‘Matlock’ showrunner discusses Barry Manilow and that whistleblower twist

WARNING: This article contains spoilers for Matlock season 1, episode 15, “Game Face.”

Madeline Matlock has finally met her favorite Redditor.

Much of Matlock‘s first season revolves around Matty (Kathy Bates) and her husband Edwin (Sam Anderson) investigating the top brass at the Jacobson Moore law firm. The titular attorney’s secret plan was to infiltrate the firm to ascertain which of Jacobson Moore’s top lawyers intentionally hid evidence in a big pharma case that could have ended the opioid crisis.

Matty’s investigation hinges on key information from an anonymous whistleblower on Reddit, who narrowed the identity of the culprit down to three possible suspects: head honcho Howard “Senior” Markston (Beau Bridges), his son Julian (Jason Ritter), and Julian’s soon-to-be-ex-wife Olympia Lawrence (Skye P. Marshall). The whistleblower’s identity has been the subject of speculation, and Matty determined that they must be a Jacobson Moore employee who still works at the firm. 

After initially suspecting jury consultant Shea Banfield (Yael Grobglas), Matty ultimately arranged an in-person meeting with the whistleblower at the end of episode 15 (“Game Face”), and confirmed that the anonymous Redditor is actually Mrs. Belvin (Patricia Belcher), a straight-edged administrator who’s extremely by-the-book on the surface.

Showrunner Jennie Snyder Urman spoke with Entertainment Weekly about the big whistleblower reveal, discussing Belcher’s reaction to the twist, and why Matty used Barry Manilow’s “Can’t Smile Without You” to set a trap for Mrs. Belvin.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: How early in the writing process did you settle on the identity of the whistleblower?

JENNIE SNYDER URMAN: In our first two weeks, when we really plotted out the whole season and put all the pieces together. [We had to figure] out what characters we have to build up so that [the reveal] will mean a lot. So that was part of our initial arc-breaking at the beginning of the season.

At what point did Patricia learn that she was the whistleblower? Has she been playing all of her episodes with that knowledge?

No, she played very officious and detail-oriented and rule-following until she got this week’s script.

What was her reaction to finding out that she’s the whistleblower?

She was excited to play all of the complexities and to get a nice juicy story and a good juicy reveal. She was really excited — she changed some flight plans for us and pushed some scheduled vacations. She pushed and pulled so she could be there to do this arc for us.

So I’m assuming since Patricia didn’t know, the rest of the cast didn’t know either?

No, it was a surprise to them. We were definitely building up Shea as the red herring there.

I’m sure this will be answered in some capacity in the next episode, but does Mrs. B have the identity of the collaborator pinned down as one person, or did she just narrow it down to the three that we’ve known from her Reddit activity?

That’s the journey of the next episode and pieces keep falling into place and the plot will reveal itself. But you will find out why she said “One of those three people.” And Matty will make contact with her. I’m smiling because it’s fun, the way she does it.

How did you decide to include the Barry Manilow angle of Mrs. Belvin’s character and Matty’s correspondence with her?

It early on came as someone that she would like, and it was sort of a character quirk of hers. Something specific about her. When we were building her character, we knew she would like dogs and decided she would like this music, and we kind of put them all together. So then that was always part of her character. And then when we were breaking this specific episode, we realized the ways in which that could specifically pay off. 

With every character, you just want to make sure they’re as specific as possible and that the things that she likes are not the same as the things that Matty likes or that Olympia likes or any of our other characters. So it was part of building the specificity of her character when Barry Manilow came up.

Did you play around with any other musicians that that could have been?

The idea just came as Barry Manilow. Early on, we knew that she was going to have named her dog after Barry, that she would really love the music, and then it came back up in a fun way. At the end of the episode when I got to editing, that’s when I started to build in those little bits of musical foreshadowing — where the song would crescendo and how the audience would know what she was looking for and what Matty had put together.

Is there a Barry Manilow fan in the writer’s room?

I grew up with my mom playing Barry, so I definitely knew all those songs. I would be the one that would be like, “Is it too obvious? The strains of music hinting at where we’re going?” But in the writer’s room, they would say, “No, it’s not too obvious. We don’t have our finger on that musical pulse.”

Matlock airs new episodes Thursdays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on CBS.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

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