“Even though I’ve had a long career and people know who I am, I was feeling a little bit invisible,” says Bates. “But more than that, I wasn’t challenged by the work in the same way. I hate to say I was losing interest in what I love to do, but you really need to find something that you really love to do. And it was a miracle to find something this well-written, this exciting, this unusual, and this deep.”
That miracle came in the form of Matlock — the CBS “prestige-ural” that utterly reimagined the word remake when it debuted last September. As conceived by Jennie Snyder Urman, Matlock skillfully blended the familiar tropes of a legal procedural with a compelling contemporary twist, winning an early second season renewal, topping broadcast charts, and earning plenty of awards buzz, including a Critics Choice win for its lead actress, among other high-profile accolades. Urman and the women of Matlock — series stars Bates (who plays Madeline “Matty” Matlock), Skye P. Marshall (Olympia Lawrence), and Leah Lewis (Sarah Yang) share their insights into Matlock’s success in an exclusive roundtable interview for Gold Derby (watch the full video above).
When she was first approached with the idea of rebooting the classic series Matlock, Urman immediately knew she wanted to something more than just dusting off Andy Griffith’s seersucker suits. “If I can just write about this woman who feels invisible and is using this cloak of familiarity to disarm people, that’s interesting to me,” she says. “You underestimate Matlock at your own risk. I wanted to create a really complex character, and I wanted her to interact with other really complex women.” Bates’ Matlock is a smart, savvy, 70-something lawyer who takes a job at a firm to ostensibly pay off her late husband’s debts, but is actually seeking evidence of a coverup of the opioid issues that contributed to her daughter’s death.
Urman’s modern-day Matlock puts the women of the law firm and their stories — both personal and professional — front-and-center. “I love the way they relate to each other and root for each other,” she says. “The biggest love story in the show is Olympia and Matty. And I always knew that was the spine of the show.”
That love story — a complicated but very real mentorship and friendship — plays out over the course of the first season, culminating in an epic showdown in the season finale, with (spoiler alert) Marshall’s Olympia finally unmasking Matty’s true motives in joining the firm.
“I consider Jennie to be what I refer to as a destiny advocate,” says Marshall. “She has played such a magnificent role in my life in just allowing me to be myself. And I’ve been able to do that same with Kathy and with Leah, just to be able to have success and still be authentic to who you are. That is the magic for me. That to me is the success.”
For Lewis, it’s also about the storylines, which weave real-world issues into the cases the attorney face. “One can only hope that the hard work and the preparation and the depth that you pour into your work will be received by people,” she says. “I had such confidence in every single woman attached to this project that it was going to be big and it was going to be something really, really special.”
Urman set a high bar for the narrative that will play out every week over the course of the 18-episode season. “I wanted it to be a love letter to women in the workforce, that you can really have passion about your career, and you don’t have to feel guilty about that,” she says. “The one thing that we always, always say in the writers’ room is that every one of our characters is smart and has to be really smart. And so if there’s anything that feels easy, we’re like, no. We really treat our characters with a lot of respect. And I think if you make your characters smart, then they just challenge you to get to something more real, more true, more surprising.”
That has established a truly collaborative process with all of her multi-generational stars.
The idea for Matty’s grandson, Alfie, being born addicted came out of a conversation with Bates — “Why didn’t I think of that?” admits Urman — as do Marshall’s signature turns-of phrase, which she dubs “Skye-isms.” Bates points to the conversation Matty and Sarah had about her grandmother being white and her being adopted, which mirrors Lewis’ own lived experience. “There are a lot of similarities between Sarah’s storyline and what was going on in my real life or things that had transpired in my life,” says Lewis, “I think even down to the very song that my father and I used to listen to when I was younger by Patsy Cline.”
Jokes Bates, “Sometimes I think \[Urman is] hiding in our brains.”
Steel yourself for even more deep-seated emotional revelations in Season 2, says Bates, who says she’s had a sneak peek into what’s ahead. “Matty was so focused on one thing in Season 1 and because of the relationships she has developed in Season 1, she is going to have her eyes opened 180 degrees to what she thought was happening,” she says. “There are a lot of twists, there’s a lot of turns. Matty’s learning a lot about herself. It’s going to be a real ride!”
