It’s been a while since I dug into the actual lawyering in Matlock, which was pretty shaky when the show debuted and which … well, okay, is still pretty shaky. I give Matlock some latitude when it comes to legal verisimilitude because it’s a reboot of the ’80s/’90s Matlock, a case-of-the-week murder mystery in which the hero routinely won in the courtroom by piecing together clues and trapping the real killer, not through any particular legal acumen. The original Matlock was heavily inspired by Perry Mason, which took a similar approach to its mysteries. The difference is that Perry Mason himself really did use his knowledge of the legal fineries to get his exculpatory evidence introduced, while Ben Matlock mostly just monologued for the jury, blowing past every objection.
The new Matlock is different from its predecessor in a lot of ways. It has a serialized story line running alongside the cases of the week, and it’s more about office politics than it is about procedural crime-solving. But the show’s approach to the courtroom scenes does have a lot in common with its namesake. Olympia’s team represents their clients via vibes, intuition, and dumb luck. As I mentioned in the footnotes last week, “good lawyering” for these attorneys often equates to stumbling onto a crucial piece of evidence through sheer happenstance. It’s sort of like how in movies about poker players, a “good poker player” is someone who always seems to draw the best cards.
This week’s case actually does require more legal maneuvering than usual, although, in the end, the team once again wins after catching a late break. The result is one of the series’ weaker episodes — one that mostly seems to be marking time until the season’s climactic “Matty vs. Jacobson Moore” arc can commence.
The team arrives at the case in a roundabout way. Olympia has been pursuing a class action against the makers of Slamm’d, an alcohol-based energy drink marketed to young people, which has been sending a lot of those kids to the hospital. (“It gets people way too drunk too fast,” one college student explains.) When a Fordham sorority sister named Zoey Santos (Galilea La Salvia) is accused of sneaking Slamm’d into a romantic rival’s cup at a party — ultimately killing the young lady, named Violet — Olympia decides to defend Zoey as part of a larger strategy to drum up publicity for her lawsuit.
The Matlock writers have a lot of fun with modern college Greek culture, getting in a few good zingers about the kids’ sickly sweet cocktail recipes (rum, strawberry lemonade, Sour Patch Kids) and about how many of them are named Kennedy. Even the relatively young Sarah regards these women as aliens in her midst, with their self-tanner and the way they refer to the music of Destiny’s Child as “the oldies.”
The problem for Olympia when it comes to defending Zoey is that the cutthroat nature of sorority life makes it hard to find character witnesses among the sisters. They all have memories of Zoey either humiliating them personally or gleefully embarrassing one of their friends. And so they all kinda believe she might’ve killed Violet on purpose. That conviction only grows stronger when evidence emerges showing that someone using Zoey’s ID bought the fatal can of Slamm’d.
As I mentioned, there’s some real lawyering involved with Jacobson Moore’s defense. Billy and Sarah try to corroborate Zoey’s alibi — that she was taking selfies in the park around the time the bodega says she was buying Slamm’d — by following her jogging path themselves to prove it would be physically impossible for her to get to the store from the park so quickly. However, the key piece of evidence comes from Matty, who notices that one of the pictures Billy and Sarah were examining from the sorority party is actually a “live photo.” When they watch it for the full second it runs, they can see in the background an image of Zoey’s ID being snuck back into her drawer by … one of the Kennedys! (This one is played by Rae DeRosa, who physically resembles Galilea La Salvia.)
That brief, incredibly fortuitous moment of insight is the most Matty contributes to this case because, for the second week in a row, she’s so distracted by her memories of Ellie and their contentious custody hearing that her head isn’t in the game. When Olympia asks her for an “angle” on the case, Matty uncharacteristically mutters, “You first.” Even at home, she wants Edwin to make all of her tough decisions for her. She’s lost in a fog.
It doesn’t help that so much of her daily routine is, as always, devoted to the mission of revenge against Jacobson Moore. This week, Matty intends to use the distraction of an annual office Easter egg hunt — with Alfie as her guest — to sneak into the security monitor station and extract the info she needs from Julian’s ID. The plan almost goes haywire when her reliable, friendly guard knocks off work early for the hunt. A quick-thinking Alfie has to get “accidentally” trapped in a stairwell to coax the replacement guard out of her office long enough for Matty to sneak in. Then the plan almost goes haywire again when Alfie calls Matty in a panic and says he lost his wallet — which contains a library card and an ice cream shop punch card with addresses close to their real Westchester home.
Matty is able to retrieve the wallet from Olympia’s office mostly undetected. (Olympia does make a comment about ice cream, but it’s unrelated to Alfie’s punch card.) Still, the stress of the day overall, coupled with the stress of the past few weeks at home and at the office, is almost too much for Matty.
Almost … until she gets some unexpected help. Senior, lying back in his special chair with an edible, invites Matty to sit down and indulge with him. The two of them giggle while listening to the original Matlock theme song, talk about their regrets, and then howl their apologies to the ghosts of the people they wronged. For Senior, it’s his little brother, who died in a car wreck the day after the two of them had a raging argument. (Senior mourned by suing the car manufacturer and the tire company … and winning.) For Matlock, it’s Ellie. Though she doesn’t speak her daughter’s name aloud, she nevertheless breaks down crying.
This is such a magnificent scene from Kathy Bates and Beau Bridges. I can shrug off the surrounding lack of legal realism when the character work being done at the center of this show is so strong. But it does whet my appetite for the eventual moment when Bates and Bridges — as Matty and Senior — can square off with all of their cards on the table.
Hot Doggin’
• Matlock is by no means high art — nor is it aiming to be — but I do appreciate some of the efforts in recent weeks to play around with editing and structure. Three weeks ago, Billy and Olympia were seen arguing different cases at the same time, with the dialogue in each piece of the montage fitting together neatly. Two weeks ago, we got Olympia’s imaginary grilling of her lying client. Last week, we saw Matty slipping back in her mind, mid-scene, to her custody hearing for Alfie. And this week, there’s a very nice sequence in which Matty walks a frightened Zoey, step-by-step, through what to expect when she gets arrested.
• Olympia makes a new enemy this week when she tries to get a novice ADA, Andrew Park (Andrew Ghai), to drop the case against Zoey and then join her in helping to bring down Slamm’d. She tells him his “first kill” should be “a big bear,” not some college “squirrel.” He responds by suggesting that maybe she’s the bear. He then gives her a bear figurine — which she puts on her desk.
• Jacobson Moore’s Easter celebration is technically branded “Family Day” (in part because 60 percent of the partners are Jewish). Senior loves the event’s “nondenominational rabbit,” but Julian hates it because on a Family Day when he was 10 years old, Senior — while wearing that bunny suit — announced he was divorcing Julian’s mother. Anyway, as an olive branch to her (maybe?) soon-to-be-ex, Olympia steals and hides the bunny head so that at least Julian won’t have to grapple with that memory.
• Sarah has some personal struggles this week, first as her nemesis Simone flirts with Kira to get under Sarah’s skin, and then as the big “let’s be monogamous” talk with Kira doesn’t go as well as Sarah had hoped.
• Whenever Senior talked about his younger brother, I pictured Jeff Bridges.
• Speaking of siblings, throughout this episode Matty dodges calls from her sister Bitsy, and then in the final scene, while stoned off her keister, Matty comes home to find one of Bitsy’s better-than-you-might-expect sugar-free peach pies sitting on the counter. Then Bitsy herself swoops in, dropping references to Cindy Shapiro and saying things like “hug my neck” and “heck-a-doodie.” (A Misery reference?) Anyway, next week should be fun, especially given that Bitsy is played by the delightful Julie Hagerty, of Airplane! and Lost in America fame.