‘Matlock’ Boss Explains That Major Premiere Twist and How Kathy Bates Reacted

[Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for the Matlock series premiere.]

Kathy Bates transforms into a lawyer on the hunt for justice in CBS‘ Matlock, but the series premiere revealed in its final moments that her mission has a more specific focus than she’s let on. Madeline “Matty” Matlock has assumed an entirely fake identity that explains this reboot’s connection to the original 1980s TV show. The Andy Griffith legal series isn’t being recreated here. Rather, it’s directly referenced by the central character through her deep emotional connection to the series.

Matlock‘s premiere episode — which premiered on Sunday, September 22 at 8/7c but will switch to Thursdays at 9/8c starting October 17 — began with Bates’ unassuming grandma snagging a job at the prestigious Jacobson Moore law firm. She does so by sharing key information about what a legal opponent is willing to dole out in a settlement, securing an extra $4 million for the firm in the process. Matty used her innocent grandmother persona to listen in on this man’s conversation at a coffee shop that morning and to sneak into the Jacobson Moore office right in front of everyone’s noses. She got the job and immediately began revealing small, unexpectedly personal details about her life.

For starters, Matty said she’s a widowed grandmother who lived in a loveless marriage before her husband died and left her in considerable debt. Her daughter also died, she revealed to her colleagues, leaving her to raise her sassy teenage grandson whom she says hates her. Matty challenges presumptions about her with comedically sexual statements and an undeniable charm, and she proves herself a worthy hire through her willingness to lie to get potential sources to share information. All of these details make Matty quirky and likable and prove her skills as a lawyer.

The entire narrative is flipped on its head in the episode’s final scenes when it’s revealed that Matty is actually quite wealthy — wealthy enough to have a personal driver. Said driver takes her home to the massive house where her very much alive and adoring husband, Edwin (Sam Anderson), is waiting, as is her grandson who worships the ground she walks on. “Matlock” is really Mrs. Kingston, and she’s chosen Jacobson Moore for a reason. Her daughter really did die, leaving her and her husband to raise their grandson. And all three of them are in on an elaborate plan to avenge her death, caused by an opioid overdose.

According to Matty one of the firm’s top lawyers — either Beau Bridges‘ Julian Sr., Jason Ritter‘s Julian Jr., or Skye P. Marshall‘s Olympia — knowingly buried documents that would’ve gotten opioids off the streets a decade earlier. They’re determined to prove this and avenge all of the innocent lives lost to opioid addiction and their families. Matty is using the fact that she’s “damn near invisible” because of her age to secretly investigate the firm’s alleged wrongdoings.

Sonja Flemming / CBS

The O.G. Matlock connection comes from Matty and her husband’s history of watching the series with their daughter, a tradition continued with her own son. They’re inspired by the character to take legal justice into their own hands and use the character’s name as an alias to top it all off.

Showrunner Jennie Snyder Urman knows a thing or two about creating a layered story with a big twist. She did so with Jane the Virgin, which slowly drew out the story of Jane’s (Gina Rodriguez) unbelievable life that culminated in a fantastic reveal of the show’s series-long narrator in the very final episode. Here, Urman explains the Matlock twist, from how they made it work to Bates’ reaction to it, as well as the twists to come to TV Insider and TV Guide Magazine’s Kate Hahn.

Big twist at the end. Huge twist. Didn’t see that one coming. I don’t think any viewers are going to see that coming at all.

Jennie Snyder Urman: I hope so. I love that feeling of being genuinely shocked. And it’s rare because audiences are sophisticated, so we were really hoping that it would be as shocking as you’re saying it was. So that’s good.

When Kathy first read that script, what were your conversations with her about this huge twist?

That was what made it the most compelling to her. At the beginning when you’re reading and watching, Kat Coiro (the director) and I were really conscious that you don’t even want to smell a twist. You don’t want to smell moody. You want to be on a satisfying journey of a fish-out-of-water older woman joining a very slick law firm and appreciate that that could be the show. I wanted to make sure that that worked on its own. And then the twist added all of these other layers and allowed us to know that we were going to go in deeper and darker, and there were going to be secrets and twists along the way.

When Kathy got to the twist, she realized that, oh, this character is playing so many levels all at once and everything is not as it seems. And there was going to be a lot of complexity to the character. That’s what she looks for in roles, the juiciest, the most layered. And so our conversations were all about that and how exciting it could be, and then continuing to talk along the way [to make sure] that we build all of that specificity into the performance.

Skye P. Marshall as Olympia, Kathy Bates as Madeline, and Jason Ritter as Julian in ‘Matlock’ Season 1 Episode 1 (CBS)

Going forward, what can audiences expect? Is there going to be more that we learn about this, about why she’s there, about her past?

You will continually learn more and more about Matty, about what her life was like before, about her past, about how she got into this, about why we continue to deepen the reveals as we go in terms of character revelations. But also the show is structured so that there is a surprise at the end of every episode. Some will be bigger, some will be smaller. I have plans for achieving ones that are hopefully as shocking as the pilot, but they’re not all going to be. But they all will have a secret and there will always be a twist.

There’s always a sense in the writer’s room of, here are the cards that we’re showing the audience, and here are the cards that we’re keeping down and waiting to reveal at the end. That gives it an exciting energy.

She was a lawyer before, so what’s the chance of someone walking into this law firm who knows her from her real life?

She was a lawyer, and she’s in a totally different area of the law. She was sort of at the end of her career, so she’s coming in under the radar. She has a totally different name. She is counting on the fact that she won’t be recognized. And who knows if that holds true.

Who’s the most likely in the law firm to start to become suspicious of her?

Yael Grobglas plays this human lie detector, this jury consultant who can sniff out the truth. [She is] definitely somebody who comes into the office and throws Matty off a little bit early on.

Olympia’s pretty smart. What can we say about how Matty starts to feel ethically, morally when she gets closer to these people?

That’s the spine. You go in and you expect it to be one thing, you’re moving chess pieces along and then all of a sudden these chess pieces start talking to you and they have feelings and you get closer and suddenly it’s not a chess game. It’s a human game.

That is what becomes really hard for Matty, because I will say the love story at the center of this show is the love story between Olympia and Matty. It’s a hard-earned love story, and it’s a friendship that comes with peaks and valleys and they both learn from each other. They both grow and change. And when they come together, it’s incredibly satisfying and incredibly deep and meaningful to both of them. And then Matty’s still lying to her.

It just takes everything and amplifies the tension, and it makes it so much harder for Matty and makes her so much less comfortable with what she’s doing. She has to constantly make these moral and ethical decisions that she just didn’t anticipate when she was gaming out her strategy.

Brooke Palmer / CBS

She has also enlisted her grandson, who is 14. Does that become an issue at all?

She and her grandson both have this hole at the center of their lives. At the base of this is grief. The loss of a child or a parent; I can’t imagine anything more life-shattering. Life keeps moving and you’re just like, but wait, how? That is what these two have between them. They get so close. It’s a way of healing themselves, grieving, doing something for their mother [and daughter] that they both felt like they didn’t get to over her lifetime.

And then Edwin, Matty’s husband — played by Sam Anderson, who’s really wonderful — is the one who’s saying, I understand that he wants to be doing this, but should he be doing this? Is this really the path to healing? How about his life? How about his school? How about what we’re teaching him about deception and subterfuge and using people and manipulating people? Everything becomes more complicated, and his involvement in it becomes a more fraught piece between husband and wife.

There are some great almost espionage moments, which he’s part of. Tell me about what an audience is going to look forward to as far as those high-stakes moments she’ll get.

What I think is so exciting is that after the pilot, you get to be on the inside with Matty. So whereas we couldn’t smell any mood and we didn’t have to see twists coming [in the pilot] and we didn’t want to feel that tension, we get to feel it all the way through now ’cause we’re on the inside. We know the stakes, we know what she’s hiding, and we know what she’s after most of the time. That just gives this extra sense of, “No, don’t get caught!”

I really wanted the show to have these moments of espionage. There’s always going to be a little mission that she’s got to accomplish within the episode. There’s the larger legal case, there are the emotional stories, and then there’s going to be the mission of the episode, which is the spy element of what she has to get, what piece of information she’s trying to uncover on her way to solving the larger mystery. And sometimes she wins and gets it, and sometimes she doesn’t. Sometimes she’s almost caught, and sometimes she is and has to talk her way out of it. All of that is a fun tension that we get to play with now that the audience is let into the twist.

You said in some other interviews that when we get to the end of this first season, there’s going to be another reveal where Matty was fooling the audience. What can you tease about that?

It’s not that suddenly the whole show is going to flip and what you thought was true is no longer true. It’s not that, certainly not. It’s more just, we continue to reveal things and hopefully you’ll get a sense of surprises. And the case has its own reveals in what she knows and how she knows. But the person that she tells us she is at the end of the pilot is the person she is.

Matlock, Thursdays, 9/8c, CBS