There are many pleasures to find ”Matlock“The sly CBS Update of the old Andy Griffith Legal drama that serves as both a restart of and a comment on the original series while going in completely new directions. Like Madeline “Matty” MatlockThe Kathy Bates Do the finest work in her career thanks to a premise-she is a rich woman who works undercover as a fighter widow in a highly priced law firm where she hopes to find and reveal the litigation that she blades for her daughter’s death-which urges her to play all the emotional notes on the scale and give a multi-layer.
The writing about “Matlock” is some of the smartest and most entertaining on network TV, and Bates is supported by an ACE Ensemble role. But the show’s secret weapon is its production design, which helps to pull the audience into Matties Psyke and at the same time create the scale that Manhattan Set Drama requires. For production designs Adam RoweThat scale was the end result of several years of development that started two full series ago.
As early as 2020, Rowe was the production designer on a medical series called “Good Sam” which only lasted for one season. “We built a spreading medical campus for a cardiology department,” Rowe told IndieWire. “We had a lot of story to tell, and a lot of characters. In realized, doing that show, that a hospital is like a spaceship, where each room or level is customs thacipment it is supporting. So through Muda of Dating, We Had. Flipped and Walls That Changed, and We Refined The Idea of How To Use Our One Or Two Stages to Be Many Things For Seven or Eight Storylines.
When “Good Sam” was interrupted, Rowe was determined to reuse it for both creative and environmental reasons. “It’s one thing to try to save plastic water bottles at exhibitions or to print less, but it is a completely different thing to recycle steel and glass,” he said. Since the set he built was so production-friendly, with built-in LED lighting, double doors and “hiding holes” for hair and makeup, Rowe was able to convince the producers in Netflix’s “glamorous” to reuse it and transform the hospital for “good Sam” into offices for offices for an upscale makeup company.
After “glamorous” was canceled during the industry strikes, Rowe was again left with an impressive set that he could not carry to just throw away. “We had hundreds of thousands of dollars in glass and steel and floors and copper,” Rowe said. He coordinated with the producers and the art department to get the set being sent to Los Angeles, where he added it once again to create the elaborate team offices in the center of “Matlock.”
Rowe says that without the starting point for “Good Sam” and then “Glamorous”, he would never have been able to build such a complicated and huge set for “Matlock”, but that “Matlock” was favored by the previous work and built on it. The scale is important because one of Rowe’s main goals in the series is to convey Mattie’s point of view through its production design.
“From Mattie’s point of view, the city of Manhattan always grows up and out as the story leads her to different places and different parts of the team,” Rowe said. “All the building blocks we set up for the hospital are still paying off. It is not only environmentally friendly, but it makes our show feel as big as it does. If we started from the beginning, we would not have had the budget to build as much.”
One thing that helps Rowe tell the story from Mattie’s perspective is the fact that he, just like her, does not always know what comes from week to week. “I was as surprised as the audience when I read the script,” he said. “It wasn’t as if I had any kind of inside. At most shows you don’t always know what’s coming.” For this purpose, Rowe tried to design the sets on “Matlock” to be flexible and adaptable no matter where the story went.
“When I worked on” Mad Men “with Dan Bishop, he said that metaphorically you always need a back door,” Rowe said. That is why there are so many doors on ‘Matlock’, because we never know where the story will go. I might need a wardrobe, or I might need a bathroom. Sometimes on the show, we only get to see something that horses with blinders on, then at the end of the section move and we see a little more. The landscape just has to adapt to those who write tricks, and we do not always know what they are not.
The sets on “Matlock” are part of the fun, and the hard fans of the show have taken to Reddit and other platforms to dissect the contradictions in continuity that often occur and which Rowe says are completely intentional. “Some shows are really strict with continuity, but we really look at each section individually,” Rowe said. “As long as we do not disturb the audience or loosen their brains, we follow the story. We have taken labels from the set and removed names from the doors, and we do not tell the audience what floor we are on. The audience cannot really find out and it reinforces the intrigue.”
One of the most impressive aspects of Rowe’s work – apart from the fact that during the show’s first season he has managed to design well over a dozen separate courtrooms, none of whom are the same and anyone who serves the drama in each special section – is that “Matlock” feels most important New York … yet shoots in Los Angeles.
“Shooting Los Angeles for New York is tough,” Rowe said. “Our streets are wider, we have different trees, New York is older. Los Angeles does not have the scale. But our site department does a good job of finding small corners and pockets that work.” Rowe felt that the ultimate validation came when Paparazzi photos of Kathy Bates on site began to get around the internet. “The pictures said they were by Kathy Bates in central New York, and it made me laugh because these photographs were taken here in LA,” Rowe said.
In the end, Rowe feels that doubling LA for New York is less problems than it may be because the series is so linked to Mattie’s subjective experience. “New York takes a back seat to what is happening in her life, and it’s not a concession to shoot in LA, I think that’s how the story works,” Rowe said. “New York is not as much presence as the law firm.” As I said, Rowe said that he often tries to strengthen the idea that the law firm is in Manhattan by expanding the scope when possible.
Rowe also says that one of the benefits of working with “Matlock” is that it is a character controlled show rooted by an actor who is really a pleasure to work with. “I know many people have passion for Kathy Bates and have loved her for a long time,” Rowe said. “I just want people to know that she is as wonderful as you can imagine, because you hear celebrity stories … Then there is Kathy Bates. For all the people who wonder,” Is she as amazing as she is on the camera? ” – The answer is yes.”
