Stakes - and body count - upped in Australia’s most watched TV show
With a round of applause please welcome back Michael Connelly’s Mickey Haller, the Lincoln Lawyer, and another of his entertaining quests for justice in a treacherous Los Angeles.
With a round of applause please welcome back Michael Connelly’s Mickey Haller, the Lincoln Lawyer, and another of his entertaining quests for justice in a treacherous Los Angeles.
Haller, played with lovely insouciance by Mexican actor Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, returns in the third season of one of Netflix’s greatest hits, the David E. Kelley-produced program again debuting as No.1 internationally for the streamer – and instantly the most watched show in Australia.
Haller is the infamous courtroom hustler who became famous in LA in the days when his office was the back seat of his Lincoln Town Car. Haller’s become so famous a whole contingent of Lincoln lawyers have cropped up, their Town Cars lined up like a funeral procession routinely crowding the curbs outside the courthouses of LA.
(The successful movie, starring Matthew McConaughey as Haller, added to his notoriety, drolly acknowledged in the series, Haller fictionally having sold the rights and buying his stunning house above Hollywood Boulevard overlooking L.A.)
But now he’s the owner of a large SUV, the Lincoln Navigator, though he also drives a 1963 Lincoln Continental convertible wearing custom plates that read “NTGUILTY” while the Navigator’s plates are “DISMISSED”.
The Continental once belonged to his deceased father who was also a defence lawyer. He married a B-level Mexican movie star, Haller’s mother, and has a habit of turning up as a ghostly presence in the series reminding Haller to get his clients off, any way he can.
The show was created by Kelley of Ally McBeal and Boston Legal distinction, and more recently Big Little Lies, The Undoing and Big Sky. The series was developed and co-created by former lawyer Ted Humphrey, who acts as show runner, best known for his work on the award-winning The Good Wife, another successful show about ethics and the law.
Humphry’s co-showrunner is Latino Dailyn Rodriguez, whose credits include Ugly Betty and Queen of the South. She brings insight to a leading character who is both biracial and multicultural, something authentically LA, even though his storyline is not about being Latino.
Connelly is an executive producer and has supported Humphry’s adaptations of his novels from the start. “My relationship to the books was just as a long-time fan and a reader of all of Michael’s work,” Humphry says. “Once the opportunity came to adapt these books, I jumped at it because I think Michael’s books are incredible page-turners. What we’ve tried to do with this is adapt these great suspenseful edge-of-your-seat, can’t-wait-to-see-what-happens-next books into that version of a TV show.”
He says that while it’s rare to have the novelist whose works are being adapted around the writer’s room for the show, it’s an advantage to have by his side the oracle of all things Micky Haller. “You always have the ultimate authority that you can refer to and say, ‘Would Mickey do this or that?’ And when you get Michael’s blessing, you feel like, ‘I’ve done right by this character’. The last thing I would want to do is do damage to a beloved character.”
Haller’s a reluctant knight errant, self-reliant and sharp-tongued, who fights his battles in the criminal courtroom, “the world without truth”, as he describes it. Haller in all his encounters with the system pursues a moral justice that transcends the corrupt routines of society’s legality. His approach is based on this simple reality: “Cops lie. Lawyers lie. Witnesses lie. The victims lie. A trial is a contest of lies.”
He seeks not only factual solutions to often exasperating cases, and the various mysteries he confronts, but a moral stance to the often-dubious events in which he becomes enmeshed. But, in the courtroom, he’s not above using a few old vaudeville tricks and legerdemain to bring them off.
It’s there he confronts the villainy of the seemingly innocent and the corruption of the seemingly respectable, like a legal version of the hard-boiled cop immortalised by Raymond Chandler’s novels, also set in LA.
He’s sensitive, tends to internalise emotions to the irritation of his ex-wives, but while he carries a shield of cynical apathy Haller always affects a wise-guy coolness and wit.
He still works in the Navigator, a half-eaten box of donuts often by his side, but there’s now an office too, run by one of his ex-wives, where his crew tend to hang out dining on the best of LA’s takeaway. At the start of season one, after battling a surfing injury and an addiction to oxycontin, Haller returned from a career break when a fellow lawyer named Jerry Vincent mysteriously dies and bequeathes his entire practice and caseload to Mickey.
A recovered Mickey and his team soon become one of the best criminal defence practices in LA, while disdained and reviled by the District Attorney’s Office and its prosecutors.
Haller has two ex-wives, both still a big part of his life. One of them, Lorna, played by the irresistibly comic Becki Newton, valiantly attempts to attain her law licence while organising Haller’s affairs. She’s involved with his investigator Cisco, the wonderfully gruff Angus Sampson.
And the other ex-wife is Neve Campbell’s Maggie, one who is on literally the opposite side of the table from Haller, a prosecutor, known as “Maggie McFierce” to her colleagues. They don’t see eye to eye professionally or personally much of the time, and yet they co-parent their daughter.
There was only one element of his best-selling novels Connelly was concerned about when it came to the TV version. “There’s a dichotomy within Mickey that he’s this killer in the courtroom and in his personal life, not so much,” Connelly says. “He wants to get his family back. He wants to stay clean and sober. He has all these things going on, but as soon as those big wooden doors open and he enters the courtroom, he’s fantastic. That’s the essence of this character and these stories – I just wanted to make sure we had that.”
Season three is based on Connelly’s The Gods of Guilt, the fifth book in the Lincoln Lawyer series. The LA Times called it “a propulsive, engaging legal thriller” and The Washington Post said: “This is the best one yet.”
“In Mickey’s world, the ‘Gods of Guilt’ is a phrase we’ve used before that generally refers to the jury,” Humphrey explains. “But in this story, Mickey starts to realise his own Gods of Guilt extend beyond any particular case; it’s all the people in your life who matter and for whom you do things.”
The show was initially structured around a case-of-the-week storyline where Haller pulls his tricks on the courtroom for acquittals – as he says there’s a “fine line between seeking the truth and seeking a verdict in your client’s favour; they weren’t always the same thing” – while several intense story arcs continued across continuing episodes. But Humphry and his colleagues have upped the emotional stakes in season three, with more violent twists, a heavier body count and a storyline that’s more personal for Haller – a client he was fond of is murdered at the start, and Haller is concerned that he might have done more to prevent her death.
She’s Gloria Dayton, aka Glory Days (Fiona Rene), and in the first episode, La Culebra, or Snake, Haller finds himself defending her pimp Julian La Cosse (Devon Graye), who’s accused of Glory’s murder – though he’s plagued by thoughts that somehow her death is his fault. Through the season, Haller battles with his own Gods of Guilt.
As the plot unfolds, Haller, although unsure of La Cosse, soon realises if he is indeed innocent then something more sinister is in play. And he’s soon involved with shady lawyers, a carjacking case, a mysterious man in a hat, vicious cartel members, and a rattlesnake sent as a warning.
There’s also the appearance of an antagonist from Haller’s past, a hard-nosed cop called Bishop (Holt McCallany), who after Haller wins a case against him early in his career, warns the lawyer, “These tricks you play, Haller – somebody’s gonna end up dead because of you. Maybe you should think about that.” Then there’s the role played by a seemingly untouchable DEA agent called DeMarco, who seems to be linked to a double murder with Bishop also sometime in the past.
It’s a dense, compelling story, full of Connelly’s’ characteristic revelations and cliffhangers and told with some nice light comic touches. It’s gorgeous to look at, too, and as Humphrey says his production channels Raymond Chandler’s menacing sense of place. “LA is this mysterious, brooding entity,” he says. “It’s bright and sunny but that just serves to accentuate the darkness lurking around every corner. There’s a lot of history here, not all of it nice, that echoes off the streets Mickey drives.”
The Lincoln Lawyer is streaming on Netflix.