Matlock Uses the Oldest Procedural in the Book to Argue About Being Invisible

Jennie Snyder Urman’s Matlock premiered on CBS with a sneak-peek airing on 22 September 2024 and moved into its regular Thursday slot on 17 October. Nineteen episodes ran through the network’s season, with a two-hour finale on 17 April 2025. The finale drew 5.6 million live-plus-same-day viewers, and the show held its position as broadcast’s most-watched new series of the season. CBS renewed it quickly. A second season began production for a late-2025 premiere.

I want to make a specific case for this show that is not the case most of the launch-week reviews made. The case the reviews made was that Kathy Bates is doing excellent work inside a cleverly-constructed network procedural. The case I want to make is that Urman has used the most conservative drama framework American broadcast television still produces to stage a sustained argument about who is allowed to be seen at work, and that the argument is the show.

The twist, and why it is structural rather than decorative

The pilot’s closing scene reveals that the character CBS’s marketing introduced as Madeline “Matty” Matlock, a widow returning to legal work to support her family, is in fact Madeline Kingston, a wealthy retired attorney whose daughter died of an opioid overdose. Kingston has invented the Matlock persona to infiltrate the law firm she believes buried evidence that could have changed the pharmaceutical-litigation outcome responsible for her daughter’s death. The pilot lets the audience sit with the first premise for fifty-eight minutes before pulling the rug in the closing two.

What a lesser procedural would have done with this reveal is treat it as a gimmick the show holds in reserve, returns to for arc-based plotting, and otherwise works around. What Urman does with it instead is build every case-of-the-week around the specific irony the reveal creates. Madeline solves the weekly case by being underestimated. The weekly client, the opposing counsel, the judge, and the firm’s named partners consistently misread her. The procedural is the structural machinery the show uses to stage the misreading, one episode at a time, across nineteen hours.

This is a more disciplined piece of long-form writing than the show gets credit for, and it is the reason the formula sustains across a full network order rather than collapsing at the fourteen-episode mark, which is the death zone for concept-heavy broadcast dramas.

What Kathy Bates does

Bates is playing two characters inside one body, and the show is built to display the work. Madeline Kingston is a corporate lawyer who has tried cases in front of federal judges and who has, across the years between her retirement and her daughter’s death, calibrated a specific kind of professional authority. Matty Matlock is the character Kingston has written for herself, the slightly-fumbling returning-widow whose competence is frequently a surprise to the room. Bates is playing Kingston pretending to be Matlock, and in most scenes the two readings are happening simultaneously.

The transitions are the performance. Bates will, inside a single scene, let Kingston briefly surface, recalibrate, and retreat behind Matlock again. Usually this happens when the weekly case brushes against material that touches the opioid-litigation backstory. Bates plays the brush rather than the story. The shift registers as a half-second change in posture, a slower blink, a word Kingston would choose that Matlock would not. The audience reads the shift before the other characters do, and the reading is the show’s central pleasure.

There is a scene in episode eight, roughly halfway through the season, where Madeline is questioning a junior associate about billing practices. The scene is written as a standard workplace beat. What Bates does is let Kingston surface for about four seconds in the middle of it, cold and specific, and then disappear back into Matty’s gentler register before the associate has quite registered what just happened. The associate has, in that four seconds, received an instruction she cannot quite name. Bates is doing work most network television does not ask of its leads, and she is doing it every week.

The cast around her

Skye P. Marshall plays Olympia Lawrence, the firm partner Madeline reports to and, across the season, grows closer to. The Lawrence-Matlock dynamic is the show’s secondary engine. Marshall plays Olympia as a woman who has reached senior partnership on the strength of specific and continuous competence, and who reads Madeline as a senior-women ally. The irony is that Madeline is an ally and is also, by the mechanics of the cover, actively weaponising that alliance toward an end Olympia does not know about. Marshall plays the ally register straight. The show does not let her in on the joke, and the not-letting-in is the ethical weight the show is building.

Jason Ritter plays Julian Markston, the firm’s managing partner. Ritter’s Julian is the character whose father’s name is on the firm and whose relationship to the pharmaceutical-litigation backstory is the show’s second-season engine. Ritter is playing a specific kind of network-television corporate son, entitled but not stupid, and the performance gives the show a functional antagonist that is not a cartoon. Beau Bridges arrives mid-season as Julian’s father and the show’s primary antagonist at the firm level. Bridges does the work without announcing. Leah Lewis plays Sarah, the junior associate who becomes Madeline’s reluctant work friend, and the Lewis-Bates scenes are the show’s most emotionally precise piece of writing.

The procedural itself

The weekly-case writing deserves marking because this register of television gets least critical attention. The cases on Matlock are almost all built around a specific theme of institutional under-seeing: someone in the case has been overlooked or dismissed, and Madeline’s strategy is to surface what has been invisible. The cases are not identical to her private mission, but they rhyme with it. The rhyme is the writing room’s discipline.

Urman, who developed Jane the Virgin for the CW across five seasons, knows how to run a case-of-the-week room. The specific discipline here is a template for how broadcast procedurals can work without drifting. Every weekly case has to serve the thematic spine. If the case does not rhyme, the episode does not get made. This is not cheap to do across a full network order.

The opioid material, handled carefully

The show’s private-engine subject is the opioid crisis, and the writing room handles this material with a specific and honest restraint. Madeline’s daughter’s death is referenced rather than staged. The specific pharmaceutical company and litigation are fictional, which gives the show the freedom to write the material without making specific claims about actual parties. The real-world opioid-crisis context is present, carefully, in the way Madeline describes her daughter across the season and in the specific emotional register of the episode-nineteen flashback.

What the show refuses is the crisis-of-the-week register. Matlock is not trying to dramatise the opioid crisis as a public issue. It is using a single family’s specific loss as the engine for a revenge narrative about institutional accountability. The smaller frame is the ethical choice. The show does not have the authority to speak for the national crisis, and it does not try to. It has the authority to speak for the specific grief of a specific fictional family, and it uses that authority with care.

What the finale does, and what it sets up

The two-hour finale pays off the season-long infiltration in a specific way: Madeline does not get the clean revenge the setup promised. She gets a partial accountability, a specific piece of evidence surfaced, and a reconfigured relationship with Olympia that the second season will have to work out. The finale refuses the cathartic-reveal ending the genre usually supplies. It substitutes a messier, more sustained set of consequences that complicate the second-season territory without foreclosing it.

I think this was the right call. A clean revenge resolution would have ended the show. What the finale does instead is convert the first-season premise into the more complicated second-season question: what does Madeline owe the firm, and the people in it, now that the revenge is partly underway and the alliances she has made are real.

What stays

Matlock is the television show that has most surprised me this network season. I started it expecting a Kathy Bates vehicle with a clever hook and found a show that has been thinking, continuously and specifically, about the conditions under which older women are permitted to work. The genre packaging is the Trojan horse. The argument inside is sustained, the craft is specific, and the star is doing the best work of a long career that has not been short on good work.

Watch it week-to-week if you can, not in a binge. The show’s rhythm is the network rhythm, and it rewards the pacing it was built for. The second season arrives in the autumn. I will be back for it.