CBS has passed judgment on The Lincoln Lawyer—and fans of Michael Connelly’s legal thrillers won’t like the verdict.
The TV network has decided not to go ahead with its upcoming show based on Connelly’s novels featuring Los Angeles defense attorney Mickey Haller, according to Deadline.
The show’s creator was David E. Kelley — best known for his legal dramas The Practice, Ally McBeal, and Boston Legal — and it had been in the final stages of preproduction in March when it was shut down. Logan Marshall-Green, who starred in the excellent 2018 SF thriller Upgrade and wrote and directed the film Adopt a Highway last year, had been set to play the lead. The specific reasons behind CBS’s decision weren’t stated, but the company had faced “financial challenges” over the past year, according to Deadline, and the entire TV industry has been hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Connelly’s legal-thriller series began with 2005’s The Lincoln Lawyer, which was made into a 2011 film starring Matthew McConaughey and was followed by four more series entries. The most recent is 2013’s The Gods of Guilt, and another novel is set for publication in November.
Haller, the series’ narrator, is known as “the Lincoln lawyer” because he often works out of his Lincoln Town Car; he’s also the half-brother of Connelly’s other major series character, LA police detective Harry Bosch, and has appeared as a secondary character in his novels. Bosch is the focus of a successful, eponymous TV series on Amazon Prime Video, starring Titus Welliver, and Haller hasn’t appeared in that show as of yet; its sixth season premiered last month.
David Rapp is the senior Indie editor.
