For The Lincoln Lawyer’s Dailyn Rodriguez, whose career with Latine projects started way before The Lincoln Lawyer (Queen of the South, George Lopez, Ugly Betty), there’s a level of joy to a character like Mickey Haller. Rodriguez, who spoke to Remezcla in the leadup to the release of The Lincoln Lawyer Season 3, discussed writing a Latino character whose storyline wasn’t about being Latino, the third season of the show, and pushing forward our communities’ narratives.
“It’s so refreshing to see a character like Mickey, who is very much a Latino man, the way he moves, he’s got an accent, he speaks Spanish,” Rodriguez said, “but it’s just part of his humanity as he moves through the world, and it’s not about that, it’s just something that makes him unique and interesting.”
Rodriguez, who came onto the show in Season 2 as co-showrunner, added that when she came in “it was really important for me to add a lot more Latino characters in the show because it was a way to do it without making it a Latino show, which I think sometimes is the curse for some of our content on television. Los Angeles is about 48% Latino, so, you just see them living their lives being in Los Angeles and being different kinds of Latinos, which was also very important to me.”
Season 3, which is based on the fifth book in the Lincoln Lawyer series by Michael Connelly, titled The Gods of Guilt, sees the show skipping ahead a bit, something Rodriguez said is part of the adaptation process. “We’re definitely skipping based on what we think the last book would be for the last season and what makes the most sense for the journey of Mickey’s character.”
The season also showcases not just Mickey Haller, but the people around him, in a way that is very much intentional. “It’s not just the plot. It’s like, you come back to spend an hour with this family, you know?” Rodriguez said, likening it to the procedural model of found family.
And for Mickey, a lot of his found family are women. “I think that the show is Mickey surrounded by very powerful women all the time. That’s really what it is,” Rodriguez said. “It’s, like, his entire life is just full of these powerhouse women that kind of boss him around a little bit, tell him what to do. And he knows at the end of the day, they’re always right. And I find that it makes him even more endearing of a character, that that’s who he is.”
But why are characters like Mickey Haller so hard to come by? Why are we still fighting for good representation? Rodriguez, who is an active board member of the Writers Guild of America (WGA), had an answer. “I think the industry has a very hard time contending and deciphering the Latino community. I think they have issues dealing with the fact that we are not a monolith. So, I think what happens is that everybody gets scared about what to develop in the space.”
“There was sort of a backlash against doing more shows like Narcos and Queen of the South because it was the only thing that was on TV,” Rodriguez added, a backlash she understands. “But at least we were getting represented somehow. Now there’s nothing.”
How do we change it? “We need more Latino showrunners. We need more Latino producers, Latino executives, people that can green light, and people that understand that the differences in our community are what make us special.”
In the meantime, at least we have Mickey Haller.
The Lincoln Lawyer Season 3 premieres October 17th on Netflix.
