‘Lincoln Lawyer’ Season 4: Mickey Fights for His Freedom, a Shocking Death and an Old Romance Re-Sparks Heat — Plus, That Cliffhanger!
SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers from Season 4 of “The Lincoln Lawyer,” now streaming on Netflix.
As Season 4 of the hit Netflix series “The Lincoln Lawyer” gets underway, Mickey Haller (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) has lost his cherished vintage Lincoln Continental — temporarily, anyway — as well as his freedom.
It’s the most emotional season yet for the Los Angeles-set legal thriller, based on the books by Michael Connelly, as Mickey must defend himself against a murder charge that could see him imprisoned for life.
As the 10 episodes build up the tension about his case, Mickey manages to execute some tricky last-minute legal maneuvers. But he doesn’t do it alone — midway through the season, Mickey (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) makes a strategic shift in his co-counsel, swapping out ex-wife No. 2 Lorna (Becki Newton) for ex-wife No. 1 Maggie (Neve Campbell), a seasoned prosecutor who knows how the other side thinks. Having Maggie on his team means they’re thrown together much more intensely than when they were merely co-parents — which seems to lead to some simmering feelings being rekindled.
While Season 4 revolves around numerous tense courtroom scenes, there’s also plenty of action and suspense in the jail where Mickey is being held and across the streets of Southern California as Mickey’s investigator Cisco (Angus Sampson) chases down possible clues and witnesses that could help Mickey’s case. Back at the office, newly-minted attorney Lorna is hustling to keep the firm afloat by taking on new cases while assistant Izzy (Jazz Raycole) pitches in with help from her new law student friend.
Mickey is also grappling with his daughter Hayley’s reaction to his arrest. Not only is he devastated to have Hayley (Krista Warner) see him looking so vulnerable in prison, but her peers are circulating damaging gossip about the case on social media.
Co-showrunners and directors Ted Humphrey and Dailyn Rodriguez broke down some of the most dramatic beats of Season 4, how Rodriguez used details from her own relationship with her father to help illuminate Hayley’s feelings — and what could be in store for Season 5, which has already been greenlit.
Ted Humphrey: We feel that is our most emotional season, and most personal season. Emotionally, the show has been building to that. We’ve taken this character on such an emotional roller coaster, but it’s been building to this.
Dailyn Rodriguez: Mickey’s in jail for most of the book, and it has a lot of internal monologues that are very self-reflective — and kind of dark, and a little depressing. So considering that our show is not quite tonally the same as Michael’s books, we’re a little bit more of a light L.A. crime noir, we had to figure out a way to get him out of jail, but then a really big plot twist get him back in again.
Humphrey: We felt that it was not going to be very dramatic or compelling for the audience to watch him just sit in jail for the whole season, and have his team on the outside doing stuff. We needed him to be on the outside, and so we took him to that bleak place in the first couple episodes. And then we get a little bit of a respite from that. It’s a little bit more of a roller coaster ride than the story of the book.
Rodriguez: We decided it was inevitable that some feelings would have been sparked again between the two of them, working together so closely. But our show lives on this push-pull between Mickey and Maggie. So we can’t have them get back together. I think the biggest scene in the finale where Hayley has picked up on all of this. She’s like, “Jack’s great, but I don’t think you’re into him.” And Maggie — I don’t think she can go there, not really, at least not yet — but it’s giving you a window into how she really feels.
Humphrey: That relationship is the beating emotional heart of Mickey’s character in the show. The idea of Maggie coming back and being his co-counsel is in the book. It gave us the opportunity also to reignite this relationship. We felt in the life of the show, it was just time to have Maggie back as a major character, to keep that flame burning.
Rodriguez: Her character is really difficult. She’s just a very by-the-book, very intense, dog-with-a-bone character. I think her whole look added to it, the severity of the bangs and the hair. Our costume designers did such a great job — it just sold the character.
Humphrey: That was very much our putting our heads together, thinking how do we visually translate this character to the screen? And Constance really knocked it out of the park in terms of her performance.
Rodriguez: We felt like we needed Mickey to be more involved in his own rescue at the end. Hence, we created this whole bit with Jeanine Ferrigno to be able to allow us to have this big turn and have Lorna and Mickey do their little hijinks to trick the FBI into playing ball. In the book, the FBI just plays ball, which is not as interesting dramatically.
Humphrey: The thing the book does really beautifully, which we did our best to translate to the screen, was the emotion and the personal stakes for Mickey. And so that’s kind of encapsulated in the scene with him and Maggie afterwards. They both, without having to say much to each other, realize what just happened and how by the skin of their teeth they’ve come through it. That feeling from the book is really powerful, and we wanted to translate that as much as possible to the screen.
Humphrey: The show has been building to this for four seasons. We keep upping the stakes in various ways, professionally, personally, emotionally. What could be higher personal stakes than this, than being on trial for your own life? As far as defending himself, he doesn’t do it alone. He has help. But of course, it’s “The Lincoln Lawyer,” and we weren’t going to have a story where he’s sitting on the sidelines and somebody else is doing all the talking.
Rodriguez: I don’t think it’s in Mickey Haller’s nature to have anybody else defend him. He’s so pissed off this is happening that he has to channel it somehow.
Rodriguez: He’s become a star. That’s the one thing that’s changed. He’s gotten more comfortable with the language, I would say.
Humphrey: But he remains the same. He’s a genuinely lovely person to work with, and he’s funny and self-deprecating and there’s no diva about him.
Humphrey: That character has been such a major figure in Mickey’s life. But when you look at movies and TV and literature, Yoda always dies, right? The Yoda character always dies, which is really what Elliott is, and then becomes, in some strange way, more powerful after their death. And that’s kind of what happens with Legal. He’s taken the help he can give Mickey as far as he can in life. And now it’s really about the memory of this person that will be Mickey’s guiding North Star from now on.
Humphrey: Hayley’s very upset by it, and that upsets Mickey, and that’s probably one of the biggest driving motivations for him, not just to save his own life, but to save his daughter and his family from the ramifications of this.
Rodriguez: My father was incarcerated a couple times, and specifically that scene in the first episode where she goes to visit him and they start calling out the inmates’ names, that happened to me. It dehumanizes people when they’re called by numbers and not names, and it was very hard for me to watch that when it happened to me with my father, so I pitched that in the room for Haley and how it would affect Mickey. I’ve been at my father’s arraignment, and it’s just very hard to see that happening to a parent. So I brought a little bit of that to the table this season, and I think that it adds to Mickey’s emotional turmoil.
Rodriguez: Becki and her quirky wardrobe — It’s the one place where we can have a little bit of fun. And I think she enjoys it. I think that she’s growing up. She starts out with a win, and then realizes it’s not that easy. She realizes she’s in over her head being Mickey’s co-counsel. By the end of the season, she grows so much as a person and as an attorney, and her relationship with Cisco really deepens.
Humphrey: In Season 1, she’s basically intimidated by Maggie, and they have this kind of frosty relationship. But now, by Season 4, she’s seeing herself as more of an equal to Maggie, and they’ve developed a kind of burgeoning friendship and certainly, colleagueship, that is built around the fact that they both care about Mickey and they both want to help Mickey.
Rodriguez: It was daunting, of course. But I’ve been writing in television for about 24 years. So I relied a lot on my experience being on sets and watching actors. The most rewarding part of it was to work with the actors and feel like I had a shorthand because I’ve been on the show for four seasons and understand the characters so much. I learned a lot that has informed my writing after that. Manuel even gave me some flowers on my last day, which is very sweet. It was a very difficult episode as a first episode, because it was very court-heavy. I had both opening statements from both Maggie and from Dana, which was figuring out how to differentiate them visually and tonally. And I had our first witness. I came out feeling a lot of empathy for guest directors.
Humphrey: It’s a professional conflict, in the sense that the DA office probably isn’t thrilled. For her, there’s a fair amount of cognitive dissonance. There’s a big learning curve for her in doing this, not just in how to do it, but in how it makes her think about everything that she does.
Rodriguez: I think it’s a nice little Easter egg for people that live here. A lot of times it’s just even seeing a prop on the screen, whether it’s a coffee cup or, you know, bag of food.
Humphrey: I directed the first two episodes of the season, and the opening of the season is probably our most ambitious.
It involved combining helicopter footage, which we shot of L.A., which we then handed off to a drone in mid-air. We wanted to go from this big sweeping vista of L.A. from a bird’s eye point of view, all the way down right to this building that is kind of the thematic fulcrum of that opening sequence, and then past the tree and into this building, which is a crime scene, and then right through the door and see what’s going on in the building. It actually involved the drone flying down and then being picked up by a handheld operator, who then operates it like a handheld camera and takes it into the place and takes it back out, and then lets it go again and it flies off.
That whole opening sequence took about 50 meetings and years off of our life to plan and execute, but we pulled it off. It was fun.
Humphrey: This is a character who has really strong ideas about who he is and where he came from, and we thought it would be really interesting to turn those on their head and and suddenly present him with the conundrum of, “What if everything I thought I knew about myself maybe isn’t quite right?”
In Michael’s books, the character Bosch is Mickey’s half-brother, and that’s something we can’t do in the show because of the fact that Bosch is a character on another platform. But we found a way to do the personal aspects of that by creating this other character.
Humphrey: Well, we cast Cobie Smulders, so that’s very much the plan. We’re super excited to have Cobie come and work with us. The last shot of the season is Mickey looking like somebody’s completely blown his mind. And so now the next question is, what is this? Is it true? What does it mean for Mickey going forward?
Humphrey: We may not use a novel directly, or it may be pieces of a novel. It may be the season that we invent the most.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
As Season 4 of the hit Netflix series “The Lincoln Lawyer” gets underway, Mickey Haller (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) has lost his cherished vintage Lincoln Continental — temporarily, anyway — as well as his freedom.
It’s the most emotional season yet for the Los Angeles-set legal thriller, based on the books by Michael Connelly, as Mickey must defend himself against a murder charge that could see him imprisoned for life.
As the 10 episodes build up the tension about his case, Mickey manages to execute some tricky last-minute legal maneuvers. But he doesn’t do it alone — midway through the season, Mickey (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) makes a strategic shift in his co-counsel, swapping out ex-wife No. 2 Lorna (Becki Newton) for ex-wife No. 1 Maggie (Neve Campbell), a seasoned prosecutor who knows how the other side thinks. Having Maggie on his team means they’re thrown together much more intensely than when they were merely co-parents — which seems to lead to some simmering feelings being rekindled.
While Season 4 revolves around numerous tense courtroom scenes, there’s also plenty of action and suspense in the jail where Mickey is being held and across the streets of Southern California as Mickey’s investigator Cisco (Angus Sampson) chases down possible clues and witnesses that could help Mickey’s case. Back at the office, newly-minted attorney Lorna is hustling to keep the firm afloat by taking on new cases while assistant Izzy (Jazz Raycole) pitches in with help from her new law student friend.
Mickey is also grappling with his daughter Hayley’s reaction to his arrest. Not only is he devastated to have Hayley (Krista Warner) see him looking so vulnerable in prison, but her peers are circulating damaging gossip about the case on social media.
Co-showrunners and directors Ted Humphrey and Dailyn Rodriguez broke down some of the most dramatic beats of Season 4, how Rodriguez used details from her own relationship with her father to help illuminate Hayley’s feelings — and what could be in store for Season 5, which has already been greenlit.
Ted Humphrey: We feel that is our most emotional season, and most personal season. Emotionally, the show has been building to that. We’ve taken this character on such an emotional roller coaster, but it’s been building to this.
Dailyn Rodriguez: Mickey’s in jail for most of the book, and it has a lot of internal monologues that are very self-reflective — and kind of dark, and a little depressing. So considering that our show is not quite tonally the same as Michael’s books, we’re a little bit more of a light L.A. crime noir, we had to figure out a way to get him out of jail, but then a really big plot twist get him back in again.
Humphrey: We felt that it was not going to be very dramatic or compelling for the audience to watch him just sit in jail for the whole season, and have his team on the outside doing stuff. We needed him to be on the outside, and so we took him to that bleak place in the first couple episodes. And then we get a little bit of a respite from that. It’s a little bit more of a roller coaster ride than the story of the book.
Rodriguez: We decided it was inevitable that some feelings would have been sparked again between the two of them, working together so closely. But our show lives on this push-pull between Mickey and Maggie. So we can’t have them get back together. I think the biggest scene in the finale where Hayley has picked up on all of this. She’s like, “Jack’s great, but I don’t think you’re into him.” And Maggie — I don’t think she can go there, not really, at least not yet — but it’s giving you a window into how she really feels.
Humphrey: That relationship is the beating emotional heart of Mickey’s character in the show. The idea of Maggie coming back and being his co-counsel is in the book. It gave us the opportunity also to reignite this relationship. We felt in the life of the show, it was just time to have Maggie back as a major character, to keep that flame burning.
Rodriguez: Her character is really difficult. She’s just a very by-the-book, very intense, dog-with-a-bone character. I think her whole look added to it, the severity of the bangs and the hair. Our costume designers did such a great job — it just sold the character.
Humphrey: That was very much our putting our heads together, thinking how do we visually translate this character to the screen? And Constance really knocked it out of the park in terms of her performance.
Rodriguez: We felt like we needed Mickey to be more involved in his own rescue at the end. Hence, we created this whole bit with Jeanine Ferrigno to be able to allow us to have this big turn and have Lorna and Mickey do their little hijinks to trick the FBI into playing ball. In the book, the FBI just plays ball, which is not as interesting dramatically.
Humphrey: The thing the book does really beautifully, which we did our best to translate to the screen, was the emotion and the personal stakes for Mickey. And so that’s kind of encapsulated in the scene with him and Maggie afterwards. They both, without having to say much to each other, realize what just happened and how by the skin of their teeth they’ve come through it. That feeling from the book is really powerful, and we wanted to translate that as much as possible to the screen.
Humphrey: The show has been building to this for four seasons. We keep upping the stakes in various ways, professionally, personally, emotionally. What could be higher personal stakes than this, than being on trial for your own life? As far as defending himself, he doesn’t do it alone. He has help. But of course, it’s “The Lincoln Lawyer,” and we weren’t going to have a story where he’s sitting on the sidelines and somebody else is doing all the talking.
Rodriguez: I don’t think it’s in Mickey Haller’s nature to have anybody else defend him. He’s so pissed off this is happening that he has to channel it somehow.
Rodriguez: He’s become a star. That’s the one thing that’s changed. He’s gotten more comfortable with the language, I would say.
Humphrey: But he remains the same. He’s a genuinely lovely person to work with, and he’s funny and self-deprecating and there’s no diva about him.
Humphrey: That character has been such a major figure in Mickey’s life. But when you look at movies and TV and literature, Yoda always dies, right? The Yoda character always dies, which is really what Elliott is, and then becomes, in some strange way, more powerful after their death. And that’s kind of what happens with Legal. He’s taken the help he can give Mickey as far as he can in life. And now it’s really about the memory of this person that will be Mickey’s guiding North Star from now on.
Humphrey: Hayley’s very upset by it, and that upsets Mickey, and that’s probably one of the biggest driving motivations for him, not just to save his own life, but to save his daughter and his family from the ramifications of this.
Rodriguez: My father was incarcerated a couple times, and specifically that scene in the first episode where she goes to visit him and they start calling out the inmates’ names, that happened to me. It dehumanizes people when they’re called by numbers and not names, and it was very hard for me to watch that when it happened to me with my father, so I pitched that in the room for Haley and how it would affect Mickey. I’ve been at my father’s arraignment, and it’s just very hard to see that happening to a parent. So I brought a little bit of that to the table this season, and I think that it adds to Mickey’s emotional turmoil.
Rodriguez: Becki and her quirky wardrobe — It’s the one place where we can have a little bit of fun. And I think she enjoys it. I think that she’s growing up. She starts out with a win, and then realizes it’s not that easy. She realizes she’s in over her head being Mickey’s co-counsel. By the end of the season, she grows so much as a person and as an attorney, and her relationship with Cisco really deepens.
Humphrey: In Season 1, she’s basically intimidated by Maggie, and they have this kind of frosty relationship. But now, by Season 4, she’s seeing herself as more of an equal to Maggie, and they’ve developed a kind of burgeoning friendship and certainly, colleagueship, that is built around the fact that they both care about Mickey and they both want to help Mickey.
Rodriguez: It was daunting, of course. But I’ve been writing in television for about 24 years. So I relied a lot on my experience being on sets and watching actors. The most rewarding part of it was to work with the actors and feel like I had a shorthand because I’ve been on the show for four seasons and understand the characters so much. I learned a lot that has informed my writing after that. Manuel even gave me some flowers on my last day, which is very sweet. It was a very difficult episode as a first episode, because it was very court-heavy. I had both opening statements from both Maggie and from Dana, which was figuring out how to differentiate them visually and tonally. And I had our first witness. I came out feeling a lot of empathy for guest directors.
Humphrey: It’s a professional conflict, in the sense that the DA office probably isn’t thrilled. For her, there’s a fair amount of cognitive dissonance. There’s a big learning curve for her in doing this, not just in how to do it, but in how it makes her think about everything that she does.
Rodriguez: I think it’s a nice little Easter egg for people that live here. A lot of times it’s just even seeing a prop on the screen, whether it’s a coffee cup or, you know, bag of food.
Humphrey: I directed the first two episodes of the season, and the opening of the season is probably our most ambitious.
It involved combining helicopter footage, which we shot of L.A., which we then handed off to a drone in mid-air. We wanted to go from this big sweeping vista of L.A. from a bird’s eye point of view, all the way down right to this building that is kind of the thematic fulcrum of that opening sequence, and then past the tree and into this building, which is a crime scene, and then right through the door and see what’s going on in the building. It actually involved the drone flying down and then being picked up by a handheld operator, who then operates it like a handheld camera and takes it into the place and takes it back out, and then lets it go again and it flies off.
That whole opening sequence took about 50 meetings and years off of our life to plan and execute, but we pulled it off. It was fun.
Humphrey: This is a character who has really strong ideas about who he is and where he came from, and we thought it would be really interesting to turn those on their head and and suddenly present him with the conundrum of, “What if everything I thought I knew about myself maybe isn’t quite right?”
In Michael’s books, the character Bosch is Mickey’s half-brother, and that’s something we can’t do in the show because of the fact that Bosch is a character on another platform. But we found a way to do the personal aspects of that by creating this other character.
Humphrey: Well, we cast Cobie Smulders, so that’s very much the plan. We’re super excited to have Cobie come and work with us. The last shot of the season is Mickey looking like somebody’s completely blown his mind. And so now the next question is, what is this? Is it true? What does it mean for Mickey going forward?
Humphrey: We may not use a novel directly, or it may be pieces of a novel. It may be the season that we invent the most.
This interview has been edited and condensed.