The New 'Matlock' Is the Russian Doll of Reboots

CBS remake starring Kathy Bates flips the script on the original with an unassuming heroine who’s on an unexpected mission

This post contains spoilers for the premiere of the new CBS drama Matlock, which is now streaming on Paramount+.

Ordinarily, a spoiler warning like the one above shouldn’t be necessary for a show like Matlock, a reboot of the Andy Griffith legal drama, which ran for close to a decade in the Eighties and Nineties. If you’re old enough, you might have seen the Griffith version, in which he played attorney Ben Matlock, whose old age and folksy demeanor left his opponents unprepared for his brilliant legal tactics. Or perhaps you’re just familiar with the title as a running gag in the early years of The Simpsons, where it was the one thing that brought joy to Abe Simpson and his neighbors at the retirement home. Or maybe you don’t know the name at all, but see that it’s a legal show starring Kathy Bates — who, at 76, is more than a decade older than Griffith was when he first played Matlock — on the CBS television network, and assume you can fill in the blanks from there.

Well, hold up there, my friends! Because I am here to tell you that this new Matlock is not what you think! Well, mostly it is. And then in some ways it is very, very, very much not.

For most of the pilot episode’s running time, the series does indeed appear to be a gender-flipped take on the old character, albeit weirdly self-aware. Bates’ Madeline “Matty” Matlock always introduces herself as “Matlock, like the old TV show show,”(*) and there’s even some discussion about the Griffith version jumping from NBC to ABC. Unlike Ben Matlock, who ran his own practice and only did criminal defense work, Matty is employed by a big firm and handles both civil and criminal cases as part of a team working under the demanding Olympia (Skye P. Marshall). But Matty’s whole brand is about disarming people with her fundamental existence. As she points out early and often, women of a certain age are basically invisible in modern society, so Matty can go almost anywhere and talk to almost anyone without being perceived as any kind of a threat. That’s even how she lands her new job in the first place: a lawyer from the firm’s opponent in a big case thinks nothing of discussing negotiations on the phone while Matty is standing next to him at a coffee shop, and she gains access to the firm’s offices because everyone assumes she’s a helpless granny.

(*) This was the same approach used by the charming but short-lived Disney+ show Doogie Kamealoha, M.D., whose underage doctor heroine was nicknamed “Doogie” because other characters had watched the TV show Doogie Howser, M.D. (whose run, coincidentally, overlapped a bit with the original Matlock). Oddly, The Simpsons never comes up here, even though some of Matty’s coworkers, like Jason Ritter as Olympia’s ex-husband Julian, are the exact right age to know the reference that way.  

And if the new Matlock were content to be just that, it would probably do OK for itself. Bates is just that charismatic and lively(*), and the same CBS audience that has kept Blue Bloods on the air for 14 seasons would likely be content with another formulaic drama built around an aging character who keeps proving that they’ve still got it. The pilot also has references to fellow Eighties shows The A-Team and Cheers, because everyone involved knows who the target demographic is. 

(*) She also has past experience headlining a legal drama, albeit not a very good one: Harry’s Law, an early 2010s David E. Kelley show where Bates ran a law firm out of an old shoe store, where her assistant insisted on continuing to sell shoes in between legal business. 

But this Matlock was created by Jennie Snyder Urman, whose great CW series Jane the Virgin was never content to stay confined by its telenovela formula, constantly toggling between parody and the genuine article. (One of Urman’s jobs in between Jane and this was developing the CW’s Charmed reboot, whose stars happened to include an actress named Madeleine Mantock.) While she could make a perfectly straightforward remake of the Griffith show, she has something else in mind. So here we go…

The end of the Matlock pilot reveals a number of key points:

1. Madeline Matlock is not, in fact, Madeline Matlock, but rather Madeline Kingston.

2. Madeline Kingston is a wealthy woman who had a long and successful legal career, rather than being the anonymous worker bee she describes herself as to her new employers.

3. Madeline Kingston has joined this particular firm because she holds it responsible for the opioid overdose death of her daughter, and is plotting an elaborate revenge against one or more of Olympia, Julian, and Julian’s father, Senior (Beau Bridges).

It’s OK if you need to take a moment to re-read that last one. It’s a lot, I know.

So what we have is not exactly a Matlock remake, but something of a conspiracy thriller whose heroine is pretending to be the main character in a Matlock remake while secretly adding items to her murder board. Because of course this new Matlock now has a murder board.

Now, what Urman has done isn’t that unusual in the modern IP Is Everything television landscape. Straightforward premises are rarely considered to be enough, no matter how successful various brands were with that approach the first time around. NBC’s attempt to redo Quantum Leap, for instance, couldn’t content itself with just telling stories about a time traveler who fixes the lives of people he gets to impersonate for a few days. Instead, a third to half of every episode had to be devoted to what the team behind the time travel was up to back home, various conspiracies and bits of franchise lore, etc.  Everything has to be made more complicated, with more characters and plot lines, whether it’s to ease the workload on lead actors (to be fair, Bates is 76 and has said this will be her last role) or out of fear that viewers with short attention spans need to be constantly bouncing from idea to idea. 

What often happens, though, is that these “reimaginings” become neither fish nor fowl. Older viewers who loved the original get frustrated with how different the updated version is, while viewers without a preexisting attachment to the premise find a show that’s overstuffed with ideas it can’t quite hold.

That said, Urman happens to be much better than most of her peers at integrating seemingly contradictory ideas, genres, and tones. For large chunks of each episode, Matlock delivers exactly what the title promises. While Matty is scheming with her husband and grandson to bring down these allegedly wicked lawyers, she’s also making a mostly good-faith effort to be part of Olympia’s team and help with their cases. She sweet talks her way into uncovering evidence, puts both clients and opponents at ease, and otherwise commits fully to the part she’s playing. These stories aren’t classics of the genre — multiple times across the three episodes I watched, I had to refer back to my notes to remind myself what was happening in one of the cases — but they’re only meant to be Kathy Bates delivery systems, and they do that job well enough.

The conspiracy plot proves a bit more challenging, and not just because the general rules of television make it likely that at least some, if not all, of Matty’s targets will turn out to be innocent of the crimes she accuses them of. (If it’s any of them, put money on Senior, since Beau Bridges is a guest star rather than a series regular like Ritter and Marshall.) Mostly, though, the issue is that it plays too lightly for the apparent stakes. Much of it involves Matty’s grandson being a genius hacker, plus various minor capers like Matty exploiting the firm’s meal per diem policy to get a closer look at Olympia’s phone. All of this is fine — though, like the legal plots, none of it will be a candidate for the Heist Comedy Hall of Fame. But the goofiness of it belies the pain that Matty’s family is supposed to be in — pain so strong that she would concoct and execute such a ridiculous vengeance scheme in the first place. Urman’s usual tonal mastery isn’t quite there yet, even though individual bits — like a dream sequence in an upcoming episode that more directly links our fake Matlock to the real one — can be very amusing.

The idea of remaking Matlock, even in the current Hollywood environment, seemed like a joke when CBS announced it. If anything, the twist seems to be acknowledging the ridiculousness of it all, by giving us a heroine who is only role-playing as someone like the Griffith version. Will that meta quality appeal to the CBS audience? I wouldn’t try to guess, but at least it’s an interesting experiment.