Lola & Mark’s Friendship Is Tested in ‘All Rise’ Season 2

“We call it the ‘awakening’ of All Rise,” co-showrunner Dee Harris-Lawrence says of the courthouse drama’s second season. “We are reflecting what is happening in the real world. And Lola will be right in the center of it all.” Quite literally, it seems, in the two-part opener (concluding November 23). 

The story begins last summer, when protesters in Los Angeles took to the streets. As Judge Lola Carmichael (Simone Missick, above) and prosecutor Mark Callan (Wilson Bethel) are heading home, says Harris-Lawrence, she “inserts herself into a situation” between a teen girl and police and is detained.

Mark’s and Lola’s different takes on the encounter test their friendship, which hasn’t fully recovered four months later when Mark — heading a Special Trials Unit — argues a case in her courtroom. “The great thing is how the audience really loves these two characters and wants them to be OK,” says Harris-Lawrence, who wrote the premiere. “We thought [Mark and Lola] can have such an honest, raw conversation about this. And hopefully [viewers will] start having those conversations as well.”

Repercussions from that night ripple throughout the season, which also introduces law clerk Vanessa “Ness” Johnson (Samantha Marie Ware). An extremely smart Harvard grad with zero filter, she too sees things differently than boss Lola on occasion. Says the producer: “They’re going to push each other.”

(Erik Voake/CBS)

All Rise, Season 2 Premiere, Monday, November 16, 9/8c, CBS