TV: The Lincoln Lawyer – Season 3 (2024)
The frisky, rule-bending L.A. attorney and his crew tackle drug lords and mean cops
TV: The Lincoln Lawyer – Season 3 (2024)
Streaming on Netflix in 10 episodes
The Haller and Associates law firm is back for a new season, more volatile and enigmatic than ever. Leader of the pack is Mickey Haller (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), the glamour-boy L.A. shoot-from-the-hip defense attorney whose clients not only are in trouble, they bring trouble. And loyal Mickey’s not good at ducking for cover.
The first two seasons drew Mickey and his unorthodox colleagues in intriguing detail; they were a lively, unpredictable crew and it’s great to see them evolve further this time.
But the writers overloaded those earlier scripts. Tortuous sub-plots wrangled unevenly with rivalries in the L.A. legal community, Mickey’s less than credible sexual alliance with a client, his feisty teenage daughter and two ex-wives, his fidelity to his native roots in Mexico, plus an office pet dog named Winston.
Winston returns this time, but most of the sideline action is crisply tied to the central plot.
Drawn from the fifth novel in Michael Connelly’s Lincoln Lawyer series (The Gods of Guilt), Season 3’s ten episodes center on a Mexican drug cartel that wriggles into the lives of Angelenos and gets down and dirty when they refuse to play ball. If they come after you, watch out for live rattlesnakes in your bed.
Here their victim is a hapless operator of a legit escort site, Julian La Cosse (Devon Graye). He’s accused of the murder of sex worker Gloria Dayton (Fione Rene), seen throughout the season in vivid flashbacks.
In Season 2, Mickey believed he’d steered Gloria, who worked using the name Glory Days, into a fresh, wholesome life. Now he’s shocked to learn that she’d never actually moved to Hawaii to clean up her act but remained in L.A. and kept working as a high-paid call girl.
Julian was her employer but also a friend, and she told him that if he ever ran afoul of the law, Mickey could work courtroom magic.
Which is all that can save poor Julian from the murder charge. Glory Days was acting as a snitch for the DEA, and the agency had inveigled her into planting a gun on a drug cartel kingpin, which gets the murderous trafficker years in the slammer for that and related charges.
Who set up the kingpin and why is the mystery Mickey has to untangle. His faithful law firm cohort is again at his service. They include his two ex-wives who still can’t let go.
One of them, office manager Lorna (Becki Newton), is happily married to Haller’s streetwise operative, the glowering yet sweet-tempered Cisco (Angus Sampson). Lorna passes the bar and becomes a shrewd courtroom sidekick to Mickey.
Ex-wife No. 2 Maggie (Neve Campbell) is a lawyer who drops in on Mickey to share concerns about their daughter Hayley (Krista Warner), who wants to be a lawyer herself one day, but wonders if Mickey’s shenanigans are part of the job description.
Izzy Letts (Jazz Recole), a trusted clerk in Mickey’s firm, has also been his driver. Mickey needs one because he often works from the back seat of his SUV fielding phone calls and rifling through documents. That is, when he’s not at the wheel of his royal blue 1963 convertible Lincoln Town Car.
But Izzy’s dance studio is beginning to take off, so a new driver, Eddie Rojas (Allyn Moriyon), becomes Mickey’s curious, sympathetic aide. And he gets caught up in the violence that Mickey can’t sidestep as the too-bold lawyer closes in on the drug kingpin’s corrupt fixers in law enforcement.
I was beyond thrilled at the return of the gorgeous Yaya DaCosta (from Chicago Med) as whip smart prosecutor Andrea “Andy” Freeman. DaCosta is a divinely sleek actress, and when Andy and Mickey fall into a torrid affair, I imagined Da Costa would steal every scene they shared — and did she ever.
Troubled prosecutor Andy Freeman (Yaya DaCosta) is comforted by a tender Mickey
Also back is Elliott Gould as Legal Siegel (an old friend of Mickey’s deceased lawyer father), who’s both a surrogate parent and a seasoned hand at legal maneuvering. Gould is amusingly gruff and blunt in the role, yet he endows Legal with a kindly Solomonic patience when he demands that fast-and-loose Mickey slow down and think.
A tender touch is introduced as we realize that Julian is gay and meet David (Wolé Parks), his partner of nine years. The frail, small-boned Julian is in jail awaiting trial. He’s increasingly despairing at what he endures behind bars at the hands of other inmates.
Over time Julian loses weight and grows more depressed, fearing David will reject him. Their heartfelt connection keeps us hoping Mickey can eventually free this bewildered innocent man.
But what really happens to Julian in jail isn’t honestly depicted. It’s neatened, and hypocritically dramatized.
As in far too much television and movie writing these days, creator David E. Kelley’s screenwriters litter the script with f-words, endless outbursts of “holy sh*t” and a teeth-baring promise to go after “motherf*ckers”.
Yet for all this badass “tough” language, the ballsy scriptwriters apparently couldn’t bring themselves to use the correct words for what’s going on right before our eyes: PRISON RAPE. That’s what poor Julian is undergoing, and the series’ cowardly writers hint at it but won’t call it out, much less explore it.
This is gutless. Especially since they don’t shy away from depicting vicious beatings, bloodletting and the planting of a live rattlesnake. So much for overpraised “adult” writing in today’s Hollywood.
Still, Season 3 crackles. The tension nicely escalates and as Mickey gets closer to law enforcement corruption, the script by the end actually makes a sound case for reform.
Garcia-Rulfo convincingly deepens Mickey’s character this time, lacing his outbursts with a keen, never overplayed, sorrow.
The mayhem we see never should have happened. And the depiction of a failed legal system is persuasive enough to make me want to take on more cases alongside these do-gooders with odds stacked against them.
And wait until you see the stunning finale. Gas up for Season 4.