Summer sleuthing: The Firm season 1, episode 4 rewatch

The Firm was NBC’s imperfect crime drama, but the John Grisham adaptation starring Josh Lucas is worth a summer watch. Return to The Firm episode 5.

With TV crime dramas winding down their seasons, what should genre fans watch over the summer? In our Summer Sleuthing series we’re going back to old favorites, starting with one you probably missed the first time: NBC‘s The Firm.

The Firm was largely ignored when it premiered in 2012. It was a follow-up to the John Grisham movie of the same name, with Josh Lucas assuming the role of lawyer Mitch McDeere. But it was not a lawyer show; it was a crime thriller with strong performances and a few plot twists.

Every week we’ll revisit an episode from The Firm‘s first (and only) season. You can rewatch the entire series on Hulu. This week, we open the book on Episode 4.

The Firm season 1, episode 4: “Chapter Four” (originally aired Jan. 19, 2012)

The fourth episode of The Firm opens with another flash-forward that lays out some pretty big pieces of the show’s puzzle. In the opening, Mitch McDeere (Josh Lucas) has escaped his pursuers and reunited with his family.

He explains to them, and thus to the viewers, that the mystery man who jumped to his death in the pilot was Martin Moxon, and that Moxon is a high-powered client represented by his colleague Andrew Palmer (Shaun Majumder). Mitch has also made another not-so-bright decision: to call Andrew, even though he isn’t supposed to contact anyone else.

Of course, Mitch has no clue that Andrew is working for the enemy, and of course, running out of a hotel room that someone else died in immediately makes you the prime suspect in that person’s death. See the problems he’s created for himself? Mitch may be a great lawyer, and a better guy, but another weakness of The Firm was that it often made him too naive.

“Chapter Four” then steps back four weeks earlier for the case of the week. Mitch is still up to his elbows in murder defendants: the Sarah Holt case is still ongoing, and Dr. Elle Larson is accused of killing one of her patients. That’s actually great news, because Larson is played by the fabulous Kristen Lehman from the underrated TV crime drama Motive.

Lehman, so fantastic as Angie Flynn on Motive, lends this episode some extra acting talent. She makes a wonderful defendant, expressive even in scenes where she can’t do more than sit in the courtroom, and Elle pushes Mitch about being completely focused on her case. She even gets a scene with his assistant Tammy (Juliette Lewis).

“Chapter Four” is also where we see Lucas come into more of his own playing a lawyer. It’s not easy to fill that role; you have to have the gravity to make people believe what you’re saying, and find a way to make technical terms and monologues compelling.

Lucas had just come off playing a prosecutor in 2011’s The Lincoln Lawyer, but given a crackling case with a solid client—did Elle kill her stalker out of fear for her life or did she set him up in an elaborate plan—he takes things to another gear in this episode. It’s still not as commanding as he was in 2006’s Glory Road, but there are flashes of that same brilliance.

And it’s just in the nick of time, too, because The Firm is starting to slot pieces of its larger story into place and give Josh Lucas more to do. If he wasn’t entirely keyed in at first, it was because the scripts were slowly building up steam too, trying to make its subplots as interesting as its crime drama. This is the first one where the audience can see the entire picture of what Lukas Reiter was going for, and it’s genuinely nail-biting.

One wonders that if this episode had aired after the pilot, if the season would have flowed more smoothly narratively. “Chapter Two” had a wonderful story, and is still the best of the bunch, but this makes the pilot’s flash-forwards make real sense, and finally makes us start to worry about whether or not Mitch will make it out alive.

Now, if he could just get out of his own way…

dark. Next. What happened in Episode 3 of The Firm?

The Firm is available to stream on Hulu and Amazon Video.

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