Summer sleuthing: The Firm season 1, episode 12 rewatch

Watch NBC’s The Firm season 1, episode 12 starring Josh Lucas.

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 7.

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 12.

The Firm season 1, episode 12: “Chapter Twelve” (originally aired March 31, 2012)

When we start this episode of The Firm, Mitch McDeere (Josh Lucas) and his family have finally survived the invasion of their home. Mitch and his brother Ray McDeere (Callum Keith Rennie) set off to handle the problem—they hope.

“Chapter Twelve” then goes back to two days before the break-in, where everyone is still discussing Sarah Holt’s (Alex Paxton-Beesley) military past and her connection to the crazy insurance CEO Kevin Stack (Martin Donovan). The show has Mitch spell this out for anyone who didn’t get it last week: “Kevin Stack was saving money for Noble Insurance by killing terminally ill patients and he was using my client Sarah Holt to do it.”

This is one of those scenes where you realize how much time The Firm spent telling the viewer key facts—there was a lot of talking in this show, and while that in itself isn’t bad, it is when it’s mostly expository.

Abby McDeere (Molly Parker) makes herself useful by helping Martin Moxon’s widow (that’s Tara Rosling from Impulse again) to uncover that Moxon had keys to several safe deposit boxes full of Noble’s files on the aforementioned patients and a half-million dollars.

Mitch confronts Sarah with this information, and she turns full-on acolyte, telling him how “great” and “brave and brilliant” Stack is. It’s no surprise when the show reveals that she wasn’t working alone—or that her old boss shows up to see her shortly after Mitch does, and has Sarah killed in short order.

This is all playing by the standard thriller playbook, but give credit to Martin Donovan for being as wonderfully creepy as ever, and at least Sarah’s death pushes the conspiracy part of The Firm into its next phase.

The case of the week involves another great actor: Battlestar Galactica‘s Aaron Douglas. He plays Mitch’s client Gerald Sykes, who’s facing attempted murder and robbery charges. There’s history, too, as Gerald was apparently Mitch’s first paying client, and now he’s in trouble again.

He insists that he wasn’t there at all. Or maybe that he wasn’t the perpetrator of the crime—he was the victim.

Mitch is skeptical (and so is Gerald’s girlfriend Anna). And after Gerald cold-cocks Mitch in open court, the judge has him pulled off the case. This could have been an opportunity to get further insight into Mitch McDeere, but The Firm doesn’t dig that deep. It’s Douglas’s desperate, manic performance that’s the best thing about the subplot.

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

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