I watched the first four episodes of Goliath last night.
I detected echoes of Better Call Saul. Both shows are about lawyers, and both involve one lawyer who spends most of his time relatively isolated and in the dark. What’s up with that? And both involve another lawyer who’s trying to prove something. This other lawyer is the center of the show, Jimmy McGill (played by Bob Odenkirk) for Saul and Billy McBride (Billy Bob Thornton) for Goliath. And–wouldn’t you know?–there’s a conflict between these two lawyers that drives much of the plot.
What’s up with that?
Of course, the shows differ in many ways as well. In Saul the two lawyers are brothers whereas in Goliath they aren’t, they’re ex-partners. Odenkirk is a slick operator who seems to be trying to prove that he could be legit. He feels unjustly dismissed by his older brother. It’s not clear to me at this point (four episodes in) just what’s going on between the two guys in Goliath other than the fact that they were once partners.
One other thing. The dark lawyer, Donald Cooperman (William Hurt), in Goliath is disfigured and runs his firm from a penthouse at the top of the firm’s suite of offices and has the entire suite bugged with video cameras that allow him to spy on people at will. He’s assigned a junior associate to be lead on a major (like ‘break the firm’ major) case. He does this via email (and creepy-cam). In the fourth episode he manipulates the security system late at night so that this late-working associate ends up coming to the penthouse for the first time. When he shows himself to her, he’s naked.
Shades of Harvey Weinstein–though this series got going before the Weinstein case broke all over the news.
Stay tuned.
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