📺 Watched Matlock.

Not the original classic; this is a 2024 call-back to the show. Madeline Kingston, a previously retired lawyer, applies to work in a law firm she suspects of covering up a report about opioids that could have saved her daughter’s life. Each episode tends to cover an unrelated court case where Madeline - under the fake name Maddy Matlock, extoling a fake life - helps her colleagues save an innocent defendant.

To do this she usually leverages the prejudice against folksy older women that they’re basically invisible to those around them too harmless or cognitively impaired to possibly present any kind of threat to people they interact with in order to charm those involved in the prosecution of the case into providing the key facts or information that lead to the acquittal of the client concerned.

In between court room appearances she sneaks around undercover looking for the evidence she needs to prove the prior malign actions of the company with regards to her daughter’s tragic demise - did they do it, who was involved and why?

This side of the show is, to me at least, extremely obviously based on the real-life appalling events surrounding the Sackler family’s promotion of OxyContin - building an “empire of pain” - even if no direct reference is ever made to it.