Paid Post: "Matlock" and the Female Antihero
Kathy Bates is the perfect person to portray an antihero who commitment to justice leads her down some very dark and treacherous moral paths.
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Warning: Full spoilers for the season follow.
Like a lot of other people, I was a little blown away by the CBS reboot of Matlock. I’ll be the first to admit that I was quite skeptical about the very concept of a new version of the story, even if the idea of a gender flip was slightly intriguing. To me, even the presence of the redoubtable Kathy Bates wouldn’t be enough to make this reboot be anything more than just another desperate attempt by Hollywood to cash in on an established IP.
Boy oh boy, could I not have been more wrong. As I’ve written here before, this is a show that manages to be both deeply funny and achingly tragic, sometimes within the confines of the same episode. While Bates is obviously front and center and does a great deal of the heavy lifting, the other members of the cast are allowed to flex their muscles, and their characters are given their own arcs and moments of growth (and regression). This is, I think it’s safe to say, one of the best shows to have appeared on network TV in recent years.
If you haven’t seen it, the plot is basically this: Bates’ Madeline Kingston masquerades as Matty Matlock, ingratiating herself in the law firm of Jacobson Moore. She does so in an effort to find out which member of the firm hid information that might have prevented the severity of the opioid epidemic, which took the life of her daughter. As the series goes on, however, Matty finds her efforts complicated by the fact that she starts to actually befriend the various members of the firm, particularly junior partner Olympia Lawrence (Skye P. Marshall).