The Lincoln Lawyer season two affirms Manuel Garcia-Rulfo as great protagonist
The hit series inspired by US crime journalist Michael Connelly’s novels rolls through the hipster streets of LA for a second season.
Best-selling American writer Michael Connelly covered the crime scene as a journalist before he became a novelist. Covering the police beat at the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and the Los Angeles Times, Connelly rode with cops, examined crime scenes, hunted with detectives, and watched criminal attorneys in court.
All the time he wrote fiction, working at night and unpublished for years, a man with a mission. Journalism was his path towards completing it. And when he made it, he did so spectacularly. He not only wrote best-selling novels about Detective Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch, one of the most famous cops in literary history, but also about his paternal half-brother Mickey Haller, a criminal defence attorney in Los Angeles.
He’s the car-bound counsellor at law who’s been the hero of six of Connelly’s other crime novels.
As a lawyer in private practice, Haller prefers to not have a permanent office, opting instead to work out of his car. He has had a series of Lincoln Town cars, leading to his moniker The Lincoln Lawyer. His number plates read: “NTGUILTY” and “DISMISSD”. Haller’s personal life is a mess – too many wisecracks maybe – but when it comes to the long shot cases, he is the man every defendant in LA wants.
Haller, played cooly and with lovely empathy by Mexican actor Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, returns in the second season of one of Netflix’s greatest hits; the first of the David E. Kelley-produced show was the streamer’s number one program through its opening season. (In Connelly’s books Haller is half-Mexican, having had a Mexican mother.)
The recently released second season, based on Connelly’s The Fifth Witness, has hit more than 108 million viewings according to Netflix’s Top Ten list, taking out first place for English-language series. (At the time of writing it was still number one in Australia.)
The series, built upon the success of the 2011 movie, starring Matthew McConaughey as Haller, was created by Kelley, of Ally McBeal and Boston Legal distinction. He was a star writer in the era before cable, especially HBO, changed TV, but who has now found a new home in the streaming era. His recent track record as a show runner, which includes Big Little Lies, The Undoing and Big Sky, all lit with dashes of his quirky, absurdist, often screwball humour, and lots of clever talk, is as good as anyone’s.
He says he instantly liked Connelly’s flawed but likeable characters. “I felt the audience needed some escapism to feel good about the world,” he says, “And I’m addicted to legal stories. I’m fascinated by the law. That was an easy one to sign up for; the combination of law, Michael Connelly and filming LA’s colourful palette.”
Connelly is delighted with the production – he’s also an associate producer, enjoying the chance to test out new story arcs, narratives, and general material in the adaptation.
“The defence attorney is the lone guy against the well-funded and populated police departments and prosecutors. It’s a classic underdog story about a guy getting back on his horse and that’s what we’re doing in society.
“That makes it the right moment. Did we know that when we were going to make it? No. I think we really got lucky.”
The series was developed and co-created by former lawyer Ted Humphrey, who acts as show runner, best known for his work on award-winning The Good Wife, another successful, twisty legal thriller.
The drama works with the case-of-the-week storylines providing a tough current affairs backbone, the details are persuasive and often fascinating, while several story arcs continue across continuing episodes.
One constant is the way Haller, for all his notoriety, has conflicted thoughts and emotions about defending criminals. Although he frequently tells people that it doesn’t matter if his clients are guilty or innocent, his inner thoughts betray an intense concern with that question in the books. In the series, it’s something Garcia-Rulfo communicates with ease physically and facially. He has a hard time telling his daughter, Hayley, which clients he wouldn’t represent because everyone is entitled to competent and effective counsel.
As Haller says: “It’s all about putting on a poker face and managing emotion.” He appears much more comfortable defending clients that he knows are guilty. (Connelly based Haller on an attorney he knew in Florida called Daniel F. Daly who told the writer that “there is no client as scary as an innocent man.” The line became the epigraph to The Lincoln Lawyer.)
Kelley, an old hand with legal dramas and his writers, balance a rich, serialised plot with the bracing procedural elements. Haller constantly takes on the legal establishment while his personal life is always on the verge of disaster.
Like The Good Wife, it’s a pleasing example of what can be done with good old-fashioned serialised storytelling with a clever, original procedural structure.
It’s hardly a new idea but works a treat here. The courtroom drama not only is one of TV’s most venerable genres but one that is always engrossing and entertaining.
At times, the endearing quirkiness (a Kelley trademark) becomes just a little irritating but much of the enjoyment comes from the sparring between Haller and his two former spouses. Neve Campbell is Maggie McPherson, Mickey’s first ex-wife and a criminal prosecutor nicknamed “McFierce” by defense lawyers. And a delightful Becky Newton plays his amusing second ex-wife Lorna who is also his office manager and a paralegal in training. Her street smarts, obstinacy, and some sleuthing skills are constantly as useful to Haller as her ability to organise his caseload.
“The way he does things is the exact opposite to the way they should be done”, is her constant complaint.
The series kicked off its first season with the story of the second book in the franchise, The Brass Verdict, where Mickey Haller returns to the courtroom after a long absence. He’d just recovered from a shocking surfing accident, a stint in rehab, and an addiction to oxycontin.
“There’s a lot of people who have never defended a murder suspect or even been in a courtroom, but they can connect with somebody who’s been knocked down and is trying to get back up,” says Humphrey. “That’s the backbone of the story and that’s what Kelley wanted to do.”
Get to his feet he does, though some threads of the cases with which he was involved in the first season remain to be tied up.
It ended on a cliffhanger, with Mickey going for a surf while being watched from afar by a mysterious man with a Japanese tattoo on his forearm.
Obviously, the Jesus Menendez case, which he was working on before he went into rehab is not over as the new season starts with “The Rules of Professional Conduct”. Menendez, imprisoned for a murder he didn’t commit, was freed after a woman, Gloria Dayton (“Glory Days”), testified that Menendez was innocent, the real killer was a man with a tattooed forearm.
Haller is now celebrated as “the Lincoln Lawyer” after both the Menendez case and other successes. He is a darling of the press. He’s even got an interview scheduled with CNN’s Jake Tapper. This doesn’t please “Wife Number One”, as his phone identifies her, her own case load as a prosecutor diminishing for political reasons.
Haller becomes involved with Lisa Trammell, an attractive chef (“I grow all my own herbs”) at her trendy restaurant, elysian, in LA’s Frogtown neighbourhood, after he shares a dinner there with Maggie – it doesn’t go well – concerned about her seemingly evaporating career. (Frogtown is a progressive, pocket-community which socially conscious hipsters call home.)
It appears Lisa and her restaurant are the last holdouts against a major developer, Mitchell Bondurant (Clint Carmichael), who seems intent on gentrifying the area, and Lisa involved with a group of protesters. She’s soon hit with a restraining order, Mickey becoming her lawyer, though he soon has doubts when she becomes involved with a shady podcaster called Henry Dahl (Matt Angel) determined to cover her case.
Then the murder case of Haller’s friend Menendez (Sal Huezo) is reopened for some reason, and the Lincoln lawyer is brutally beaten up in a concrete parking station.
It’s all entertainingly diverting, even if the series lacks the kind of existential bleakness, the self-conscious humourlessness – what critic Elizabeth Alsop calls its “bias toward dark and punishingly tragic content” – that characterises many of the dramas of the streamer era. (It’s all getting a little self-consciously earnest.)
Explicit sex and extreme violence are absent, and one’s moral compass is rarely taxed. Haller is for the most part a virtuous hero and Manuel Garcia-Rulfo is a great protagonist. His is a performance characterised by a kind of self-mocking, rueful courage and a rough and ready vulnerability.
The Lincoln Lawyer streaming on Netflix
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