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Kathy Bates‘ win for Best Actress in a Drama Series at Friday night’s Critics Choice Awards was also a win for broadcast TV, which is scarcely represented on the awards circuit these days, especially in drama categories.
“It’s a big deal for me,” she told reporters backstage after her win for the CBS series Matlock. “When we did our pilot, I got an email from Amy Reisenbach, who is the head of the network, and I looked up her up because I didn’t really know who she was, and I saw a picture of her…next to a headline that said, ‘Broadcast TV Is Not Dead.’“
In Matlock, Bates plays Madeline “Matty” Matlock, a brilliant septuagenarian who achieved success in her younger years and decides to rejoin the work force at a prestigious law firm where she uses her unassuming demeanor and wily tactics to win cases all while investigating a deeply personal secret of her own. The series has been a ratings hit for CBS — so much so that it received a swift Season 2 renewal in October.
All this to say, Reisenbach (with Bates’ help) has certainly proved her thesis that broadcast television still has a place in the current landscape.
“This really is an award for [the network] for taking the opportunity to need to create such a wonderful show,” Bates continued. “I mean, it’s just been phenomenal.”
Bates remained tight-lipped about what’s in store for the rest of Season 1, simply saying: “We’re going to really rock your socks off.”
Over the course of her career, which spans more than five decades, Bates has certainly played a whole host of characters and is no stranger to roles she can’t necessarily relate to.
However, she did acknowledge that she “really dig deep” before tackling Matlock, especially given the character is still struggling with the loss of her daughter. As someone with no children herself, she looked to other experiences to channel that grief and guilt.
“I really started to think about my own mother a lot…she was born in 1907 and so when she came along, she didn’t have anywhere near the opportunities that we had. So she’s always very much at the forefront of my mind,” she explained. “I also lost a very, very dear friend, who was a wonderful actress, who was killed in a car wreck back in the 80s. So that loss was so tremendous that I’ve been able to use that to deal with the loss of my daughter. So for me, it took different things from my life to try to create this tremendous amount of guilt that Maddie has so that we can keep her driving through this preposterous event where she decides to infiltrate this law firm for justice.”
