How a surprising plot twist elevates the CBS ‘Matlock’ reboot

While Urman was obviously aware that the TV landscape is filled with new renditions of old shows, she knew something that her doubters did not. Not only was this version of “Matlock” a gender-flipped premise with Kathy Bates taking on the role originally played by Andy Griffith, but there also was a shocking twist hidden at the end of the pilot, elevating the series from case-of-the-week show to spy drama.

As viewers saw during the premiere, which debuted last month with a “sneak preview” and re-aired Thursday night in its regular time slot, this Matlock isn’t just a sharp legal mind under a folksy exterior. This time, Madeline “Matty” Matlock lies about her identity as part of a complicated revenge plot against a big law firm that defends pharmaceutical companies. Matty, whose daughter died of an opioid overdose, knows that one of three lawyers was responsible for concealing documents that kept opioids on the market for years. So Matty tricks her way into a job at the firm so she can avenge her daughter’s death.

“I’m going to figure out who knew what and when,” Matty says when this is revealed in the final moments of the pilot, as she glares at photos of her three suspects (played by Beau Bridges, Jason Ritter and Skye P. Marshall) on a wall. “And then, I’m going to put them in jail.”

The reaction to the end of the episode (frequently along the lines of “Whoa!”) has been especially gratifying to Urman after the skepticism she faced in the beginning — the twist set the internet buzzing in a way it typically does not about a prime-time network TV series. About 7.7 million people watched the pilot when it aired Sept. 22, and the audience grew to 10.6 million viewers with multiplatform viewing over the next three days. With the exception of post-Super Bowl programming, it is CBS’s most-watched series premiere in five years.

“Matlock” is the type of show that could attract viewers simply by being a straightforward reboot — the original still has a hold on plenty of people. But Urman, the creator and showrunner of the CW hit “Jane the Virgin,” wanted to make more than a faithful adaptation. Eric Christian Olsen, one of the stars of long-running CBS property “NCIS: Los Angeles,” had the rights to “Matlock” through his production company. When he asked Urman to write the new show, she knew she had to take some big swings to stand out, while also making sure the series maintained the original’s essential DNA as a comfort-viewing experience.

“I just want to make sure everybody who is watching is not watching and saying, ‘Wait, why are they doing this? Is it just sort of a grab for attention?’” Urman said. “I think I had anxiety going in that fueled me to know that if I was going to do it, I had to do something very different — and that you would understand why we were using the title of ‘Matlock,’ but it was going to be in an unexpected way.”

At first, it does seem that Matty is just embracing the old Matlock’s vibe — being a charming lawyer who is underestimated because they seem so low-key. After all, Matty is an older woman, and as she points out in the pilot, this makes her virtually invisible.

“There’s so many dimensions to her,” Urman said of Bates. “She’s so emotionally present as an actor and as a human so that she really lets you in, and then you’re not expecting her to surprise you at the end.”

The opening sequence illustrates how Matty infiltrates the law firm: She pretends to be a chatty, bumbling grandma with a purse full of butterscotch candy as she evades three layers of security to crash a partner’s meeting. Upon arrival, she delivers settlement information from an opposing counsel that she had obtained by eavesdropping at a coffee shop — because the lawyer didn’t notice her standing next to him — and impresses everyone so much that she lands a job as the firm’s new associate. Even though she says she hasn’t practiced law in 30 years, she also brightly reminds the hiring partners about the concept of ageism.

In addition to gasps about the twist, Urman said that her favorite reactions have been from viewers who see themselves in Bates’s character. One woman who works on the show told Urman that her mother watched the premiere and said that “it made her proud to be an older woman.”

“Yeah, that made me cry,” Urman said. “That’s everything to me.”

This theme hit home for actress Linda Purl, who played Matlock’s daughter Charlene in the first season of the original series. In an interview, she said she felt emotional watching the new pilot (“It’s like revisiting an old friend, only they’ve gone on this odyssey and come back stronger than ever”) and raved about Bates’s take on the role.

“To have her character as a woman of a certain age who is really coming into their power is great,” Purl said. She added that one reason the audience connected to the original show was that Matlock relied on his everyday intuition to solve cases, which made it easy to relate to him, and Bates does the same. “In Kathy’s case, the pathos she brings is remarkable.”

Urman said there are a lot more twists in store as Matty navigates the law firm, helping with cases and trying not to arouse suspicion about her real plan; she tells her younger colleagues that she needed a lucrative job after her late husband gambled away all her savings. In reality, her husband is alive and well and helped her with her scheme — as did her teenage grandson, who set up Matty’s fake LinkedIn page and references. Urman said she’s enjoying writing the relationship dynamics of a family out for vengeance but is looking forward to swerving in unexpected ways.

“Definitely in the writers room we talked a lot about the role of secrets and surprises in the structure of the series and wanting to keep that element alive,” she said. “It was so seminal to the end of the pilot, we did not want to drop that. It’s a big part of the series.”