Summer sleuthing: The Firm season 1, episode 10 rewatch

Watch NBC’s The Firm season 1, episode 10 starring Josh Lucas.

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 Tubi. This week, we open the book on Episode 10.

The Firm season 1, episode 10: “Chapter Ten” (originally aired March 10, 2012)

The tenth episode of The Firm opens with the flash-forward that audiences have been waiting for: how are Mitch McDeere (Josh Lucas) and his family going to avoid the armed hitmen that have descended on their home? Luckily, Mitch’s brother Ray (Callum Keith Rennie) is on the scene to provide some reinforcements.

The flash-forwards move at an agonizingly slow pace, though, and don’t actually answer anything. Instead, we get more scenes of the Morolto crime family and Joey Jr. going on about his “plan” for Mitch. One wonders how much more Gianpaolo Venuta could’ve given to this show if he wasn’t stuck with a half fleshed-out character.

The case of the week sees The Firm finally change gears a bit—Mitch is dealing with a kidnapping and not a murder. One of the pluses of the second half of the season was that the writers were a lot more diverse in the types of cases that he was handed, giving the show in turn more diversity and steering it away from feeling like a procedural.

Mitch’s client, Elena, is accused of kidnapping a baby after interviewing for a nanny position with the child’s parents. Elena claims she didn’t get the job and so wasn’t even present when Tyler was taken. But why was his blanket found buried in her yard? Mitch is soon trying not to tick off the media and even his own firm.

(And hey, that’s Impulse star Craig Arnold, albeit much younger, playing the missing child’s father! He’s got issues, too, like he got a new girlfriend.)

Mitch eventually digs out the truth, with some help from a “smoking gun” email, and this turns into an episode of Catfish. “Chapter Ten” has a strange plot involving obsession, delusion and a target of opportunity, but it does have something to say about the power of the media and how it can be used in terrible ways. It makes something out of what’s usually just a scene or two of noise in other crime dramas.

The Firm does continue to drag some bits along—how long will it take Mitch to realize that his briefcase has been bugged? That feels like a plot crutch just to keep the bad guys in the loop. The ongoing story still lacks the weight that the weekly cases do, which was probably this show’s fatal flaw. When it focused on something, when it had a purpose, it was brilliant. It gave the audience a thing or two to think about, when we weren’t still wondering how Mitch was going to get out of his house.

Next. What happened in The Firm episode 9?. dark

The Firm is available to stream on Tubi and Amazon Video, and available for purchase on iTunes and DVD.

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