"Goliath", Season 4, on Amazon Prime [View all]
One of the reasons I first subscribed to Prime was I wanted to see Season 2 after watching Season 1 of Goliath on DVD. The first season was wonderful "L.A. noir" with great writing and acting; the second pushed the envelope with Mark Duplass as one of the creepiest villains ever (and a possible explanation for why billionaires are so desperate to hold onto their money); the third kind of went off the rails with Dennis Quaid an unconvincing antagonist and a story about water rights that didn't quite gel; but the fourth is terrific, more noirish, well-written and photographed, and wonderfully acted.
In the fourth season, McBride (Billy Bob Thornton), a brilliant, functionally alcoholic lawyer goes to San Francisco to sue Big Pharma over the opioid crisis. The first episode is dreamlike, disjointed and not very engaging. But hold on, it gets better, and that episode sets up a lot of backstory and underlying issues that play out throughout the season. If you see negative reviews on Amazon, they're probably from people who didn't make it past the first episode. Once you get to the second episode, the story hits its stride with intrigue, plot twists and courtroom fireworks.
J.K. Simmons is convincingly nasty as the "bag of dicks" pharma-CEO villain, and Jena Malone is perfection as the MS-suffering head of a prestigious law firm. McBride is joined by his trusty, long-suffering crew: lawyer Patty (Nina Arianda) and P.I. Brittany (Tania Raymond), even Marva (Julie Brister) appears in dream sequences. The cast is rounded out by Bruce Dern, Brandon Scott, Clara Wong, Elias Koteas, Robert Patrick and Haley Joe Osmant.
If you like detective stories, courtroom drama, and a satisfying David-and-Goliath battle, this is definitely worth a binge.
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