SPOILER ALERT! This story contains details about the premiere episode of Matlock on CBS.
Although Matlock has returned to the screen in name, that’s about where the similarities end with the new reboot.
CBS chief marketing officer Mike Benson recently talked about the challenges of promoting the Kathy Bates-led reboot of the 1986-’95 legal drama — particularly since it ventures so far away from its source material.
“We certainly would never set out to disparage what Matlock was,” he explained to Vulture. “But this is a wholly different show. What [showrunner] Jennie Urman envisioned was something that has the name ‘Matlock,’ but the reason for the name of the show has a twist behind it. So while we knew there were audiences out there who knew what Matlock is, we didn’t really want to actually utilize that. We didn’t want to go out and leverage the strength of the old Matlock, per se. It was really about, ‘If you knew the show, fine.’ We wanted to create something that could stand on its own and had nothing to do with the old IP.”
The original series starred Andy Griffith as criminal defense lawyer Ben Matlock, who’s known for his southern charm and unbeatable knack for closing a case.
Bates stars in the reboot as septuagenarian Madeline Kingston, who gets a job at the law firm Jacobson & Moore under false pretenses and the false identity Madeline Matlock. Claiming to be a struggling single grandmother, she’s actually a wealthy woman seeking to expose whichever partner contributed to the opioid death of her late daughter.
Jason Ritter as Julian, Kathy Bates as Madeline ‘Matty’ Matlock and Skye P. Marshall as Olympia in Matlock.
Sonja Flemming/CBS
Benson added, “The thing that I knew is that I didn’t want to give away the twist, but I wanted to promise a twist. So the best way to do that was actually to twist the campaign. And that’s really what we set out to do: Create marketing that would get people to say, ‘Wait, there’s something else going on here. Is it Kathy? Is it the show?’ The idea really stemmed out of the fact that Kathy Bates is not the Matlock you’d expect. In fact, there’s something much more deceptive going on here. So the goal was to create something that was provocative, to build on the idea that there’s some deception going on, and to create a bigger mystery—but certainly not give anything away.”
He explained that the show’s goal has been to “creating more mystery” around Madeline, instead of marketing the big twist. “The best form of marketing continues to be word of mouth, and so the more that we can do to drive more word of mouth around this series, that’s what we want to do,” explained Benson. “Our strategy here is to continue to build more and more mystery around Kathy, her character and where this series is going.”
Urman previously explained to Deadline that when pitching the show, she asked herself “what would be different” from the original.
“Of course, I was going to start with a female protagonist, but I didn’t want to just do a gender swapped version that wasn’t interesting,” she said. “So I started to think that maybe she is using the name Matlock. I gave myself sort of a challenge. I can continue to tell the audience they’re underestimating her but then they’re fooled at the end.”
Urman noted that she intends for the show’s big mystery “to be 100% resolved by the end of the season,” adding, “It will leave us with new problems.”
