(This story contains spoilers from the October 24 episode of Matlock.)

Fighting sexual harassment on television and in cinema is no longer a taboo#Me too. But Matlockwith its third episode, “A Guy Named Greg,” added even more nuance to the conversation.

Kathy Bates as Madeline “Matty” Matlock in the hit CBS series as a cunning septuagenarian lawyer who shares the same last name as the TV series’ iconic hero. In the latest episode, which aired Thursday night, creator/showrunner Jennie Snyder Urman and her team went beyond simply getting the audience to believe the accuser and instead highlighted the lingering generational divides and biases surrounding how the sexual harassment harms women.

The stage is set to spark a larger conversation when Olympia (Skye Marshall) fails to connect with the jury while representing Alex (Danielle Larracuente, Bosch: the legacy), a young and attractive lawyer new to his firm, in her sexual harassment complaint against her colleague Jeremy Brooks (Chad Coe), who has more seniority. To win back the jury, jury consultant Jacobson Moore, aka “the human lie detector” Shae Banfield (a new recurring role for Joan the Virgin favorite Yael Grobglas), recommends Matty to take over. While Olympia and her colleagues – her soon-to-be ex-husband Julian (Jason Ritter), whose father Senior (Beau Bridges) founded the company, and her potential love interest Elijah (Eme Ikwuakor) – prepare Matty, who has no haven’t tried a case in 30 years, in the mock trial room with a mock jury, it keeps faltering. As Shae continues to question him, Matty responds with an emotional truth bomb.

“You’re not being honest, Matty, why?” » Shae roars as she walks towards Bates’ character, repeatedly downplaying her prodding.

“Because I’m pretending,” Matty explodes. “The truth is, I don’t think we should have taken care of this matter. Back in my day, we accepted comments like that all the time. And if things went wrong, we avoided the guy. We didn’t get drunk at a Christmas party and end up alone with him.

A loud gasp comes from behind, prompting Matty and Olympia to turn their heads as Shae continues to stare straight ahead to reveal a very hurt Alex – who viewers had seen Matty coax into wearing a breast-reducing court outfit before this premiere court appearance. – before she leaves the room. In the next scene, with the New York skyline in the background, Matty apologizes to Olympia. “I’m really sorry; it’s generational; we just put up with different things at that time,” she says. But Olympia tears into her with passion and persuasion that Alex doesn’t need to be perfect and shares that she took the affair because of the world she wants for her own young daughter.

Preparing for the case, her first argument in court, Matty remembers her own Jeremy, a guy she calls Greg who “crossed the line” and “cooled off” with her. She and her husband even joked about it. But this decision to stay away from Greg, she later reveals to the jury, took her away from the litigation. Instead, she hid and turned to contracts. “You know, it’s funny,” she told the jury. “It seemed like a small thing at the time,” shaking his head, “it completely shattered my dreams, which is not small at all, is it?”

Admitting to the jury her own biases against Alex, based on what happened during her youth as a working woman, Matty challenges jurors to adjust their own thinking in relation to the centuries-old attack of “why Alex waited so long to report what Jeremy Brooks said. did” to “how bad must it have been for Alex to risk everything and finally report him?”

Urman tells The Hollywood Reporter that this episode is one of his favorites, especially since it accomplishes so much at once. “Matty isn’t always right and we wanted to dramatize some of his blind spots,” she says. “What really gives hope is how she changes.”

Urman explains: “If you had asked her if she had ever been a victim of sexual harassment, she would have said ‘no.’ And then she realizes this incident that happened in her life. She thought she had the situation handled, (but) she just pivoted. And she realizes through this young woman’s story that, yes, she pivoted, but that it cost her something. It changed the entire course of her life and the type of law she practiced. These are things that we cannot quantify.

Urman further explains Matty’s emotional state, saying, “This is one of my favorite episodes because of that, how she learns and how emotional it is for her to realize what Things like sexual harassment can cost you. It’s not always clear at the time, and it becomes clear later. In this case, it becomes clear 30, 40 years later, and it really changes his way of thinking. And it also makes her realize that she loves being in the courtroom, and it opens up a new path for her.

Bates also praised Matty’s crucial episode, saying THR“I really like this episode, not only because I get to argue a case in court, which is something Matty really wanted to do all these years, and didn’t realize until it happened, and then she remembers this event, this defining event in her life that set her on a path that led her to abandon her dream of becoming a trial lawyer.

The topic of sexual harassment, she reveals, struck her. “It’s something I identify with because I grew up sexually in the ’60s and ’70s. It was a different time, and it was right before AIDS curtailed the rise of sexual freedom that started in the ’60s,” says Bates. “In those days, if you decided to go to a men’s hotel room, you knew why you were going there. So when the #MeToo movement emerged, my reaction was very instinctive, based on my generational experience,” she admits.

“When I saw what young women are going through today and the type of sexual harassment they face, not just going to a hotel room, but on a daily basis in offices, and how it affects their careers, I think that’s what Matty began to identify with: this isn’t an isolated case; it’s something they have to live with. And his eyes are opened to that in the same way I think my eyes were opened. So it was a very powerful episode for me to delve deeper and understand what young women are going through, and that they want to be able to show off their bodies, be sexy, have fun and flirt, but not have to be harassed to cause of this. .”

“It affects you in ways that you don’t always know, because you protect yourself in different ways,” Urman emphasizes again. “Unfortunately, I don’t know many women who haven’t experienced this. In the writers’ room, there were a lot of frank and honest discussions. One of our writers said this line that Matty later says, which is: The question is not why it took him so long to report it, but how bad it must have been for her to come forward?

Urman continues: “So often we don’t wallow in it, we pivot and we build boundaries that we don’t realize are affecting us as well. Why should you avoid someone for their bad behavior? And what situations and places of power are you getting out of because you need to avoid those bad situations? It’s not something Matty faced at all until this affair realizing, “Oh, this changed the course of my life.” And that’s no small feat.

Urman is careful to note that getting women to come forward still isn’t easy and that other factors play a role. “I think there is still a certain level of privilege in who gets to report and how it is seen and valued, because it costs money; it puts the job at risk and depends on where you are probably in this country, how serious or not serious these things are,” she says. “It’s full of hope and ambition when women say something and they’re believed, but I think there’s so much calculation every day of ‘if I do this, then I don’t.’ I won’t get this job’ or ‘I won’t be able to support my family and I won’t be able to pay my bills.

“It’s devastating to me when I think about it,” she continues. “The privilege of being listened to is very real. And that’s why we just want to put more and more examples on screen to say, “this is not right,” just so people recognize that they’re in a similar situation and that they feel seen. »

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Matlock releases new episodes Thursdays at 9 p.m. on CBS.