With full respect to Bob Odenkirk’s Jimmy McGill, my favorite totally screwed-up lawyer on TV these days is Billy Bob Thornton’s Billy McBride (top).
Billy McBride returns Thursday in Season 2 of Goliath on Amazon Prime and the result is eight more delicious episodes.
Billy is a brilliant trial lawyer who mostly dropped out of the law game after he got a bad guy off on a technicality and the bad guy went on to murder an entire family.
Now Billy lives in a cheap motel and drinks. The consensus is that he drinks too much, but when someone raised that notion in Season 1, he said no, that’s not true. He drinks exactly the right amount.
Billy has that kind of bobbing and weaving quality about him. He can match brains and wits with anyone, but these days he’d rather just be left alone to nurse the bruises. While he can still get angry, he prefers a strategy of deflection.
That may get harder this season with the arrival of his 16-year-old daughter Denise (Diana Hopper, right), who’s back from London and shows every sign of getting on his case.
Denise’s presence also could change the dynamic with Billy’s ex-wife Michelle (Maria Bello). She’s a partner in the law firm from which he bailed, Cooperman McBride, and she finds Billy’s inertia infuriating.
Billy isn’t just feeling sorry for himself, though. He’s convinced that the legal profession, like “the system” itself, is moving ever-further away from its original mission, which was justice and fairness, and becoming just another tool by which the rich and powerful become richer and more powerful.
A case in point is Donald Cooperman (William Hurt), a fellow brilliant lawyer with whom Billy started their firm.
That has changed now, and last season Donald was quite enjoying Billy’s reduced circumstances, right up until Billy started to beat him in court and Donald collapsed.
Billy’s success did not, however, restore his faith in anything. It only made him a bunch of money that he can’t give away fast enough.
So Season 2 starts in much the same way as Season 1, with Billy bumping into a case that’s so outrageous he takes it in spite of himself.
This time, the son of a friend is being framed for a double murder. Moreover, as we know upfront and Billy will gradually learn, the frame-up involves a web of rich, well-connected, important people.
It even touches on Marisol Silva (Ana de la Reguera), a Latina councilwoman who is aggressively running for mayor.
Like several of the other people who become voluntarily or involuntarily involved, Silva must weigh a number of moral factors.
This season of Goliath is reminiscent in several ways of the late lamented ABC series American Crime, and that’s a compliment. It takes a situation that could safely be written in black and white and colors it with intriguing greys.
But Goliath’s trump card is Thornton, who keeps us rooting for Billy McBride even when he’s infuriating. He doesn’t hurt other people to help himself, and he underplays the smart lawyer stuff as beautifully as Colombo used to underplay the smart cop.
Watch 20 minutes of Goliath and you won’t stop until the end of episode 8.