Beau Bridges Gives ‘Matlock’ Season 3 Update — Has Filming Already Started?

It’s CBS scripted TV premiere week, but Matlock won’t be among the new episodes. The Kathy Bates legal drama is getting a reset after the major mystery of its first two seasons, the case of the missing Wellbrexa study, was solved, and the writing team needed extra time to craft the new mystery. Because of that, Matlock Season 3 will return in the midseason on CBS, meaning it’s getting a 2027 premiere date. Beau Bridges gave TV Insider an update on when he’ll be back on set of Matlock, implying that filming has already started.

Bridges just appeared in a guest-star role on ABC’s R.J. Decker on Tuesday, October 6. He played the father of Scott Speedman‘s titular character. He gave us the Matlock update while discussing that episode, confirming that he’ll be back in the third season after his character, Howard Markston, was imprisoned for the Wellbrexa cover-up scandal alongside his son, Julian (Jason Ritter), who helped take his corrupt father down but was atoning for his role in the cover-up with his arrest.

“I’m going to work on Matlock in December,” Bridges said. “They just started just now, so the timing worked out for me to be able to do R.J. as well.”

“Matlock is great,” Bridges continued. “I have so much fun on that one, and what a gift to be able to do a show here in L.A. where I live. That’s fantastic. And Kathy Bates is an old buddy of mine, and working with her is fun. Yeah, it’s good.”

The creator of the Matlock reboot, Jennie Snyder Urman, requested the midseason premiere for Season 3. She told TV Insider why.

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“I asked for it with the network. We had a talk,” she said in April 2026. “I just feel like we had so much stuff to think about because we really landed the plane on this and 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. So, we really, 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. I’m excited about it, but I am also grateful because we needed a little bit of time.”

CBS’s Thursday primetime lineup this fall now consists of Ghosts (8/7c), Eternally Yours (8:30/7:30c), Elsbeth (9/8c), and Cupertino (10/9c). A Matlock Season 3 premiere date will be announced at a later time.

Matlock, Season 3 Premiere, 2027, CBS

— Reporting by Meredith Jacobs