The Rainmaker Brings The John Grisham Thriller To TV — What's Your Verdict On The Premiere?
Nearly thirty years after it became a big-screen movie starring Matt Damon, John Grisham's courtroom thriller The Rainmaker is getting the TV series treatment, courtesy of USA. But did it acquit itself well?
Friday's premiere opens with a man played by The Walking Dead's Dan Fogler waking up in the dead of night to discover his house is on fire. He yells for his mother, but he can't reach her bedroom, so he runs out of the house coughing and wheezing as the whole house goes up in flames. Then we meet Rudy Baylor (Milo Callaghan) and his girlfriend Sarah (Madison Iseman), recent law school grads who have lined up jobs at a prestigious firm. They're offering free legal advice at an event, and a woman there says her son Donny Ray went to the hospital with the flu and died there. The authorities claim Donny died due to an opioid addiction, but his mom insists he was clean and thinks the hospital killed him. The hospital is represented by the firm Rudy and Sarah will be working for, though. "Good luck working for Satan," the mom sniffs before walking off.
After finishing up his last night as a bartender, Rudy wakes up for his first day at the firm. He finds his mom dusting things in his late brother John's room. After John died, his mom kept the room just how he left it, but her boyfriend Hank says it's time to move on. (He wants to turn the bedroom into a gym.) Rudy angrily confronts Hank and gets into a fistfight, bleeding all over his suit, and he gets to work late, just in time to get grilled by his new boss Leo Drummond (John Slattery). Rudy and Leo spar back and forth about who's not treated equally under the law — Rudy proposes victims of domestic violence; Leo shoots that down — and when the dust settles? Rudy finds himself fired.
Sarah warns Rudy that his need to never back down from a fight could be his undoing. (She may be right; he is bleeding, after all.) While she stays back at Leo's firm, Rudy frantically looks for another job, but no one is hiring. His bar manager, though, tells him about a "not so reputable" lawyer named Bruiser (Lana Parrilla), who works out of an old taco restaurant along with her "para-lawyer" Deck (P.J. Byrne), who's failed the bar exam seven times. When they meet, Bruiser can sense that Rudy got fired and he has nowhere else to turn. She can also sense that he's angry, and she encourages him to use that. "We represent people on the worst day of their lives," she tells him, and they're angry, too. She hires him — though at a mere fraction of what he'd make at Leo's firm.
At a client mixer for Leo's firm, Sarah catches the attention of hospital CEO Wilford Keeley, impressing him with her ability to remember the first line of every book she's ever read. (What in the name of Marilu Henner?) He wants Sarah on his account, and Leo is happy to oblige. She tries to get Leo to hire Rudy back, but he won't budge — and he also pulls a creepy power play on her, deliberating dropping a series of french fries on the ground and expecting her to pick them up. (What in the name of Christian Grey?) Rudy moves into a cheap loft with no curtains, which gives him a prime view of his neighbors next door. And he could use some extra cash, so Bruiser sends him to the local hospital with Deck to drum up some new business.
Deck shamelessly barges into a victim's hospital room and offers to represent him in any pending litigation, giving him the hard sell. The victim is reluctant, but Rudy convinces him to sign... even in a full body cast. In the hospital hallway, Deck spots Melvin Pritcher (the Dan Fogler character we met earlier) handcuffed to a wheelchair and rushes over to offer his services, but another lawyer beats him to it. Rudy thinks he needs a real case to sink his teeth into — and he remembers Donny Ray's mom. He pays her a visit, and though she sees him as a rich white boy with wealthy parents, he pushes back: "Respectfully, you don't know a thing about me." He's dealt with losing a loved one, too, when his brother John died, and soon enough, he gets her to sign on the dotted line.
Rudy digs into Donny Ray's medical records and finds that one of the nurses who treated Donny was — Melvin Pritcher! Donny Ray's mom hears her dog barking at something in the night and later finds a vape cartridge, and we see a mysterious women vaping and spying on Rudy and Deck as they confront Melvin about his involvement with Donny Ray, but Melvin's lawyer won't let them get a word in. Sarah is stunned to learn Rudy took the Donny Ray case — that will pit them directly against each other, since the hospital CEO is Sarah's client now — and the revelation leads to her leaving his loft in a huff.
Bruiser is skeptical about taking on the Donny Ray case, but Rudy points out that Leo's firm already offered a $50,000 settlement, and he thinks he can get more. Bruiser warns him that if the case gets thrown out, they could wind on the hook for the other side's attorney fees. She also warns him that once they take this case on, there's no going back: "What are you willing to do, really willing to do, to be a rainmaker?" Oh, and we see Melvin knocking on the back door of a house late at night, and when an old woman answers... she jabs a syringe into her neck, telling her: "It's OK. I'm a nurse."
Alright, what's your verdict on The Rainmaker's premiere? Give it a grade in our poll, and hit the comments to share your thoughts.