CBS’s new “Matlock” gets a kick out of genial misdirection. That’s one of a few ways showrunner Jennie Snyder Urman honors the original series, which ran from 1986 to 1995 and starred Andy Griffith as a folksy attorney who routinely got criminals to confess on the stand. Casting Kathy Bates is another: It’s hard to imagine anyone better suited to channel that particular kind of sly Southern charm.
But the procedural, which purports to be a gender-flipped version of its namesake, is itself a tad deceptive. Urman uses the cozy “Matlock” brand to smuggle a jeremiad about grief and obsession into a network show whose main thesis is that women, even enormously capable ones, become functionally invisible as they grow old..