Out from under McConaughey's shadow
A nice little television program peeks out
We just finished Season 1 of Netflix’s The Lincoln Lawyer, based on the Michael Connelly series of novels.
Here’s how IMDB describes it:
“An iconoclastic idealist runs his law practice out of the back of his Lincoln Town Car in this series based on Michael Connelly's bestselling novels.”
It is a far better “television” experience than I anticipated.
A few months back we wrote about the 2011 motion picture of the same name starring Matthew McConaughey.
The movie caught me by surprise because I was watching it ten years after it was released, and I hadn’t really heard about it before. Turned out to be a good flick.
At its conclusion, I was begging for a sequel or a TV show to continue the franchise. Little did I know, Netflix already had it in development.
Here’s a little bit of what I wrote before I knew there was a series in the works or that they had already started filming:
It stopped making me wonder why McConaughey is doing those Lincoln car commercials.
McConaughey plays lawyer Mick Haller who, in lieu of a proper office, does his work out of his chauffeured Lincoln Town Car.
Here’s how IMDB describes it in one sentence: “A lawyer defending a wealthy man begins to believe his client is guilty of more than just one crime.”
We really enjoyed the movie and couldn’t figure out why there hadn’t been several sequels.
The “TV” show Bosch, also based on a Connelly character, is one of our favorites.
In the Connelly universe, Titus Welliver’s Harry Bosch turns out to be the half-brother of McConaughey’s Haller.
Bosch is on Amazon Prime and ended its 7-season run earlier this year. [Crucial edit: the show now continues on Amazon Freevee in the “spinoff” called Bosch: Legacy. I remain a big fan of the Bosch franchise.]
McConaughey is probably too high-priced to make the Lincoln Lawyer series into anything other than one or two stand-alone movies. It’s too bad.
I was right and I was wrong.
McConaughey was too pricey.
However, this new series is pretty good.
The movie borrowed primarily from the first book of Connelly’s “Lincoln Lawyer Series with Mickey Haller.”
This season is more-or-less a cinematic take on the second book (I’m told). A lot of the characters are the same as in the movie, but the actors are different.
There are six books in the Lincoln Lawyer series (from my count) and at least 7 other Connelly books that Haller appears in.
Connelly does a great job of “world-building” with his characters. I’ve never read the Connelly books, but there are “crossovers” in pretty much all of them so you can follow one character from one book over to another.
Connelly’s world is the same, yet his foci change in each book, movie, and series.
Mexican actor Manuel Garcia-Rulfo steps into the role McConaughey inhabited so well and plays Mickey Haller in the series. The only other star of much notoriety is Neve Campbell, who plays Haller’s ex-wife, Maggie.
I find it hard to watch Campbell play an adult, even though it has been two dozen years or more since I first saw her on television.
When I envision a Neve Campbell character as a more-or-less responsible adult with a career and a child and an (ex-) husband, it strikes me as totally preposterous. That reality hit home in the first few episodes of The Lincoln Lawyer. But I softened as the series progressed.
In my mind, and perhaps unfortunately, Campbell is an extraordinary example of a typecast actress. Angsty teenager/young twentysomething and perpetually whiny. Its just strange to see her “adulting.”
Campbell’s character in Fox’s Party of Five in the late 1990s was so wrought with misdirection and poor decision-making while rarely taking accountability for her actions that it is still hard to disassociate actor and character.
I vaguely remember the Scream franchise, where Campbell played the main protagonist of the series, Sidney Prescott, starting with the 1996 slasher flick Scream.
I’m not much for the horror genre, even though this series kind of satirizes the some of the best-known horror franchises of the 1970s and 1980s.
What I remember of Campbell’s Prescott—and forgive me if my quarter-century old memory slips a little here and there—was, frankly, the over-acting. It was perfect, however, for what this polyptych of films were trying to accomplish.
I still hear that tinge of Party of Five angst in her voice and persona from time to time in The Lincoln Lawyer, but she’s come a long way (as now a nearly 50-year-old actress).
Having said all this, if I was tabula rasa about Campbell’s career and the Lincoln Lawyer franchise, I’d have to say I’d be impressed with Campbell’s chops as an actress.
Not bad.
An evolution, I guess you’d call it.
Garcia-Rulfo, who I first saw when he took on the role of “Gabriel Ortega,” a menacing drug lord, in Season 2 of the Amazon series Goliath, has a hint of a Mexican accent. He is a native of Mexico, so no surprise there.
As a youth, the Haller character split time between Mexico City (with his mother) and Los Angeles (with his lawyer father, Haller, Sr.), thus we see a stronger Mexican vibe than McConaughey gave off.
Ultimately, I’d give the edge to McConaughey for the Haller role, but the margin is thin.
While we’re on the subject of Goliath, it was a Billy Bob Thornton vehicle that lasted 4 seasons over at Amazon and then just ended. I don’t think it was cancelled, but not out of character for a Thornton project, it was time for Billy to do something new, I guess.
Goliath was a great show and had some top-notch actors and entertainers on the cast over the seasons.
One of my personal favorites and chum of Thornton, Dwight Yoakam played a supporting role in Season 1.
Famed songwriter Paul Williams had a recurring role in Seasons 2 and 3.
The great LDP—Lou Diamond Phillips—appears in Season 2.
Dennis Quaid stars as Thornton’s adversary in Season 3.
Haley Joel “Walker told me I have AIDS” Osment appears in Season 4.
Many other great (and not-so-great) actors grace our screens in the 32 episode run over the totality of the series.
I was hoping against hope that there would be some sort of “crossover” into the Bosch universe, but to no avail.
Part of the problem with the non-network networks acting like networks is that each show is its own thing. Don’t get me wrong, though…as most of us are aware, the television programming on the “streaming” platforms is generally much better than what we get on the legacy networks or even most “cable” stations. HBO might still be the leader, but their big budgets have a ton to do with it.
Furthermore, regarding Billy Bob Thornton…he is one of my favorite actors and directors and screenwriters of all time. Bold claim, but he’s an immensely talented guy.
I was just checking out his “filmography” and it is much more extensive than I realized, and I haven’t seen everything he’s done. What I have seen, I like.
Thornton, on how he dove into his role as Goliath’s Billy McBride, “Pretty much anything I’ve ever done, I’ve played myself. It doesn’t matter what the role is.”
Billy Bob is nothing but authentic.
These days, Thornton is more concerned with his rock band, The Boxmasters, than television or film. Fine by me.
Whatever the guy does, I dig.
I could probably write a book on my appreciation for Billy Bob Thornton, but that’s for another day.
Moving on… back to The Lincoln Lawyer…
Comparing the actresses in the role of the ex-wife, I’d go against the grain and give it to Neve Campbell over Marisa Tomei. Like I stated earlier, Campbell is surprisingly good and this may be the best role I’ve ever seen her in.
Not the most iconic role she’s had—that either goes to her turn in Party of Five as Julia Salinger or as the Scream queen Sidney in that movie series—but this is her best, most believable role as an adult in the limited filmography of hers that I’ve been exposed to.
The arc of the series picks up after the events of the original motion picture with Haller rebooting his law career after a surfing accident and a subsequent “pill addiction.”
One of Haller’s former colleagues is murdered, and Mickey is tasked with taking over this lawyer’s practice and his entire caseload which includes defending a client accused of double-murder in a trial that starts in a few days time.
Haller juggles responsibilities with other clients as well.
His law clerk is his second ex-wife Lorna who is now engaged to be married to his chief investigator, Cisco, who is a former member of a Hell’s Angels-ish biker gang. This part of the show is a bit absurd, but it still makes for good fun.
One backstory and throughline across the entire season is Haller’s dysfunctional and often tumultuous relationship with his daughter and his first ex-wife (Campbell).
The other story that weaves through the season is Haller’s relationship with LAPD detective Griggs. In the book, this character is Harry Bosch, but since the timelines of the books and the shows and the movies are not concurrent—with each other or the present-day—and the fact that the Haller franchise is on Netflix while the Bosch franchise is a member of the Amazon family of “networks,” we get this oddly contentious relationship between lawyer and detective that is constantly on the verge of blowing up everything for all the characters involved in the series.
The brinksmanship in the Haller-Griggs relationship is too heavy-handed, but it does move the plot along. It’s a plot device more than anything.
I don’t think I’m speaking out of turn for most Haller/Bosch fans in saying that we would love to see a crossover of the Haller and Bosch characters. As mentioned before, they are paternal half-brothers, though it is unclear if both of them know that and, if so, when either one becomes aware of it. Time to dig in to the novels to find out, I guess.
In the recent season of the Bosch franchise, in the “spin-off” Bosch: Legacy, we see a young Bosch in his twenties briefly interact with a presumed “half-brother” who goes unnamed (likely because the Haller franchise is on a competing platform).
Netflix already renewed Lawyer for at least one more season. I’d like to see “them” knock out the entire series of books in a similar way that Amazon has and is doing with Bosch.
I think “they” can do it. Actor salaries shouldn’t be too big of a concern until if and when one of them skyrockets to fame.
The only somewhat “big name” in the series, if you don’t count Garcia-Rulfo or Campbell, is Hollywood mainstay Elliott Gould, who had a minor cameo in one of the middle episodes.
Speaking of big names and a series of books we need to dive into, especially as parents, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention The Tuttle Twins.
We’ve written of our fondness for The Tuttle Twins in the past and that I have several of the books for my own children.
Connor Boyack, the brainchild behind the Twins series, just launched America’s History: A Tuttle Twins Series of Stories, “a 240-page storybook that teaches inspiring stories and powerful ideas from our nation’s past, to help empower your children to live their best lives today.”
Recommended for children ages 7 to 13.
If you order the launch bundle, you’ll get
the hardcover of America’s History
a 200-page companion curriculum and activity book,
over 6 hours of audiobooks that will help the stories “come alive” for children
and over 4 more hours in a set of fun videos where children (and everyone) will learn the powerful ideas that history has to offer.
All of the content listed above would normally cost you $216, but during this launch period, the entire bundle is way less—approximately three-quarters the price of just the fully-illustrated and inspiring America’s History hardcover book.
https://olearyreview.com/twins/
Brian O’Leary