A-List Cast Elevates David E. Kelleys Impressive Goliath | TV/Streaming
Billy McBride (Billy Bob Thornton) lives in a seedy motel. He’s the kind of guy who wakes up, probably mid-afternoon, steals a piece of bacon off a room service tray left outside a neighbor’s door and then takes another neighbor’s paper. Although Kelley quickly shows how this world can be a bit unexpected as McBride gives the bacon to a stray dog he’s befriended and then has to use the paper to clean off the dog shit into which he steps. McBride isn’t so much a fast-talker as someone who can quickly adjust to the demands of the situation. Take for example a great scene in which he’s talking to a couple of fishermen about a case. At first, he’s jovial and proposes cracking open a few beers. However, when they don’t bite, he switches to threatening them with insurance fraud. McBride isn’t the smartest man in the room, but he has that ability to adapt and to go to Plan B, C and D when Plan A isn’t working.
Billy McBride used to be a legal hotshot. He founded Cooperman/McBride, one of the biggest law firms in the world, but his alcoholism got the best of him. Now professionally disgraced, he spends most of his time in bars, saying wonderfully TV things like “I’ve had the shit beat out of me a lot of times. I just replenish with more shit.” It’s there that a woman named Rachel (Ever Carradine) finds him, and tells him a story about how her brother’s suicide wasn’t what the authorities claimed it to be. He didn’t blow himself up on his own boat—he was killed, and the attorneys at Cooperman/McBride helped cover it up. Prove it and Billy can help take down the firm he created.
If McBride is the David, the Goliath is represented by Donald Cooperman (William Hurt, in icy cool “A History of Violence” mode), who still runs the firm from a dark room buried deep within its headquarters. Cooperman is presented almost as a Faustian villain, with half his face burned and a sensitivity to light. He runs things through a team, including Callie (Molly Parker), Letts (Damon Gupton), and the new girl Lucy (Olivia Thirlby). He doesn’t just want this case to go away. He wants to destroy Billy. Again. Kelley and his team fill out the supporting cast even further with a prostitute turned legal secretary (Tania Raymonde), a fast-talking co-counsel (Nina Arianda) who learns to hate Billy, and even a daughter (Diana Hopper) and ex-wife (Maria Bello), who, of course, still works at Cooperman/McBride.
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