I guess we're going to talk about the Matlock reboot

Hey everyone, it’s me, Bill.

Thank you so much for signing up to receive posts, despite the fact that I “launched” the newsletter something like two solid years before sending this, the very first post. So I guess thanks to the 2024 reboot of Matlock for making that happen.

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We’ll get to Matlock in just a second, however. A brief bit of … I guess it’s not housekeeping, if this is the first newsletter. Housewarming? Sure; let’s go with that.

[Note: after writing this into I finally found the Substack dashboard and apparently I wrote and sent precisely one newsletter in 2022, sort of laying out a similar plan, and the original content was related to some momentary sports scandal that happened so long ago that I don’t even know what I was obliquely making a joke about. I’m sure it was funny and everyone got it at the time. Let’s just pretend that was a scrapped pilot and this is the recast one that people will actually see. Or pretend that post was Eric Stoltz and this one is Michael J. Fox.]

My plans for this Substack are to begin a cadence of two to three posts a week, and once I’ve proved to myself and to you for a couple of months, I’m going to turn on monetization. I’ll still have portions, or maybe one a week that’s free to read. So if you like the content, think about whether maybe you’d like to pay for the content.

(Also, I’m probably at some point after I’ve developed a cadence, maybe prior to moving to monetization, going to see about whether I want to move this newsletter off of Substack and maybe onto a platform that doesn’t quite so gleefully spotlight and shovel money to Nazis. But this is 2024, so I’m sure “give Nazis money and a platform” is just the cost of business of any UGC digital media enterprise. We’ll see!)

One final bit of info about the content you’ll see here: I’ll be writing about pop culture, movies, television, music, maybe some stuff about having a young kid. There will be posts where I write about writing, and about the entertainment and digital media industries, and both insights and frustrations related to all of that. (My next few posts will be about a Guy Ritchie movie, about the frustrations and rewards of writing a novel, and about looking for representation. Probably also at least one post about an album or artist I really want to talk about. I’m amassing a surplus before I begin sending, to assist with the whole “cadence” thing.) I may write about social justice, or identity, or mental health. I will almost certainly write about baseball, the NFL, or the NBA. But I am trying, to the best of my ability, to not write about professional wrestling. I try (and fail) to not think about wrestling, to not have opinions about wrestling, and ultimately end up hastily typing my wrestling thoughts onto Twitter (it is still Twitter on my phone, and always will be until X bricks whatever the last version of the Twitter iOS app is) or into multiple rooms in my friends Discord. I have an opportunity to make this my own space on the internet free of the stink of the world’s least savory profession/art form, and I may as well see how long I can keep that going.

(If you absolutely feel like you want to beg me to write about fake fighting, please feel free to say so in the … are there comments on Substack? Guess I’ll find out!)

Anyway: Matlock.

When my wife and I began to see commercials for the upcoming Matlock reboot, our initial reaction was, I imagine, the same as everyone else’s: “Huh.” Not surprised, not incredulous, just sort of a “would you look at that.” We assumed we’d probably check it out at some point, since it’s a courtroom show starring Kathy Bates. Seems like the sort of thing that someone gets around to watching an episode or two of at some point. No setting anything aside, no going out of one’s way, but … you know.

I didn’t actually know much about the original Matlock off the top of my head, apart from it being on in the afternoon on some channel or other for like the middle 15 years of my life, and of course the ubiquitous jokes on The Simpsons. As is the case of how television used to be, I’ve seen a spare five minutes a handful of times, but I didn’t know anything about the character of Matlock or the format of the show, other than he’s an elderly Southern lawyer. I guess I assumed some semblance of Matlock was part of the miasma that animated Futurama’s chicken lawyer. “Now I may just be a simple chicken, you-ah honah …” That sort of thing. I know Perry Mason gets the guy to confess on the stand, I know Columbo starts by seeing the murder, but I didn’t know anything about Matlock.

While watching those commercials during one of the early football Sundays this year, I checked out the Wikipedia for the original Matlock and learned that there wasn’t much to it; it was pretty much what I expected: a small-town courtroom procedural. And the defining characteristics of the Matlock character seemed to be that he was a cheapskate who loves hot dogs. Just wolfs the suckers down. Although Wikipedia declined to clarify whether he raw-dogged the glizzies.

So whatever. Kathy Bates is just going to be a new version of Matlock, because existing IP is the only thing that matters anymore, and Angela Lansbury refused to let anyone remake Murder She Wrote. And Poker Face is already approximating Columbo, to great acclaim. If a company owns a thing that a high enough percentage of human beings can recognize the name of, may as well take it on one more trip around the sun.

But then the latest batch of commercials for Matlock features Kathy Bates saying, “My name’s Matlock. Like the old show.” And let me tell you, dear reader, that shit stopped me dead in my tracks. Does Matlock exist in the world of Matlock (2024)? Is the character of the original Matlock a real person upon whom the original Matlock was based in the universe of Matlock (2024)? Are Andy Griffith’s and Kathy Bates’ characters related? Or does Matlock just watch Matlock? AND WHY WOULD ANY OF THIS NEED TO BE INCLUDED IN A REBOOT? Why are you making a selling point of your new network prime time drama that the original show exists in the universe of the reboot?

So after seeing a second commercial in this campaign to verify that we didn’t have a gas leak, we hastened to the “sneak peek” available on Hulu to watch the pilot of Matlock (2024) and figure out what the fuck was going on here.

The largest of the questions gets resolved right off the bat. Kathy Bates’ Matlock, an extremely shrewd former lawyer in the “quirky person who knows everything about every topic” trope permeating network television (High Potential, Elsbeth) worms her way into an impromptu job with one of the largest law firms in New York City by leaning into letting people think she’s a sweet little old lady: a demographic that is both invisible and condescended to, which allows her to glean information and infiltrate locations and conversations, which proves to be invaluable when people are trying to gather information in order to litigate. It’s in the first real scene of the show, where she obtains the job, that she introduces herself in that way: “Matlock. Like from that old show, Matlock, and yeah, I’ve been hearing that my entire life.”

So in this new Matlock, Matlock exists, and she happens to have the same name of the title character of that show. Okay. That answers the question of what but it comes nowhere close to answering the more pertinent why. If you’re making a new Matlock, what purpose does it serve to make sure that Matlock exists — solely as a television show — in that universe? Do the creators believe it would be so incredulous for a character in Matlock to be named Matlock in Matlock (2024) that it must not go uncommented upon? Especially since you’re changing everything about the show by setting it in a big law firm in a big city with a gender-swapped character who shares the surname of the character but literally no other signifying traits apart from said surname and approximate age? You’re the ones making Matlock (2024). You can literally just choose not to do any of these things and if you choose to do any of them, you can literally just choose the characters in that show to not comment on it. Or just reboot Matlock in name only, and then don’t reference that there’s another show with that name. You have every option available to you, and you’ve chosen the most baffling ones.

But wait. But wait. There’s going to be a critically important twist here, and it’s going to make everything I’ve just said even dumber and more nonsensical.

The bulk of the first episode of Matlock (2024) deals with all the standard network legal drama table setting and character introduction: there are a lot of characters from different backgrounds at this law firm, including two junior assistants who are paired with Matlock for MAXIMUM GENERATIONAL CULTURE CLASH, and Matlock and the two Gen Zers gather important intel regarding the police misconduct civil suit at the center of the episode.

[Spoilers for the first episode of Matlock (2024) follow here]

After everything at the firm wraps up for the episode, Matlock takes her leave and departs for home. BUT WAIT, she’s getting into a limousine! whaaaaatttttt, she was never in a limousine before! Inside the limousine, she puts on a wedding ring! whaaaaaatttt???? she wasn’t married before!! And then she pulls into the grounds of a huge mansion, where she’s greeted by a loving husband who calls her by a different name. NOW HANG ON JUST A MINUTE, BUSTER. Inside, she’s greeted by an approximately 11-year-old grandson, who asks her how her first day(?) went. She says they won the case and he gives her a high five and says, “Yesss, just like Matlock!” and then she comments on how much of a Matlock superfan this circa-2024 child is.

Finally, not-Matlock walks with her husband into some sort of den or lair, where photos of all of her law firm coworkers are pinned to a corkboard with lots of appropriate notes and red string connecting things.

And this is where she lays out her big explanation: their daughter died years ago of a drug overdose, and the law firm she’s working for now were the ones who had the chance to take opioids off the market(?) but declined to(??) so now she’s posing as Matlock in name only (I guess in tribute to her grandson, the resident Matlock geek who definitely has lots of friends at school) in order to infiltrate this law firm, gather all the dirt, and nail their freaking asses to the wall.

It would be an understatement to say that I flipped out about this. It’s bad enough that it rendered the previous paper-thin premise for a Matlock reboot moot, but it genuinely has to be the most gall anyone has ever displayed when invoking established IP. It’s a Matlock reboot, but it’s being marketed as “Do you remember Matlock? Because the people who live inside this show do!” And in absence of either a new spin on an established character trope, or sharing any DNA whatsoever with the IP, or even “a bold new take” on something, this network is instead using only the name of the show in order to baffle people into watching it, before revealing that literally the only thing Matlock (2024) has in common with Matlock is that YOU, the viewer, in addition to the characters in the show, remember that Matlock existed. I’m far from someone who rails against established IP: if something is good, I don’t care if it’s a remake. Not even within this same genre! The new Perry Mason was phenomenal. Presumed Innocent on Apple TV+ was great. But this is a level of crassness in invoking IP that’s fairly beyond the pale.

Apparently it worked. Because it baffled me into watching it, and in fact here we are, Talking About It Right Now. I’m not going to watch any more of this show, barring some The Lyon’s Den-level finale reveal. I don’t care about whether the “legacy” of Matlock is ruined here (because there’s really nothing to ruin), and a cursory look at commentary regarding the first episode seems to indicate that at least some outlets find the twists here to be in the “bold new take” vein.

But I think a bold new take involves utilizing at least some tissue from the original IP. I don’t think it counts if I said “Hey, I’m doing a Quincy M.E. reboot!” and the pilot has a guy who’s a medical examiner and says “My name’s Quincy. Like the old show! So random, huh?” And then the camera zooms out and it turns out the year is 2445 and they’re all on a terraformed Neptune and he’s a medical examiner, but actually he’s a space vampire whose sole mission in undead life is to hunt down and destroy the galactic council that funds the corrupt Medical Examiner Association, so that no one can ever be medically examined again.

But if that does count, please email me if you want to give me money to write that pilot. I’m available.

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