Kathy Bates, the Oscar-winning actress of Misery, has been at her best in Matlock. Defying Hollywood ageism, Bates plays a 75-year-old lawyer who has returned back to the workplace. But all is not what it seems as the wily Matty Matlock, “like the old TV show,” has hidden her real identity as Madeline Kingston to infiltrate Jacobson Moore, the law firm that represented the pharmaceutical firm she blames for her daughter’s fatal opioid overdose.
During the first half of the show — which debuted back in late September, but got really going in mid-October and earned a speedy season two renewal — Matty’s subterfuge as an older woman left impoverished and slightly bitter by her no-good dead husband forced back to work to support her teenage grandson, despite being quite wealthy and happily married, looked like it could blow up at any time.
Her mission to find out who was responsible for hiding the document she feels could have prevented her daughter’s death has gotten more complicated, with Matty in full double agent mode. Plus, there’s now trouble at home. In the show’s first half, Matty’s loving and supportive husband Edwin (Sam Anderson) seemed all in. After the show’s return Jan. 30 with its ninth episode “Friends,” however, that support seems to be wavering.
Lately, she and Edwin aren’t on the same page about a lot of things, including how they’re raising their grandson Alfie (Aaron D. Harris). One of the biggest sources of tension, though, is her deepening friendship with her partner-track boss Olympia (Skye P. Marshall) who is among her three prime suspects. The other two include Olympia’s colleague and husband Julian (Jason Ritter), not to mention father of her young twins, whom she’s divorcing, and his father, her soon-to-be ex-father-in-law Senior (Beau Bridges), the firm’s powerful leader who is a looming presence even in his long and frequent absences. Not only does Edwin fear losing his closeness to Matty, but he also knows that, if her cover is blown, she could go to prison.
At work, there are other complications. Her two younger colleagues Sarah (Leah Lewis) and Billy (David Del Rio), with whom she works to help solve Olympia’s ongoing cases, feel insecure professionally. As young lawyers hoping to make their mark, they wonder if they will get a fair shake especially at the big cases as Matty and Olympia grow closer. By the end of the “Friends” episode, which centers a case involving the termination of a pregnant woman, in this case the cousin of Olympia’s colleague Elijah (Eme Ikwuakor) for whom she has feelings, it’s abundantly clear that, going forward, Matty’s growing bond with Olympia will grow to be a bigger complication, feeding Edwin’s worse fears. Having the firm’s consultant Shae (Jane the Virgin’s Yael Grobglas), known as “the human lie detector,” sniffing around Matty to discover what she’s hiding, doesn’t help either.
The Hollywood Reporter spoke with Matlock creator Jennie Snyder Urman about the first half of the season, her favorite episodes and a hint at what’s ahead over the next 10 episodes (one of which airs Tuesday night). What Urman, who also created Jane the Virgin, revealed about Matlock is a deeply thoughtful approach to a show she hopes is working on all cylinders to not just be different and entertaining, but also to carve out critical space for women exploring everything from issues that specifically impact women in the workplace to mom guilt.
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Why was the fall finale in December a good mid-season point? What did we learn by that time?
It brought us to this crossroads of where her research was. She thought she was going toward something and going to get an answer, and then she found out Senior wasn’t where she thought he was going to be. He was out of the country then. So, suddenly it narrows down to Julian and Olympia, who could have physically taken this document. And anytime it gets closer to Olympia, it gets scarier for Matty because that’s the person with whom we’re watching their love story develop. So much of the heart of the show is between those two. So knowing that she’s eliminating one of the three and leaving the person she has grown to really care about and admire and bond with [out] makes it scary for Matty and more personal. That raises the stakes for her emotionally and for her mission.
So what are we going to get into for the second half? What are we in for?
You’re in for, I would say, all cards that we’ve been laying down, some of which the audience is aware of, some of which they’re not aware of the importance, will ultimately start to flip over. Oour show has to have a bunch of things working at once. It has to have that big overarching crime story, spy thriller element and adding up to something real. But there’s also a love triangle that we’re working on between, Matty and Olympia and Edwin, her husband. She’s changing by being in this workplace and by becoming friends with Olympia, and it’s causing her to cast a light back on the life she thought she had, and caused her to look at things a little bit differently. Olympia is changing her. Edwin thought she was going to go into this mission, get the bad guy and then come out. I don’t think he was prepared for the changes that are happening to Matty.
In a lot of ways, this show is a love letter to women in the workplace because Matty is somebody who is realizing how much she gets out of work and that her job wasn’t just a way for her to make money. It was about her sense of self and identity. How their work got divvied up in the family sort of comes to light again. Yet there’s so much compassion for Edwin, who’s like, these are his golden years and he wanted her home. They’re already raising their grandchild; she’s out and having new experiences and her life is expanding, and his is kind of closing in a little bit. There’s a real tension in that. That’s why I love the relationship with Olympia and Matty and how they have come to rely on each other, to learn from each other, to challenge each other and the trust that they’ve built is hard won. All those pressures kind of come together in the back half of the season.
Viewers have seen Olympia and Julian making their way back together. What’s that complication? Especially divorcing the person you’re still working with every day, which now seems more likely?
We want the workplace to be the place where we get our legal dramas and spy thriller fix, but we have a personal mix up in there all of the time. When things were going well between Olympia and Julian, it made going to work together really fun. And when things are not in a great place that starts to explode in the workplace as well and bring consequences for both of them.
What are your favorite episodes from the first half of the season?
Oh, it’s like children. I love a lot of them for different reasons, but I really love [episode] three [“A Guy Called Greg” because] I loved that that was the first moment that Matty had to look back on herself in her life and realize she was affected in ways that she didn’t expect to be. She was looking back on her own experience and what it meant to be a woman in the workplace and sexual harassment. I just felt that her eyes were an interesting lens to go there, and I really loved her performance in the courtroom too.
I really loved [episode] six [“Sixteen Steps”], which was our dual timeline episode, in which you saw when Julian and Olympia were breaking up just as they were getting back together. I thought it opened the aperture for us to get to know them more. At the same time, you got to see when Matty was in her deciding moment to go forward with the plan. I like when a few different moments come together at once, and I like the ending too, where suddenly it costs her a lot emotionally and she did not expect it to cost her [anything]. She’s suddenly terrified, and her health is in jeopardy, and she’s looking at herself and saying, “Wait, can I do this? Is it worth it?” Then right at the end, she gets the carrot of “you’re going on [the] Pharma [team].”
Those are two of them, but I like all the episodes for different reasons. I want to make sure there’s some pieces in each episode that will make us feel and know more about the character, and peel back more layers. Hopefully they’re all stacking up so that you get to know each character more. Anytime Olympia and Matty have a lot of scenes together, I love it as well.
One of the things that Matty is also revisiting is mom guilt.
Exactly. You know how you can hold a few things at once, I would say. It’s how you can have mom guilt and wish you were there [at home] more, but at the same time, really recognize how much your career gave you. So it’s looking at that and how much is valid, and how much is she taking on because of society versus a mistake she actually thinks she made? For Matty, that’s why it comes up at the end of [episode] eight. [Where] she says, “I didn’t miss any of those moments” and “I still know Ellie’s best friends from fifth grade.” All of that invisible labor that moms do that is hard to quantify, and you’re doing it while you’re at your other job too, right?
There’s never a moment that I’m running this show that I’m not also tracking where my kids are, emotionally, physically, what they need, and it’s doing that all at the same time, and picking when I have to be someplace and when I have to be at another. She’s reconciling with just all of that and how, when she started off in the workplace, she had so many glass ceilings she had to break that she just didn’t even mention she had a kid. You put doctor appointments on your calendar if you had to do something for your kid, because you didn’t want that to be seen as a weakness. Now she’s seeing a different kind of workplace; Olympia is very specific about when she has to go do something for her family. She’s always going to say it; that’s going to trump everything. But she also knows that’s a privilege that Olympia has because she’s making her own hours right now and can do that. So it’s looking back on that, and that’s what ends up getting between her and Edwin, because Edwin wasn’t expecting these big examinations of what their life was. But Matty, now coming into the workplace again, and being the parent of a 13-year-old again, is seeing things in a slightly more modern lens, and wanting and expecting different things and still feeling guilty.
I don’t think you can move through the world doing those two jobs — your work job and your family job — and feel like you’re crushing it all the time. There are constant moments that you feel like, “Should I have given more here? Or should I have given more here? Or is this part of my life? Am I prioritizing it in the way that I should?” She’s just experiencing that again, and it’s an important thing to talk about.
You mention Olympia having that privilege, and, to me, it’s because of women like Matty that she has that privilege.
Working women didn’t have that for a while, and then culture changes, and they say, “Wait, wait, why am I pretending I don’t have children here?” That is a part of life, and then culture changes slowly. But the more power you have, the more flexibility you have with your hours and childcare and stuff. The working woman is something we’re very interested in in the show, and female friendships and the way they support each other. How they’re going to end up mentoring Sarah becomes important as we go forward, bringing that next generation in. We start to really work through that.
Matty is talking about her case, and this tiny little thing that Edwin says of, “I’ll explain it. I’ve done it before,” [alluding to her not always being there for their daughter Ellie when she worked before] and suddenly it’s like a knife to her. [But Edwin] has also been a wonderful husband and an amazing support to Matty and is going along on this crazy ride with her. He was a man 50 years ago who had a very powerful wife who worked at a big law firm and supported that. So, he’s excellent too. And yet, there’s always ways we can be more excellent to each other.
Let’s talk about the explosive addition of Shae, with whom you worked before on Jane the Virgin.
Yes, lucky me. Shae is a constant thorn in Matty’s side. Certainly, somebody who is trained to sniff out the truth is always going to provide a lot of jeopardy for Matty. She becomes more integral to the plot. As we continue, she becomes a bigger problem. There are a few other secrets attached to her in the back half of the season.
Shae also kind of serves as an external conscience, right? Like the things that she brings up are kind of the things that are Matty’s greatest fears.
Exactly. And she is the person that Matty just can’t get around easily. And she doesn’t take her foot off the gas. She has Matty a little bit under the microscope, and she’s moving closer and closer to Matty and Matty has to figure out a way to deal with it, which continues for a few episodes. Shae has moves and Matty has moves, and so they sort of go toe to toe. In episode nine, you discovered a little bit of Shae’s involvement in the personal arena too. So, that just makes her even more of a ticking time bomb in Matty’s world.
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Matlock airs new episodes Tuesdays at 9 p.m. on CBS.
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