By Steve Pond

For decades, Kathy Bates has been both celebrated and underrated. When she won an Oscar for her fearsome performance in Rob Reiner’s 1990 Stephen King adaptation of “Misery,” she was greeted as a newcomer, even though she had made her film debut nearly 20 years earlier in Miloš Forman’s “Taking Off.” Her career since then has included Oscar noms for “Primary Colors,” “About Schmidt” and “Richard Jewell,” 14 Emmy nominations and two wins for “Two and a Half Men”and “American Horror Story: Coven,” and a varied resume that boasts both dramas like “Dolores Claiborne” and “Titanic” and comedies like “The Waterboy.”

Bates’ latest role is the title character in Jennie Snyder Urman’s “Matlock,” which borrows its name from the Andy Griffith legal drama from the 1980s and ’90s but knowingly subverts it in the process: Bates’ Madeline Kingston, aka Matty Matlock, solves cases just as Griffith’s Matlock had done, but it turns out that she’s playing the role of Matty in order to infiltrate a law firm that hid evidence on behalf of a pharmaceutical company that was complicit in the opioid-related death of her daughter.