Re: What Did You Watch? 2024-10-20 (Sunday)

 What did you watch?
 

Matlock:
I re-watched the pilot for the Matlock reboot-that-isn't-a-reboot and then the second episode. I originally watched the reboot pilot a few weeks back when they previewed it. Even though I wasn't fully paying attention to it - I was playing a game on my phone at the same time - it still struck me as something a little different, in a good way. I've always like Kathy Bates in the things I've seen her in so I thought I'd take a look. The funny thing is that I only ever watched the original Matlock a very few times: I'm not a dyed-in-the-wool Matlock fan!
When I rewatched the pilot, I was again impressed with the relative originality of this take. I had wondered if Bates was going to be the much-older daughter or something of that kind but she's not even RELATED to the original characters: she's using the last name Matlock in place of her real last name and passing it off as a coincidence. She's essentially going undercover in the law firm in order to figure out which of three lawyers there is the one who covered up the dangers of opiods for an extra decade, leading to her daughter's death from drugs.
Despite her subterfuge, she IS honouring an important aspect of the original show in that the character she plays at the law firm is one that is typically underestimated. While Andy Griffith played a Southerner at a time when Southerners might still have been viewed as a little less sophisticated than their Northern cousins, Bates is both a Southerner and a woman so is even more underestimated, at least in theory. I'm not sure how long she is going to be able to pull this off though since she demonstrates considerable cleverness in the first two episodes alone....
SWAT:
The cancellation/uncancellation/renewal of SWAT took all fans of the show by surprise. I watched the season 8 premiere with curiousity, wondering who we'd see on the team. Would Luca have made a surprise recovery? Would Street be back from Long Beach? Would Deacon have been forced to re-retire to honour his promise to his wife? As it turns out, Luca and Street did NOT come back and Deacon did NOT un-retire so there's only one new face on the team and even she is familiar, if only from a different show. It took me a minute but then I realized that the new partner was one of Brett's old partners from Chicago Fire. (She may also have had a guest spot on SWAT a few seasons back based on some references to her having formally been from LA but then moved to Oakland with Hondo's assistance when things got uncomfortable in LA. I don't specifically remember that plot line but there have been a lot of episodes over the years.) Anyway, the episode itself was pretty typical SWAT. A schoolbus containing 10 children had been hijacked, along with its driver, by a group of former French Foreign Legion soldiers trying to eke out revenge on a Middle Eastern prince who had screwed them over. Luckily, the bus driver is Hondo's old football coach and friend so he helps keep the kids as safe as they can be while Hondo and the team track them down.
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Rhino