Posted in: CBS, TV | Tagged: Kathy Bates, matlock

Matlock Is Crazy-Good But Is Matty a Dangerous Maniac (or Batman)?

Under its surface, CBS's Matlock is a crazy, subversive series because our sweet old lady heroine could be a dangerous maniac - or Batman?

Matlock is the weirdest new show on CBS, and it's a hit. This is at a time when networks and studios are particularly averse to risk, but somehow, they managed to sneak this reboot through. There is something hilariously demented about the show as it passes itself as a cozy lawyer procedural series: the heroine is a dangerous maniac!!

Think about it. The pilot had one of the cleverest swerves in recent network television. It acknowledges that Matlock was a TV show in the 1990s and the heroine has the same name as the original series' hero. She talks her way into getting hired by a white shoe law firm through social engineering, which is really a fancy way of saying "con." She comes off as a sweet old lady, but she's incredibly manipulative, using that persona to disarm people because they always underestimate an old lady. Sure, the pilot skips over the more arduous process a new junior lawyer has to go through to get hired, including getting her background checked out. Then the twist came at the end where she turned out not to be a poor divorced grandmother singlehandedly raising her grandson but rich, happily married with a genius hacker teenage grandson and using the fake name of "Matlock" to con her way into the law firm on a mission of revenge. She wants to find out which partner at the firm hid documents that covered up a big pharma corporation's culpability in the deaths of scores of people who became addicted to their opioids, including her daughter and the mother of her grandson.

This Matlock is Freaking Scary (and We're Here for It!)

Okay, leaving aside surely the entire senior partnership of the law firm is pretty much complicit in that cover-up for which she wants to bring them to justice, Madeleine "Matlock" has shown herself in each episode of the series – and we're only up to three so far – to be a highly dangerous and unstable sociopath! She continues to use her ability to act like a nice, doddering old lady to manipulate and lie to her colleagues and bosses at the law firm and the clients she helps. She's out to steal her bosses' confidential files and information through hacking. She has committed a long list of crimes already in just three episodes and will keep doing it for as long as she's keeping up her façade of being Maddie "Matlock." Her grandson has already committed a whole bunch of crimes with her by hacking into the phones and computers of her boss, and her loving husband is an accomplice for enabling and encouraging her. And this is all presented as okay because they are on a mission to expose big pharma corruption and the lawyers that helped. This is absolutely hilarious!

How Long Before She Goes Full Dexter?

The viewers are supposed to root for Maddie because she's the underdog taking on a powerful law firm despite being rich herself. She's like an old lady version of Batman, only without the costume; her husband is her Alfred, and her grandson is her Robin. Every single thing she does in every episode of this series is a crime!! We love it! This new version of Matlock is an old person's fantasy of outsmarting anyone under 50 and just glosses over the heroine being a criminal! It's like CBS' cozy version of Dexter for the old people who only watch CBS; all pretty much benign right now… at least, until Maddie "Matlock" eventually has her bosses and colleagues chained in a dirty basement and is torturing them like the next Saw movie. We live in hope.

Matlock is on CBS.

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