‘The Lincoln Lawyer’ Boss on Mickey & Andrea’s Relationship and Learning From ‘The Good Wife’

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for all of The Lincoln Lawyer Season 3.]

Given where Mickey (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) finds himself at the end of The Lincoln Lawyer Season 3, it’s probably a good thing he has a couple lawyers on his side!

Mickey and Andrea (Yaya DaCosta) went from rivals in the courtroom in Season 2 to a casual relationship (which didn’t last) and now legal allies in Season 3. And Lorna (Becki Newton) is now no longer the firm’s office manager but officially a lawyer after passing the bar exam.

Below, co-showrunner Ted Humphrey talks about Mickey and Andrea’s relationship, the excitement of Lorna as a lawyer, and more. (Plus, read Part 1 for scoop on which book a Season 4 would adapt here.)

I have to say I liked Mickey and Andrea together. What did you enjoy most about putting them together in the way that you did?

Ted Humphrey: They have great chemistry. The two actors have great chemistry together. Yaya’s performance is fantastic as Andrea. Andrea is not even a part of this story in the book, but we so enjoyed that performance from Season 2, and we so enjoyed the chemistry between the two characters that we just felt this was one of those ways that we expand the books. We just felt like this was very fertile territory to have a really fun storyline and relationship and get more into who is that character and what is that? We always say that one of the defining characteristics of Mickey is that he’s surrounded by strong women who all seem to care about him, and so this was just one more basically, and the fun part was just watching it unfold and watching what the two of them did with it.

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Mickey says it’s too complicated for him right now, and maybe one of these days he’ll figure out the work-life balance, but could there be a future for Mickey and Andrea, or was this just what they both needed at this time?

You never say never. First of all, obviously we’ve got to get another season and then hopefully seasons after that. We feel like we have a really great palette of characters to play with, and so you can bring them in and out of the stories. And it’s like Sam Scales in the trunk at the end. Here’s this guy who’s been a recurring person who showed up in a variety of humorous ways, usually, in the show. And now suddenly here’s a very not humorous way that this person shows up. So Andrea is a great tool in our toolbox that we would love to find another way to use.

You also put Andrea through it this season at work, with that mistake. But then she rightfully goes to Suarez and points out she’s the best he’s got. So why did you want to have her go through what she did this season? And is there really a question of whether or not Suarez will listen? Because he’s not stupid, she is really good.

You can never overestimate the degree to which politics plays a part in situations and offices like that. The LA District Attorney’s office is, I believe, the largest prosecutor’s office in the entire country, the largest local prosecutor, right? There’s something like a thousand DAs in that building. So it’s much larger even than New York because when you think of New York City, it’s five different counties, LA is all one county. And so it’s all one prosecutor’s office, which is enormous, and anything like that, it’s like an iceberg of bureaucracy. And so I don’t know that who’s the best in the building is necessarily always the prime consideration. It’s like, who’s the most loyal? Who brown noses the most? So I think there is a question about that, but I think one of the defining characteristics of Andrea is that she’s not just a great prosecutor, but she’s also great at playing that political game, and we established that in the earlier season. She’s much better at it in a lot of ways than Maggie [Neve Campbell], which is why Maggie ends up currently down in San Diego. She just couldn’t deal with the politics anymore, and Andrea is able to rise above.

Lorna was impressive this season, in the scenes in front of the judge, running between the courtrooms — I liked what she did with the elevator — and also just letting Mickey know what she wanted. What excites you about having Lorna as a lawyer both on her own and alongside Mickey?

In one word, everything. Lorna is, in a weird way, a combination of two characters from the books because the character of Lorna in the books is the Lorna of Season 1 in a sense. But then there’s another character in the books, Jennifer Aronson, who Mickey calls “Bullocks” because she went to the law school that is in the old Bullocks department building on Wilshire Boulevard, and she’s kind of his associate. And we just felt on the show the logical thing, why do we want to introduce a new character when we already have this great character and this great actor playing her? So we, in essence, combine those two characters and made it Lorna. And so both in the books but also in the stories that we come up with, it just enables us to have this whole other dimension to play with Lorna. It enables us to potentially in the future have other cases that we—I mean, we even did this to some extent in this season, but we’ll do it much more hopefully in future seasons if we get them, have other cases that we can play with that are Lorna’s cases and just make that whole thing a more well-rounded enterprise. Becki is so delightful to watch playing this character that you just naturally want to give her as much to do as you can.

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Izzy (Jazz Raycole) is now the office manager and keeping dance in her life. Did you always know working on the season that you wanted her to be able to find that balance by the end of it? Did you debate having that up in the air at all?

Izzy is a character that we created for the show, she’s not in the books. And she was created in the pilot to fill the role of a different character in that book, a similar character with a similar backstory, but it was a male character and that person went away at the end of that book and never came back. But when we got to the end of Season 1, we just knew that we loved this character, we loved Jazz’s portrayal of her, and the audience really loved her. The relationship with Mickey and the other characters was great. As all TV shows do if they’re going to be successful, we built kind of a family among our characters, and Izzy was a core part of that family. So we knew we wanted to keep this character around and build our world around her. We didn’t know exactly how we were going to do that. So we worked that out between Seasons 2 and 3 that this dance dream of Izzy’s, she could continue with [it], but she could also find a way to stay in the life of our show. And we have ideas for how to keep that going in an even more interesting way should we be lucky enough to get future seasons.

I like that you leaned more into Lorna and Izzy’s relationship this season.

We love that relationship and we love—I think it was in this season, maybe it was in Season 2, I forget—that scene where Lorna says, “Izzy, you might not have noticed this, but I kind of didn’t like you when you started here.” And Izzy’s like, “Oh, went right over my head.” I think all great TV shows do that. I spent a number of years doing The Good Wife and in the pilot and the first season of The Good Wife, Alicia [Julianna Margulies] and Cary [Matt Czuchry] are antagonists. I mean, Cary is the antagonist of the pilot. He’s this asshole who makes Alicia’s life miserable. And yet fairly quickly over the course of that season, they become allies and friends. And then the relationship [ebbs and flows], right? And I think that’s what all great TV shows do so that you can keep life in these relationships. So it’s been really fun to play with Izzy and Lorna’s relationship.

Hector (Arturo Del Puerto) is now out. How’s Mickey feeling about having to make that deal with him?

I think it’s just one more long, long line of very gray areas that Mickey Haller and people like him have to live in. It’s the enemy of my enemy is my friend for the moment. And I think it’s also what he explains to Eddie [Allyn Moriyon] in the car: I don’t think Hector Moya is a good guy, of course not. But I really strongly think that if you want to put somebody away for life, you got to do it the right way. My job is to make sure you cross your t’s and dot your i’s and anything else that’s not fair.

It kind of feels like you gave Cisco (Angus Sampson) a lighter season. Was that by design or was that just how it turned out to be with everything else going on?

No, it wasn’t by design. I mean, he had a very heavy season in Season 2 with the Road Saints stuff, and we certainly felt like we had done our job with that story, and that story is in part Cisco’s backstory, too. I mean, not that there isn’t more to learn about Cisco’s backstory, because there is, but that was certainly part of telling the story of how Cisco came to be Cisco and how he came to be in Mickey’s orbit and all of that. And so it’s always just dictated by the demands of the story we’re telling. That’s all. We love the character, who is such a twist on the traditional investigator or whatever you might want to call it, character. Again, my experience on The Good Wife and the character of Kalinda [Archie Panjabi], that was another—those characters are really fun when you make them something other than what you expect them to be. And Cisco’s definitely something other than what you expect him to be.

The Lincoln Lawyer, Seasons 1-3, Streaming now, Netflix