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Spoilers, believe it or not, for CBS’ Matlock will follow.
The mining of intellectual property has been going on for decades now. At the center of American entertainment is a litany of reboots, remakes, and reimaginings. Oh, and sequels and belated sequels and on and on. Oh, and movies that are technically not part of a series but take a known quantity, like Barbie or Mario, and turn them into a film. It’s all pretty lazy and craven. And yet, things are going to a new level on the I.P. mining front. Now, all a project wants is a name. Instead of grave robbing, the industry is simply stealing the identities of dead properties and using them for its own benefit.
Matlock is the recent example of this that frustrated me enough to get to writing. The original Matlock, starring Andy Griffith, is about an older lawyer who uses his folksy ways in the courtroom to great success. It was successful, and it is mostly remembered as the show that Grampa Simpson and all his friends didn’t want to miss. So, here we are in 2024, and there is a new Matlock. Kathy Bates is in the lead role, and the ads make it seem like, yeah, we’ve basically gender-swapped Matlock. Fair enough. That’s the least amount of effort to change it up when I.P. mining you can do.
Then, I read about the Matlock pilot. It turns out that Bates’ character’s name is not Matlock, she took that from the TV show, she is rich and successful, not a folksy senior citizen trying to make it as a lawyer in a big city, and she plans to take down the law firm that hires her because she blames them for her daughter overdosing on opioids or something?
In short, the show has nothing to do with Matlock. It just took the name and used it to sell the show. The whole thing was a bait-and-switch, and an attempt to ride on the coattails of an older, already-successful show. That, in a word, sucks. It’s worse than Twisters, which is in no way, shape, or form a sequel to Twister. It’s just another movie about tornados and it is drafting off the original. At least there was no bait-and-switch there, and at least Twisters was good. Matlock represents the nadir of I.P. mining. They might as well have called the show The Big Bang Theory Returns! or some such nonsense.
