Proving to be a more successful and consistent adaptation of Michael Connelly’s ‘Lincoln Lawyer’ novel series, Netflix’s show is back for a fourth season, this time bringing Connelly’s sixth book, “The Law of Innocence” to screens.
And putting Mickey on trial for a murder he didn’t commit (not a spoiler; it was established at the end of the previous season that he’s being framed) makes for a hefty dollop of fresh tension that aims to keep the show from feeling stale.
Adapted by Ted Humphrey and David E. Kelley (with Dailyn Rodriguez running the show itself alongside Humphrey), the season proves to be an effective use of the cast, and while there isn’t too much tension as to whether Mickey will make it out of the trap he’s been placed in, the various plot twists are compelling and entertaining.
The series also continues to make good use of various Los Angeles locations, with a particularly stylish sheen that suits the storyline.
‘The Lincoln Lawyer’ may never quite challenge the best of the best from the prestige TV category, yet in nevertheless provides solid legal wrangling, a charismatic central performances and enough twists and turns to keep you guessing.
It’s good to be riding with Mickey Haller again (even if he doesn’t get to use the car as much this year).
‘The Lincoln Lawyer’ Season 4 receives 75 out of 100.
After the dead body of Mickey’s former client, a conman named Sam Scales (Christopher Thornton), was discovered in the trunk of the lawyer’s Lincoln at the end of Season 3, he’s fighting to prove his own innocence and preserve his reputation.
And with production on the fourth season already underway, a new name has been added to the cast list: Cobie Smulders.
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The actor, still best known for her TV role in sitcom ‘How I Met Your Mother’ and as Maria Hill in several of the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies starting with 2012’s ‘The Avengers,’ has, according to Variety, joined the show in an undisclosed role.
Manuel Garcia-Rulfo in ‘The Lincoln Lawyer’ season 3. Photo: Netflix.
The show adapts various Connelly tomes, particularly “The Brass Verdict.” It focuses on Mickey Haller (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), a charming and unconventional defense attorney in Los Angeles who operates out of the back seat of his Lincoln Town Car instead of a traditional office (though he does also have one of those).
After a long hiatus due to personal struggles, Mickey inherits a high-profile murder case from a deceased colleague, thrusting him back into the fast-paced world of criminal defense. As he navigates the complexities of the legal system, he also grapples with his personal demons, strained family relationships, and the lingering danger surrounding the case.
With each episode, the series explores gripping courtroom battles, intricate investigations, and Mickey’s moral balancing act between justice and the law.
(L to R) Neve Campbell and Manuel Garcia-Rulfo in Netflix’s ‘The Lincoln Lawyer.’
The show also stars Neve Campbell as Maggie McPherson, Mickey’s ex-wife and a dedicated prosecutor who still shares a strong connection with him and Becki Newton as Lorna Crane, Mickey’s loyal and resourceful legal assistant (who, er, is also his second ex-wife), who keeps his practice running smoothly.
Then there’s Angus Sampson as Cisco, Mickey’s investigator and Lorna’s husband, a former biker with a complicated past and Jazz Raycole as Izzy Letts, Mickey’s former client turned driver (who these days has worked in the legal practice and opened her own dance studio), who plays a key role in helping him rebuild his life.
The character of Mickey, while fictional, was inspired by two real-life lawyers: the late David Ogden, who was known for working out of his Lincoln, and Florida-based attorney Dan Daly.
Where will the story go for Season 4?
(L to R) Jazz Raycole, Angus Sampson, Becki Newton and Manuel Garcia-Rulfo in ‘The Lincoln Lawyer’ season 3. Photo: Netflix.
In the Season 3 finale, investigator Bishop (Holt McCallany) took the stand and revealed that DEA Agent DeMarco (Michael Irby) killed Gloria Dayton (Fiona Rene); she’d planted a gun in drug trafficker Hector Moya’s (Arturo Del Puerto) room on his orders and had been subpoenaed.
After his testimony, Bishop shocked everyone in the courtroom by revealing he had another gun (the judge had the bailiff take his primary weapon) and shooting himself, dying by suicide. Mickey’s client Julian La Cosse (Devon Graye) was free.
Then, as the season concluded, Mickey was looking forward to a vacation when he was pulled over for a missing license plate –– and during the stop, the police officer found the body of another client, Sam Scales (Christopher Thornton) in the trunk… Cue a cliffhanger and Mickey facing murder charges.
“We just thought, ‘What could top this?’ Well, what tops it is obviously Mickey is now the client, the jeopardy that his clients have been in up until now, now he’s in, and it’s truly the toughest case of all. And if you think back over the course of three seasons, what is the mantra that his father taught him and that Legal Siegel [Elliott Gould] has reminded him of? There’s no worse client than an innocent man. Well, what happens when you’re that innocent man and how do you handle that? And how do you deal with the fact that traditionally a lawyer who represents himself is a fool for a client? So we’ll see.”
That all sets up the fourth season, which will adapt 2020 tome “The Law of Innocence.” Sadly, while it features fellow Connelly character (and Mickey’s half-brother) Harry Bosch –– who has been played on screen for years by Titus Welliver –– the fact that Bosch is on Prime Video and Mickey is on Netflix mean they can’t share the screen. Objection, your honor!
Smulders joins some previously announced guest cast members. Constance Zimmer will play Dana Berg, also known as “Death Row Dana,” a ruthless prosecutor and a colleague of Maggie’s from her days in the L.A. district attorney’s office.
Zimmer will be on the show for a 10-episode arc, while Sasha Alexander plays the no-nonsense and intimidating FBI Agent Dawn Ruth.
Cobie Smulders in the Netflix series ‘Friends from College.’ Photo: Barbara Nitke/Netflix.
As mentioned, Smulders is still most recognizable for the roles of Robin Scherbatsky on ‘How I Met Your Mother’ (she was one of the main cast members for the series’ entire nine-season run) and S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Maria Hill on a variety of MCU movies following her debut in ‘The Avengers.’
When is ‘The Lincoln Lawyer’ Season 4 due on screens?
Netflix has yet to confirm when the fourth season will land on our TV screens, but with filming set to be finished next month, there’s a chance it’ll be ready to fill a similar October spot as the most recent season.
Still, we may yet end up having to wait until 2026 –– which will be tough, given the cliffhanger that closed out the third season…
Manuel Garcia-Rulfo in ‘The Lincoln Lawyer’ season 3. Photo: Netflix.
Other Movies and TV Shows Featuring Cobie Smulders:
Manuel Garcia-Rulfo stars in ‘The Lincoln Lawyer’ season 3.
Moviefone recently had the pleasure of speaking with Manuel Garcia-Rulfo, as well as executive producer, co-showrunner and director Ted Humphrey about season 3 of ‘The Lincoln Lawyer’, what fans can expect from the new season, the hunt for Glory Days’ killer, choosing the novels to adapt, finding authentic Los Angeles locations to shoot, what the series means to Garcia-Rulfo, and ideas for a possible season 4.
You can read the interviews below or click on the video player above to watch our interviews.
Manuel Garcia-Rulfo in ‘The Lincoln Lawyer’ season 3. Photo: Netflix.
Moviefone: To begin with, Manuel, can you talk about how season 2 ended and what fans can expect from season 3?
Manuel Garcia-Rulfo: We finished last year’s second season with discovering his friend Gloria Dayton (Fiona Rene) being murdered, so that’s very shocking. In this season, I think, because of that, the stakes are a lot higher because we follow that case and he’s trying to find the truth and who did it. Because it’s so personal, the stakes are higher. He knows that the people behind it are very dangerous, and he knows that he puts his family in danger and himself and friends. But there’s something about him that he must find the truth and justice for it, no matter what. I think that’s why this season is so alive, and the stakes are so high, because there’s so much at stake and so many obstacles that he has. So, it’s just more personal, and it just feels heavier.
MF: Do you think Mickey’s personal feelings will cloud his judgement and could get in the way of him finding Glory Days’ killer?
MGR: Yeah, definitely. I think that sometimes it blurs his judgment of things, and that’s why it is so important for him. So again, it’s so personal that the stakes are higher.
(Right) Manuel Garcia-Rulfo in ‘The Lincoln Lawyer’ season 3. Photo: Netflix.
MF: Ted, can you talk about how you choose which Michael Connelly books to adapt for each season, and how involved is he in that decision?
Ted Humphrey: Well, that’s a great question. Michael has a say in everything. Michael’s a great partner on this show, and it’s really been one of the great professional and personal experiences of my life to work with him. He’s incredibly collaborative. It can be a little daunting to tackle adapting a series of books and have the author of those books be involved because sometimes authors don’t always appreciate what Hollywood does with their work. Michael is incredibly appreciative, and incredibly collaborative. He’s the first person to always say, “We can do better than what was in the book” or “Let’s change this.” He’s appreciative of the ways in which we update the books. I know he was very vocal about that with season two because we took a book in season two that was, I don’t know, 10 or 15 years old, and that the plot of which dealt with the subprime mortgage crisis, which was very relevant when the book was written in 2008 but wasn’t very relevant today. We changed a lot of that to make it about gentrification and celebrity chef culture and things that are not in the book, but that are relevant today. We did that while keeping the basic structure of the story and, most importantly, the character relationships. I know he was really taken with how we did that. So, he does have some say, but ultimately, we’re choosing the books that will flow best from one to another. This book that we adapted this season, ‘The Gods of Guilt’, is my personal favorite of the books or one of them. I know it’s one of Michael’s personal favorites as well because it’s the most emotionally deep and resonant of the books, for the reasons we were just talking about, that it’s so very personal to Mickey and how personal it is played out in a variety of ways throughout the book and throughout the season. So, to some extent, ever since I started this show, I’ve been looking forward to adapting this book, but we couldn’t just do it right away because there are things that you must set in motion in previous seasons to build to the story of this book and Glory Days being chief among them. So, I’ve been looking forward to adapting this book for a long time, and it really has been a thrill to do so.
MF: Manuel, do you read the books that you are adapting before you begin shooting, or do you prefer to just read the scripts for the series?
MGR: I used to read them, and I love Michael Connelly, he’s a genius. He’s brilliant. But then to adapt it to the TV to make it work, sometimes they change some characters, and they bring in other characters from other books. So, I prefer to first, shoot the season, read the scripts, and then just for fun (read the books), because otherwise I start getting confused. So, I start getting ideas from the book that are not on the script. I think it’s better to focus on the scripts of the TV show, and then for fun, I’ll read the book. This is a lot of work. It’s like five months of not having a personal life. But again, it’s so fun. It’s one of those things that, yes, you want to finish, and it feels so good, but at the end, you’re going to miss your coworkers because we became like a family now.
Manuel Garcia-Rulfo in ‘The Lincoln Lawyer’ season 3. Photo: Netflix.
MF: Ted, the show takes place in Los Angeles and is also shot in Los Angeles locations that are not always seen in movies and on TV. Can you talk about how you choose the specific downtown Los Angeles locations where you shoot?
TH: I mean, it’s a great question. We have a wonderful location department, and they’re a huge part of what we do on the show. We’re fortunate, first, just to shoot the show in Los Angeles. As we all know, we built this whole city to shoot things and then everything has gone elsewhere and it’s been devastating, of course, to the production economy here and everything. These books are so LA-centric. They don’t just take place in LA. They’re really about LA. So, right from the get-go, it was always going to be the case that we had to shoot the show here. There are budget considerations to that. It simply costs more to shoot here than it costs to shoot other places. So, we must be smart about how we do that, and the locations department is a big part of that and combining locations and episodes in a certain way to maximize our bang for the buck or whatever in terms of our shooting schedule and all. But we make it a point to highlight different areas of Los Angeles and to try and highlight them as authentically as possible and show the reality and the verisimilitude of what Los Angeles is today, obviously a majority Latino city, but also an incredibly diverse city in terms of other ethnicities as well, all around the city. The food is a big part of that. Mickey is a foodie in the books, although in the books he eats at Dan Tana’s a lot, and he takes his daughter to Du-par’s in the valley, which is no longer there even. So, we’ve kind of expanded that. There’s something about a guy who works out of his car that enables you, because of the literal vehicle of the car, to explore every aspect of the city, both visually, but also from a culture and food standpoint. So, we try and take as much advantage of that as we can.
MF: Manuel, what has it meant to you personally to have the opportunity to bring this character to the screen and work with this cast and crew?
MGR: Amazing, man. You can imagine a guy from Mexico, from Jalisco, playing a lawyer in Los Angeles and being a very successful show is just, I don’t know. I’m very grateful and very thankful with the network, with the showrunners to take the chance on betting something that I am sure behind the scenes the executives were like, “Oh my God, we’re going to hire a Mexican to play a lawyer.” But it worked. Thank God, but I’m very thankful for that. They took the chance. It’s amazing for me. I feel blessed and grateful.
Manuel Garcia-Rulfo in ‘The Lincoln Lawyer’ season 3. Photo: Netflix.
MF: Ted, can you talk about working with Manuel and what he’s brought to this role and this series?
TH: He’s made the character his own. That was a process, although it was a process that really began on day one of shooting the first episode. Why did we cast Manuel? Because he made the character his own. Even in the audition, it was this kismet moment. The character in the books is Latino American, and we were very focused on honoring that. We looked at many different possibilities for this character. Right from the audition tape, he just became the character. In part, it’s his natural charm, which is funny because in real life he’s a humble and almost shy person. But on screen, he has this just natural effortless charisma and charm, and you believe that this is a guy that gets up in court and wins things as much with that as with whatever legal argument he’s making basically. So, he’s great to work with. This is a complicated show in terms of the dialogue. He’s playing a lawyer. He has these huge court scenes. There’s a lot of complicated legal jargon, so that’s a lot of work for him. He’s very meticulous, and he puts a lot of effort into bringing this character to the screen, and it’s literally physically and emotionally draining for him to do, especially when we have these long days in the courtroom. He gets just physically exhausted by the end of those days. We try and work around that and help him in whatever way we can, but he’s incredibly dedicated to bringing the character to the screen the best way every time.
MF: Finally, Ted, do you already have ideas for season 4 and which of Connelly’s books you might adapt?
TH: Well, we absolutely know what season four will be. We’ve set it in motion at the end of season three in the same way that we set season three in motion at the end of season two. Every TV series is all about the audience. We’ve been incredibly gratified by the response to the show, by how successful the show has been. If people want to (continue to) watch, we really love making this show. Obviously, we’ve got a wealth of material to work with from Michael’s books, as well as things that we invent. There’s a lot of roads still to go for these characters and this show. So yes, we have season four all planned out as to what it’s going to be and where it’s going to go. If people want it, we are very excited to deliver it to them. Beyond that, we have ideas for what at least one or two seasons after that would be. But again, it’s just all about the audience enthusiasm for the show.
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What is the plot of ‘The Lincoln Lawyer’ season 3?
Mickey Haller (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), an iconoclastic idealist, runs his law practice out of the back seat of his Lincoln, as he takes on cases big and small across the expansive city of Los Angeles. Based on the series of bestselling novels by renowned author Michael Connelly, the third season is based on the fifth book in ‘The Lincoln Lawyer’ series, ‘The Gods of Guilt’.
Who is in the cast of ‘The Lincoln Lawyer’ season 3?
Manuel Garcia-Rulfo as Mickey Haller
Becki Newton as Lorna Crane
Neve Campbell as Maggie McPherson
Jazz Raycole as Izzy Letts
Angus Sampson as Dennis “Cisco” Wojciechowski
Yaya DaCosta as Andrea “Andy” Freemann
Elliott Gould as David “Legal” Siegel
Manuel Garcia-Rulfo in ‘The Lincoln Lawyer’ season 3. Photo: Netflix.
Premiering on Netflix beginning August 3rd is the second part of season 2 of ‘The Lincoln Lawyer,’ which is based on author Michael Connelly’s popular novels and was co-created by David E. Kelley (‘Boston Legal’) and showrunner Ted Humphrey (‘The Good Wife’).
What is the plot of ‘The Lincoln Lawyer’ Season 2?
Season 2 of ‘The Lincoln Lawyer’ is based on author Michael Connelly’s novel ‘The Fifth Witness,’ and sees lawyer Mickey Haller (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) taking on the case of Lisa Trammell (Lana Parrilla), a chef accused of murdering a real estate developer.
Who is in the cast of ‘The Lincoln Lawyer’ Season 2?
Moviefone recently had the pleasure of speaking with executive producer and showrunner Ted Humphrey about his work on ‘The Lincoln Lawyer’ Season 2 – Part 2, developing the series, adapting ‘The Fifth Witness,’ what fans can expect from the second half of season 2, why the season was split in two halves, Mickey’s current case, why Manuel Garcia-Rulfo was the right actor to play Mickey Haller, collaborating with Michael Connelly, and if we’ll ever see the show crossover with Connelly’s other series, ‘Bosch.’
You can read the full interview below or click on the video player above to watch our interview.
Moviefone: To begin with, why did you want to adapt Michael Connelly’s ‘The Lincoln Lawyer’ novels into a series?
Ted Humphrey: I think first of all, it’s been one of the great pleasures of my career to work with Michael on this, and he’s super involved in it, just like he is with ‘Bosch’ and his other projects. He’s created a character that has a universal appeal. I’m a former lawyer myself. I love legal stories when they’re well done. I did a show called ‘The Good Wife’ for a long time. I love legal shows when they’re well-crafted. I think what Michael’s books have is an authenticity to the legal world. Everything that’s in the books, the nuts and bolts of what’s in the books is all accurate. That’s something that’s very important to me. We strove to do that on ‘The Good Wife,’ and I get very irked by legal shows and movies where things happen that aren’t realistic, often in terms of the timing of how they happen. Things happen very fast in a lot of legal TV shows. Somebody gets murdered and the next day somebody’s on trial. Of course, in real life, things take a lot longer than that. They take years sometimes. So I like to honor the real amount of time that things take, and I also like to honor the nuts and bolts of it. I think the nuts and bolts of it could be very interesting and the audience finds it very interesting when you make it dramatic, and Michael’s books do that. So, I thought this was a perfect vehicle to tell people interesting things about how the legal system works wrapped around this very compelling character. We’ve been able to do that now in both seasons with taking little tidbits of the legal process and building whole episodes around them. But ultimately, it all comes down to this very fundamentally hopeful character that Michael has created. I think the show tells a redemption story. When you meet this guy at the beginning of season one, he’s this broken man on a beach who’s lost everything. So, over the course of seasons, the show will tell this redemption story of this guy kind of growing into himself, becoming who he is, and figuring out who he is.
MF: Can you talk about what happened in the first half of Season 2, and what fans can expect from the second half?
TH: I’m going to actually take one step back and talk about season one for a second. Season one, again, had us meeting a man who has lost everything in his life to an addiction to pain pills. He’s lost his career, he has lost his family, he doesn’t really know where he is going, and he gets a lifeline thrown to him in the form of this very big media frenzy case that also will pay him a lot of money. It’s another thing our show does that I think smart legal shows do, which is they pay attention not just to the kind of big questions of right and wrong, but also to the nitty-gritty of what lawyers do with their day, which is make a living. Mickey’s a criminal defense attorney. He has to make a living. He needs clients who pay him money. He’s not a public defender. He used to be a public defender, but he’s not anymore. So, in seasons one, he wins this case and where we meet him in season two is he’s kind of in some ways the polar opposite of that guy. Now, he’s on top. Now, he’s this media celebrity and newspapers are interviewing him, and Jake Tapper is interviewing him and all of this stuff. Clients are pouring in and he’s flying a little too close to the sun. Hubris, a little bit of arrogance, and a little bit of stubbornness all play into him making some poor decisions about cases that he takes and so on. Then, in his personal life, he’s still struggling with the breakup of his marriage with his ex-wife, who he still pines for, who is played by Neve Campbell wonderfully. When that goes south, he meets this woman, Lisa Trammell, who’s a restaurateur. He has a one-night affair with her, and then she ends up becoming his client when she’s accused of the murder of this real estate developer who’s trying to buy her out and gentrify her neighborhood. Where we leave off at the end of the first half of season one is that he has been assaulted by persons unknown and left for dead in the garage of his building, kind of playing on the symbolism of cars and driving in our show that is so central to Los Angeles, but so central to this character as well. He’s literally beaten up and left for dead in front of his car in the garage of his building. So, when we pick up in the second half of season two, we find out what the aftermath of that was and how does he figure out who did this to him, and how does it play into the case? What are the twists and turns of figuring that out?
MF: What was the reason for splitting season 2 into two parts?
TH: It was not a decision we made. It’s something that Netflix does with some of their shows, particularly I think some of their bigger, more successful shows. They’ve done it with ‘Stranger Things.’ They’ve done that with ‘Ozark.’ They’ve done it with a lot of shows. It was something that they kind of toyed with and decided, “We’re going to try and do it here.” So, it was not really a creative choice of the producers of the show, but at the same time, it was something that we were fine with and we had a natural organic cliffhanger that came in the middle of the story to build to, so we didn’t have to kind of jam that in there. It was already going to be there. It worked out quite well. It gave us a natural place to split the season without us having to do anything artificial to make it happen.
MF: Can you talk about why you decided to adapt ‘The Fifth Witness’ for the second season?
TH: The way that worked, before we began the process of making the season, Michael Connelly and (executive producer) Dailyn Rodriguez, who I run the show with, and I got together for about a month and kicked around and decided that was the book that we wanted to do. We kind of figured out the tent poles of what that would look like for this season, so that we had a roadmap going into the season. We brought the writing staff in to write that, and ultimately the production staff in to make it, of course. It just felt like a natural progression from the first season to this season that we could make this transition from the broken man to the man who’s on top of the world. But of course, he’s not really on top of the world, and there will be a price to pay for that sort of hubris. In the series of books, there is a book in between them, which is called ‘The Reversal.’ We just felt, for story reasons that that book didn’t really fit as well here, but we love that book. So, it just kind of naturally organically fit. Now, having said that, Michael’s still writing these books, and he just published a new Mickey Haller book a couple of years ago and another one’s coming out this fall. But this particular book was written in the wake of the subprime mortgage crisis in 2008. The story of the book actually deals with a woman whose house is being foreclosed on by a mortgage banker, and that wasn’t particularly relevant to 2023 Los Angeles. So, one of the things we did was we changed that to the gentrification debate that’s going on in Los Angeles today and the world of foodie culture and celebrity chefs. We made it a chef in a rapidly-gentrifying neighborhood, who this big real estate developer wants to buy her out of the restaurant and put up condos, or something like that. We also made her a love interest for Mickey, which she was not in the book, as a way of expanding upon his personal relationships.
MF: Can you talk about how Mickey’s judgment has been clouded with this case?
TH: Well, I mentioned this is a man who can be arrogant at times and who can make poor choices. One of the things I love about our show is we’re a show about lawyers and crime and all of those things, but we’re also a show that, I hope, features real human beings, and real human beings make dumb choices sometimes and do things maybe they shouldn’t. In this case, everybody is sort of saying, Mickey, “Are you sure you want to do this? This might not be the best idea.” Yet, he does it anyway because he kind of lets his pride and maybe his feelings for this woman, and certain other things cloud his judgment as to whether or not this is really a good idea. Complications ensue, let’s put it that way.
MF: Why was Manuel Garcia-Rulfo the right actor to play this specific version of Mickey Haller?
TH: So, we looked at a lot of actors. We’re going back now several years to when we were just starting to make season one. We’re talking about the fall of 2020 at this point, or the late summer of 2020, so we’re going back three years. We looked at a lot of actors. When we brought the show to Netflix, it was very important to Netflix, and to us, that we honor the Latino heritage of character. The movie that they made with Matthew McConaughey, they decided to go a different direction and they didn’t do that at that time. It was very important to us to do that. We looked at a lot of choices. The character in the books is Latino-American, but more American in the sense that he was born and raised in Los Angeles and doesn’t have an accent, and doesn’t really speak Spanish in the books. He’s a person of Latino heritage, but he is not a Latino-forward person. We looked at choices across the spectrum, and many fine actors who were terrific and just for one reason or another weren’t right. We were starting to wonder, “Gosh, who is this person?” Then Manuel auditioned and we watched his tape and I just said, “That’s it. There’s Mickey right there.” It wasn’t maybe at first exactly what we had in mind in the sense that that Manuel is 100% Latino, he is 100% Mexican, he has an accent, and English is not his first language. Spanish is his first language. He’s certainly not a lawyer. On the surface, he maybe isn’t exactly what’s on the page of the book, but when you see him play a scene from the show, you just go, “That’s it.” He’s got the effortless kind of charm and intelligence. He’s saying one thing, but there’s something very clever going on behind his eyes while he’s saying it, that is exactly who this character is on the page. It gave us the wonderful opportunity to explore even more fully than Michael does in the books, the Latino heritage of the character. I mean, do it in a very organic way where he speaks Spanish because he speaks Spanish, and it’s not something we had to jam in there. It just is what it is. A lot of that was driven by Manuel himself, who very much wanted to explore the heritage of this character, and will pitch different things that we do. Then we’ve built on it now, introducing his mother. We found a wonderful piece of chemistry between him and his daughter, and that they both speak Spanish and can communicate to each other that way. So, finding Manuel to play this part was lightning in a bottle.
MF: What’s your experience been like working with author Michael Connelly on this series?
TH: Michael’s incredible to collaborate with. In the past, in my career when I’ve adapted novels, you don’t usually work really closely with the novelists. Sometimes they don’t really want to be involved in that process, and often, for good reason. They can be very precious about the work. Michael is one of the most collaborative people I’ve ever worked with and one of the least precious about the characters and the world that he’s created, and he should be precious about those. The raison d’être of the show is to honor what he’s done in the books and to honor those characters in that world. But he’s the first person to pitch, “Hey, I think we can do better than what was in the book. Let’s do this.” Or if somebody pitches a change, if it’s a good change, he’s the first person to say, “Yes, let’s do that.” So, he’s so refreshingly not precious about it. What he’s precious about is he wants to make the best show possible and whatever that is, the best idea wins. He’s 100% on board with that. So, it’s been really one of the great experiences of my career to work with him on this.
Titus Welliver as Harry Bosch in ‘Bosch: Legacy.’ Photo: Tyler Golden. Copyright: Amazon Freevee.
MF: Finally, as fans of the novels know, Mickey Haller is actually the half-brother of Connelly’s other popular literary character, Harry Bosch. Is there any chance that there could ever be a ‘Lincoln Lawyer’ and ‘Bosch: Legacy’ crossover, or is that impossible because the two shows are produced by different studios?
TH: As I understand it, it’s an impossibility because of the different auspices involved. I mean, I guess one might never say never because stranger things have happened in the world. But we have approached it as these are two completely different worlds. We’ve had to approach it that way. They approached ‘Bosch’ that way as well because in the Bosch books, Mickey Haller occurs quite a bit, but Amazon didn’t have the rights to that character, so they’ve inserted different characters into those places, and we’ve kind of done the same thing. We’ve interestingly built two parallel worlds in two different shows on two different platforms, that both spring from a common source if you will. Interestingly, I’ve seen articles online about the crossover of actors between the shows, which is not something we’ve given any thought to, meaning we’re not purposely trying to cast actors that have been in ‘Bosch,’ nor are they purposely trying to cast actors that have been in our show, but yet, we appear to do that. There are a number of actors who’ve appeared in both shows in different roles, which is interesting. But it’s not something we’ve paid attention to. There have also been articles about common locations, and it’s like, we shoot in an authentic real world LA and they shoot in an authentic real world LA, so of course they’re going to be common locations. But I think, creatively, organically, they spring from the same source, and there’s a common ethos behind both series. of books, which then infuses both television series. So, I think people who enjoy one tend to enjoy the other, certainly because they both delve into certain things. I kid Michael, that my sister is a public defender and has been for a long time, and she said that Michael’s her favorite author and that Harry Bosch is her favorite character in fiction. I said to Michael that, “You’re doing something right If a public defender’s favorite character is a cop, because public defenders and cops don’t usually get along very well.”
