THE RAINMAKER Review: Sturdy Legal Drama Strains Against Expectations

As last year's Kathy Bates-starring Matlock showed, there is still life and vitality in the dramatic legal series format.

That series flipped the gender of the lead role, but that was only the beginning in a complex set of clever twists and turns that completely upended expectations for what could be done with an intellectual property that was showing its age.

The Rainmaker (2025)
The series premieres Friday, August 15 on USA Network. Episodes will be available to stream on Peacock TV one week later. I've seen the first five episodes.

Michael Seitzman serves as showrunner for a new adaptation of John Grisham's sixth novel, first published in 1995. By that point, Grisham had enjoyed great success with his earlier novels, and his narratives had fallen into a familiar pattern that made them quick and easy to read, if not especially memorable or probing on their own terms.

Francis Ford Coppola wrote the screenplay and directed a perfectly enjoyable, if bland, adaptation that featured Matt Damon in an early lead role as Rudy Baylor, an idealistic young lawyer; Danny DeVito as grubby paralegal Deck Shifflet; Mickey Rourke as an ambulance-chasing lawyer named Bruiser; and Jon Voight as Leo Drummond, a powerful, menacing lawyer on the other side of the primary case.

In the new version, which sets up things differently than the original novel or the film adaptation, Rudy Baylor (Milo Callaghan) and his girlfriend Sarah Plankmore (Madison Iseman) are law school graduates who have both been hired at the law firm run by Leo Drummond (John Slattery). On their first day, Rudy tangles with Leo and is fired. Immediately! Get out! Don't let the door hit you on your backside!

Aghast, Rudy can't get hired on anywhere else and must beg for his old job back as a bartender from his kindly boss. Then someone suggests that Rudy see if Bruiser's law firm is hiring, and -- shocker! -- they are, only now Bruiser is a woman (Lana Parrilla), and we soon learn how disreputable she is because she sleeps with someone just to get something done, and her law firm is run out of a fast-food joint that still looks like a fast-food joint.

For all that silliness, and the constant stream of legal mumbo-jumbo that only budding law students will enjoy, The Rainmaker is a potboiler in the classic sense, in that it caters to popular taste with characters ripped straight out of John Grisham's book and pasted back together with minimal attention to detail.

The shame of it is that this is a very easy show to enjoy, even if the first five episodes, kindly provided in advance, prompted me to talk back to the screen as often as not. Milo O'Callaghan is earnest and sincere, and quite believable a naive young person who is not yet fully assured of himself.

Overall, though, I wished that more were done with Madison Iseman's character. She is fully capable of leading a series herself, as she proved with Prime Video's version of I Know What You Did Last Summer. Here, she too often she has to put the brakes on her performance to make it fit within her character's more limited parameters.

As I mentioned, I've only seen the first five episodes, but I hope that John Slattery gets more room to show off the villainy of his particular nasty, arrogant lawyer. He is an excellent actor and, in fact, I'd be glad to watch a spin-off that revolved around Leo Drummond putting other lawyers in their place.

To sum up, if I've been rambling too much: The Rainmaker is trashy in all the right places. More, please.

Now Streaming covers international and indie genre films and TV shows that are available on legal streaming services.