"The Lincoln Lawyer," premiering Friday on Netflix, is a meat-and-potatoes legal thriller starring Manuel Garcia-Rulfo as Mickey Haller, a Los Angeles defense attorney. It was created by David E. Kelley and developed by Ted Humphrey (a producer and writer on "The Good Wife") from "The Brass Verdict," the second of (so far) six novels by Michael Connelly to feature Haller. (Connelly also created the detective Harry Bosch, who appears as a character in that novel but not the series.) It has the distinction of being built on the sort of premise, and with a cast of characters, one might expect to have found on USA when "Suits" was a going concern, or network television when Kelley was all up in its business, but with a modicum of bad words added. Indeed, Garcia-Rulfo comes across as a bit of a Dylan McDermott, the star of Kelley's for-the-defense series "The Practice," with a twist.
Mickey is called the Lincoln Lawyer not because he has the "Henry Fonda Directed by John Ford" folksiness of Honest Abe before he went into politics, but because he became known for working out of one of several Lincoln Town Cars, of various vintages, as he traveled the highways and byways of the Greater Los Angeles metropolitan area, in the service of his clients.
Mickey, who has evidently made a lot of money in his time, is not working at all as the story opens, having been sidelined by a surfing accident that led to a painkiller addiction that led to recovery. When a colleague is murdered, it transpires that his practice has been left to Mickey, a motley mix of cases Mickey is able to dispatch in a few deft moves — he has a superheroic knack for finding the weak or fraudulent spot in his opponent's case — and one very high-profile trial that will occupy most of the 10 episodes: video game mogul Trevor Elliott (Christopher Gorham), accused of murdering his wife and her boyfriend. Mickey's new caseload fires him up immediately, in a deadpan sort of way.
