot film in Toronto, then re-created them on the Paramount studio lot. “Last week,” he said in July, “this was plywood.”
Not any more. Now it feels like a sleek vision of glass and chrome and wood. There’s the cluttered office of the boss (played by Beau Bridges), the slightly playful one of his son Julian (Ritter) and the no-nonsense one of Julian’s ex-wife Olympia.
That’s the role for Marshall, an Air Force veteran who was a dancer and a drug rep, then became a busy actor. During the pandemic years, she had regular TV roles as a doctor, a voodoo practitioner and a vice-principal who spied on meta-humans.
Now she plays a lawyer, in a show that could help coax people back to a traditional TV network. Consider her an essential worker.