The Lincoln Lawyer (2022)

In spite some of the clumsy political commentary pokes through—those Kelley-ready components make this iteration of "The Lincoln Lawyer" a bingeable, highly enthralling piece of entertainment.

Punchy, clever, and entertaining.

It avoids treating its characters as quirky confections, and instead treats them as adults you might actually meet in the real world. ... It’s pretty good and frequently satisfying. That’s more than I can say about a lot of television.

"Lincoln" is so pleasing in its unpretentiousness. It's not trying to answer big questions, besides whether Mickey's biggest client is innocent. Garcia-Rulfo is a bit stiff at first as the charismatic lawyer, but he quickly grows on you.

This is a slick, easily digested and well-acted legal thriller featuring an outstanding ensemble cast and a juicy, lurid murder mystery that keeps us guessing throughout—not that we can’t see some of the twists coming a mile down the road. That’s even part of the fun of shows such as this one.

Some 10-episode shows seem stretched out, but “The Lincoln Lawyer” is fast-moving and packed with incident. Yet Mickey’s personal life is also well developed.

Even though the set-up is familiar and the dialogue is shopworn, The Lincoln Lawyer still works. It delivers likable characters who are easy to root for as they stand up for the unfairly accused. There's comfort to be had in this type of storytelling.

It has a sort of modesty — the cast delivers appealing, workmanlike performances that do exactly what they need to without overshadowing any other actor or element of the series. (That’s not to say that some don’t get some heated moments to play.) The twists are twisted enough to keep things interesting, if that’s what you watch for, but as with most if not all character-driven procedurals, it’s the characters that keep one coming back.

The show, written by David E. Kelley (“Big Sky”), still feels fairly broadcast network-y, albeit slightly elevated.

The Lincoln Lawyer (Netflix) will do you no harm, as certainly as it will do you no good. People say things like, “You know Michael – the only thing he likes more than a fight is a fight with one hand tied behind his back,” and they manage exchanges such as “Can you work with that?” “I can win with that,” with straight faces.

Kelley’s belief in the inherent intrigue of the legal process helps him along; one can sense enthusiasm undergirding, say, an episode built around the jury-selection process. But others of the creator’s tricks fail him, like a tendency to lean hard on the quirkiness of bit players studded through the story, seemingly intended as a sort of comic relief that doesn’t consistently land.

Sure, the show just about does enough to justify its existence and separate itself from the novel and same-named film, and it's certainly a step up from the preposterous antics of Kelley's last effort. But why he was so determined to take such a relatively generic potboiler off the page is arguably The Lincoln Lawyer's most intriguing mystery.

Netflix’s new legal drama The Lincoln Lawyer is at least somewhat entertaining for a show with a bland central character, as many as three generally bland simultaneous plotlines and no notable perspective on the criminal justice system circa 2022.

Planted seeds really go nowhere by the end. Several subplots, including one with Cisco and his former bike gang, occupy real estate with zero payoffs. Garcia-Rulfo, Newton, and Campbell try their hardest, but the show isn’t worthy of their talents (or even a continuation).