‘I Wanted to Promise a Twist’: How CBS Got People to Watch a Matlock Reboot

This article contains spoilers for the CBS reboot of Matlock.

CBS chief marketing officer Mike Benson has spent the last 18 months obsessing over Matlock — or, to be more precise, how to sell 2024 audiences on the Eye’s new reboot of the Andy Griffith-led legal mystery. Normally, hyping the reincarnation of a classic TV title is pretty straightforward: “Remember that show you loved a long time ago? It’s back, only cooler, with new stars — and now in HD!” But as soon as Benson screened the pilot for the new Matlock back in the spring of 2023, he knew his task was going to be a lot more complicated. That’s because this remake was not actually a remake at all.

As anyone who’s seen the first episodes of Matlock (2024) now knows — and stop reading if you don’t want to have the surprise ruined — the new series features Oscar-winner Kathy Bates playing a lawyer who lands a job at a prestigious firm by pretending to be a Madeline Matlock, a down-on-her luck widow just trying to make enough money to take care of her grandson. For most of the show’s pilot, audiences think they’re watching a show about another lawyer named Matlock who’s unnaturally good at solving legal mysteries. But at the very end of the first hour, we find out that this Matlock is actually a millionaire named Madeline Kingston who’s decided to go undercover at the firm because she’s convinced it is complicit in the opioid overdose of her daughter. So while, yes, it’s clear she’s going to be solving a new case every week like Griffith did for a decade, there’s also a huge twist that turns the show into an unexpected thriller.

As the many positive reviews of CBS’s Matlock have noted, this makes the new show a lot more interesting and, potentially, a lot more appealing to a broader audience. After all, for many folks under 35, Matlock is only known as a running gag on The Simpsons involving its appeal to Grampa Simpson and his geriatric friends. And while Matlock was actually a top 20 Nielsen hit for much of its nine-year run from 1986 to 1995 — making the title instantly recognizable to the Gen X and Boomer audiences who watch broadcasters like CBS — only the oldest members of said viewership were probably regular watchers of the original series: Even 40 years ago, Matlock was seen as a show for the “olds.” So the spin creator Jennie Snyder Urman (Jane the Virgin) put on Matlock in some ways ended up being much more of a marketing asset than the title itself. “It went from a really good pilot to a great pilot at the end of the show with the twist,” Benson says, recalling his first viewing of the show in the spring of 2023.

While CBS ordered Matlock to series almost as soon as it saw the pilot, the summer 2023 labor struggle between the Hollywood studios and labor unions WGA and SAG prompted the network to hold the show’s premiere a full year. That extra time came in handy, though, since it gave Benson time to figure out how to solve a mystery worthy of the original Ben Matlock: Promoting a reboot that’s not actually a reboot at all. I recently talked to Benson about the solution he and his team came up with, as well as the more general challenge of marketing a broadcast series in a streaming era, and the (somewhat) unusual decision to wait a month between airing the first and second episodes of the show.

When studios and networks talk about why they reboot shows or use old titles, they’ll often say, “Well, it means we start with something that has immediate awareness with millions of consumers.” But we saw this summer on the theatrical side that using the title The Fall Guy didn’t help that movie at all. And with the new Matlock, you’re using IP to sell something that is nothing at all like the show on which its title is based. So was having this title a good thing, a bad thing, or something in between? 

We certainly would never set out to disparage what Matlock was. But this is a wholly different show. What Jennie Urman envisioned was something that has the name “Matlock,” but the reason for the name of the show has a twist behind it. So while we knew there were audiences out there who knew what Matlock is, we didn’t really want to actually utilize that. We didn’t want to go out and leverage the strength of the old Matlock, per se. It was really about, “If you knew the show, fine.” We wanted to create something that could stand on its own and had nothing to do with the old IP.

Right, but then the challenge here was that what actually is a key selling point — the true identity and motivation of the lead character — comes as a complete shock to the audience when it’s revealed at the end of the pilot. Once it’s revealed, the show gets a lot more interesting. Did you know from the start that there was no way you could use this twist in your campaign? 
 
The thing that I knew is that I didn’t want to give away the twist, but I wanted to promise a twist. So the best way to do that was actually to twist the campaign. And that’s really what we set out to do: Create marketing that would get people to say, “Wait, there’s something else going on here. Is it Kathy? Is it the show?” The idea really stemmed out of the fact that Kathy Bates is not the Matlock you’d expect. In fact, there’s something much more deceptive going on here. So the goal was to create something that was provocative, to build on the idea that there’s some deception going on, and to create a bigger mystery—but certainly not give anything away.

What did that translate into with the creative elements of the campaign? 

Everything about the identity of the show that we created — from the key art, where part of her is behind a piece of frosted panel, to the music choices like Britney Spears — was about saying, “There is something else going on here, but we’re not going to let onto it. … You have to see it to really understand it. ” What we were really trying to do is set up a campaign that sells the entire season, not just the one episode.

You also ended up having two launch campaigns for this show. There was all the promotion over the summer geared toward the sneak preview in September, and then for the last month, you’ve been hyping Matlock’s official Thursday premiere this week. But even though millions of people have seen it, you still haven’t revealed the twist in your marketing, right?
 
No. Whether it’s on-air or any other platform that we’re running on, we’re still building upon the idea that there is something different about this woman. Even from a publicity perspective, we’re not going out and just talking directly about the storyline in the show. We want to continue to build mystery around her and what she’s doing.

The big shift that we have made is, we’ve actually gone deeper and advanced the idea that she’s a fraud, she’s a liar, and what she’s doing as a character in this show is not what you think it is. But we’re still not giving away exactly what it is. It’s still been about creating more mystery around her than just putting it out there.

The best form of marketing continues to be word of mouth, and so the more that we can do to drive more word of mouth around this series, that’s what we want to do. Our strategy here is to continue to build more and more mystery around Kathy, her character and where this series is going.

 The show will have officially premiered by the time people read this, so I’m wondering, after the Oct. 17 relaunch, do you change gears again and lean into telling people, “All right, this is what’s happening”?

Well, this is where we start to get surgical with our campaign as we start to understand who’s watched it and who hasn’t watched it. I have this motto: “Always be recruiting.” We always are looking to bring new audiences in. We are continually working these days to market a show as something that people can either watch on CBS live or stream it on Paramount+. And the delayed viewing aspect is an important part of understanding the audience now. If someone puts a show on a watch list, and they don’t get to it for five or six weeks, that’s okay — but we start to think about, “How do we get people who have the propensity to watch to start watching?” And then if they do watch the show, it becomes, “How do we get people to watch more?”

We are actually working hard to bring new audiences into the show all season long. Look at Elsbeth: We created a sampling strategy for that show last spring, then we got people to watch during the season, and then over the summer, we worked to get still more people to start watching. So it’s this bifurcated strategy of driving further engagement with people who are watching and finding ways to recruit new audiences. There’s never really just a shift in the campaign where we say, “Okay, we’re done launching.”

We’ve alluded to the sneak preview approach you used here, but I want to get more into the reasoning behind this strategy. It’s not new by any means: You did it earlier this year with Elsbeth; ABC did something similar with Abbott Elementary. It’s not something you do regularly, though, so I’m curious what makes you take this approach with a new series? 

We don’t do this sort of sampling a lot. We’re pretty specific about it. But we want to make sure that we are putting these sampling opportunities in front of audiences that have a high propensity to actually go in, watch a show, love it, and then want to come back and, importantly, want to talk about it. In this case, we know what a CBS Sunday audience is, with football and 60 Minutes. We felt that if we could sample Matlock on a Sunday, there would be an audience there that would really like this show.

I’ve been curious about the scale and scope of broadcast marketing campaigns. Streamers barely used paid media to market many of their shows, even big ones. What is the size of the off-network marketing for a priority show such as Matlock in 2024? You’ve been doing this for a few decades now, so I’m sure whatever you spend is a lot less than when you launched something like Desperate Housewives. Do you even do paid media anymore?

We absolutely use paid media. But I would like to think that we use it in a smarter, more efficient way than others. We utilize CBS and all of our own [brands] across Paramount, and then we study where we can reach the right audiences outside of our own platforms — and that’s where we start to leverage paid media. It’s really about understanding who has the propensity to watch the show and where can we reach them in a way that can create impact.

What we don’t want to do is just — we’re not buying a ton of outdoor, for example. It’s not that it wouldn’t necessarily work, but we’ve got to be more strategic and more efficient with the way that we are buying media. Our campaigns really need to do double duty. So we lean heavily into connected devices, and social media and digital, because we’re building campaigns that need to create live viewing on both CBS and Paramount+, but also build awareness so we can then convert viewers to streaming.  We’ve really got to think about not only how and where we’re reaching audiences, but how we can be very specific with the messaging so people understand how to watch in a way that’s convenient.

Can you give me any specific examples of how you target your ads? What sorts of places will the audience see them?

I don’t want to give you our exact buying strategy, but I can tell you this: Every single campaign that we create has a fairly significant level of planning. We think about, “How do we reach an audience in a place that maybe they wouldn’t expect us to be?” It’s kind of the way I think about outdoor. I like outdoor advertising, but you drive around Los Angeles and the whole town is entertainment advertising in outdoor. Does that make the most sense for us? So we’re continually looking for new platforms and other ways to use platforms that will surprise an audience. It’s about understanding how we can make campaigns that are more provocative and have more impact rather than, “We just need to plaster it everywhere.” I just don’t think that that’s a strategy that works anymore.

Before we go I want to ask about the bigger picture of how you’re premiering your entire fall season. I know the setting of launch dates is mostly done by Amy Reisenbach and Noriko Kelley, your respective heads of programming and scheduling. But the whole way you’ve created a CBS Premiere Week that’s different from the usual Nielsen premiere week seems to be as much about marketing as anything else.

So, we did this coming out of the Super Bowl, too, earlier this year. Part of it was out of necessity because of the strike, but it worked really well for us from both a programming and marketing perspective. That’s because it created a bigger event that was a very specific destination [for viewers.] So we’re doing that again this fall, by sampling a couple shows like Matlock, and then having a very focused premiere week. It’s something that might feel like old-school television, but we think it actually works really well for new audiences today, because it makes things just a little easier for them. Everything kind of ties together in a way that’s more digestible.