On paper, there are many reasons to be concerned about Goliath. It’s the type of “prestige drama” that the age of Peak TV has flooded us with. There’s a male anti-hero, the type of drunk who lives in a motel next to his favorite bar and drives a rundown classic Mustang with a busted windshield he can’t afford to fix. He’s divorced from a shrew of an ex-wife and has a tight relationship with his teenage daughter even though he lets her hang out with him in the bar. Of course he’s going to do the right thing and save the day because he’s super talented even though he’s kind of an asshole. Before even starting the series on Amazon I thought to myself, “Do we even need another one of these?”
While I still firmly believe the answer is no, I’m going to let Goliath slide through because, against all odds, it’s really good. Most of that has to do with the man playing the anti-hero, Billy Bob Thornton, whose expertise always surprises me even though he has proven himself countless times (including on television with an excellent turn in the first season of Fargo).
He plays Billy McBride, a man whose alcoholism is even worse than his haircut and his goatee, and who founded one of the most powerful law firms in the world only to be ousted from it because of his bad behavior and a spectacular fallout with his partner, Donald Cooperman (William Hurt). Now a bottom-feeder who arranges plea deals for petty drug criminals whose names he can’t remember, he ends up back in the firm’s orbit when he takes a personal injury case where a woman’s brother supposedly committed suicide by blowing up a boat in the middle of the ocean. The boat is owned by the technology company where he worked, which is the firm’s client, so McBride and Cooperman get to grind their considerable axes once again.
It’s a completely unlikely scenario, chock full of the sort of drama you only find on television, like Billy’s ex-wife Michelle (Maria Bello) still working at the firm and McBride being harassed by a string of shady characters after he takes the case, but it’s mostly forgivable since the mystery is so intriguing and the characters so vibrant.
Master producer David E Kelley (Boston Legal, Ally McBeal, Picket Fences) has had a string of misfires in recent years but acquits himself nicely with his latest effort, co-created with Jonathan Shapiro. Kelley is used to working in the procedural mode, but what he’s created here is more of a noir, with the down-and-out detective trying to do the right thing in seedy LA with one little case that has the ability to shake the halls of power. There’s even a shot of a woman with the shadow of the blinds cast across her eyes. That’s how you know it’s a noir.
What really fuels any good noir, of course, is a femme fatale, and luckily this show has a whole host of them, including the exasperated Michelle, Callie Senate (Deadwood and House of Cards’ Molly Parker), the baddest lawyer at Cooperman McBride who is taking on Billy in court, her stuttering number two Lucy (Olivia Thirlby) and Brittany (Tania Raymonde), the prostitute who serves as Billy’s paralegal. Yes, you read that right.
This is where Kelley, whose characters are always a bundle of tics and strange obsessions, goes a little too far. Thornton’s performance and the gorgeous way the show is filmed is so naturalistic that it’s jarring when the fanciful invades. We see Cooperman, with his face half burned off, sitting in a dark room snapping one of those dog training clickers to get those around him to stop talking. He would be more believable if he were clutching a cat and tittering about his plans for world domination.
Thankfully the show is saved by Billy and a host of other characters, chiefly his tough-talking associate Patty (Tony winner Nina Arianda), the kind of woman who rushes around wearing designer sunglasses with two bucket bags slung on her shoulder but will curse someone out (usually Billy) as soon as they order a pumpkin spice latte. With only eight episodes, hopefully we won’t have enough time to get sick of these people, and their nefarious interconnections will be enough to keep us clicking on the next episode in an intense fit of bingeing. As I said, most of that can be laid at the feet of Thornton, who plays a character that we should hate, but he’s a David you can’t help rooting for.
