John Grisham‘s 1995 legal thriller — which inspired the 1997 Matt Damon feature about a law-school grad taking on an insurance company — gets a series treatment that’s more “inspired by” than straight adaptation. “I think the film was pretty faithful to the novel, at least as far as the [main] case goes,” says The Rainmaker showrunner Michael Seitzman, adding that, for TV, “you’ve got to be able to give it legs to last, in this case, 10 episodes.”
Additionally, Seitzman adds that “you want to be able to have enough elements from the original material that reflects why you wanted to do [a series] to begin with, which is that you love the material and you love the characters, but also be mindful that the audience also has a bit of an allegiance to those characters in the book and movie. So you have to be at least faithful enough to them that they feel like they’re showing up to something that at least resembles what they love and what you love, but you want to bring something new to it.”
To that end, he has crafted an expansive new storyline for Grisham’s up-and-coming attorney Rudy Baylor (Milo Callaghan), moved the setting from Memphis to South Carolina and reconfigured several of the book’s characters. In the opener, the relatively idealistic Rudy, after being fired from the prestigious Tinley Britt law firm on his first day, is forced to take a job with a brassy ambulance-chasing lawyer named Jocelyn “Bruiser” Stone (Once Upon a Time‘s Lana Parrilla, gleefully gender-flipping the role first played by Mickey Rourke).
But to earn his keep with Bruiser and her second-in-command, Deck (P.J. Byrne), Rudy must bring in a new client. He winds up taking the case of Dot Black (Karen Bryson), a grieving mother looking to sue a hospital system’s CEO (Hugh Quarshie) for the wrongful death of her son. The only hitch: The defendant is the top client at Rudy’s former firm, where his girlfriend, fellow lawyer Sarah (Madison Iseman), is slowly falling under the sway of Tinley Britt’s Machiavellian managing partner, Leo F. Drummond (Mad Men‘s John Slattery).
“There’s a moment in the book, it’s in the movie, too, where Rudy asks Leo if he remembers the first time he sold out,” Seitzman continues. “And I thought, maybe this show is the story of the first time Sarah sold out. I don’t want to give away too many spoilers here, but what if that’s the story that we see with her? The story of how, in very small increments, you can be tempted to trade in your moral code for ambition. And if Rudy’s faced with similar moments, what does he do and how does that define his character?”
And can they survive more than just opposing counsel? As both sides begin to build their cases, a homicidal nurse (Dan Fogler) starts to target anyone connected to…well, even Seitzman knows spoiling that twist would be criminal. “He’s at the heart of the case,” is all he’ll tease. “We always saw him as a wolf in the woods, if you will, who is very often on the outskirts of the story, but moving closer and closer until we get to the end. All three villains converge when we finally hit the trial in the last two episodes.” We have no objections to that, your honor.
The Rainmaker, Series Premiere, Friday, August 15, 10/9c, USA
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