Season 2 of the CBS legal drama “Matlock” came to an end on Thursday, April 23 — and fans have a while to wait for the next chapter.
“Matlock” stars Kathy Bates as Madeline Kingston, a retired lawyer who returns to work under the alias Matty Matlock. Season 1 debuted in the fall of 2024, followed by season 2 in the fall of 2025. CBS renewed “Matlock” for a third season, but it won’t be back this fall. The show has been moved to the midseason, which means it won’t return until early 2027.
Series creator Jennie Snyder Urman confirmed that the scheduling change was her idea.
“I asked for it with the network. We had a talk,” she told TV Insider in an interview published Tuesday, April 21. “I just feel like we had so much stuff to think about because we really landed the plane on this [season]. We really thought that was important because we didn’t want to keep dragging out the same story and the characters have to get to someplace real emotionally.”
Warning: Spoilers ahead for season 2 of “Matlock.”
The “Matlock” season 2 finale resolved the show’s longest-running conflict: the big pharma Wellbrexa opioid scandal. Howard “Senior” Markston (Beau Bridges), a managing partner at the law firm Jacobson Moore, confessed to his role in the scandal while wearing a listening device that Matty slipped into his suit jacket. Both Senior and his son, Julian Markston (Jason Ritter), were arrested.
The Wellbrexa scandal has been the central story line since “Matlock” premiered, so the writers needed a longer break to figure out what’s next.
“When we took this two-hour finale and really paid a lot of things off, what came with that was, ‘I’m going to need time after that to really build the architecture so that we have it for the next seasons,’” Urman explained. “I’m excited about it, but I am also grateful because we needed a little bit of time.”
During an interview with TVLine, Urman confirmed that season 3 will pick up with Matty and her colleague Olympia Lawrence (Skye P. Marshall) “in a new [law] office” after the collapse of Jacobson Moore.
“It’ll be a little time jump: six to nine months, something like that,” she said. “Not like five years later and everything has changed.”
“Matlock” is available to stream on Paramount+.