The Rainmaker: Grisham’s Rudy Baylor gets a modern makeover
Tuesday, 13 January 2026
REVIEW: Thirty years on, I’m still not sure if John Grisham’s 1995 novel The Rainmaker helped inspire my legal studies or pushed me towards a career away from the Bar.
Whatever the truth, I lapped up the 434 pages detailing young graduate Rudy Baylor’s fight for justice for his downtrodden and victimised clients. Then, despite writer-director Francis Ford Coppola significantly paring down the author’s tome, I thought the 1997 cinematic version perhaps the most accessible of all the Hollywood Grisham adaptations (even if it isn’t as quote-worthy or sheer crowd-pleasing as A Time to Kill).
As well as the impressive central trio of Matt Damon, Danny DeVito and Claire Danes, it also featured wonderful cameos from the likes of Danny Glover, Dean Stockwell and Jon Voight, while delivering a solidly coherent story full of emotion and good-old, classic courtroom tension.
But that hasn’t stopped Tinseltown from having another crack, retooling and reimagining The Rainmaker into a 10-part series (now available to stream on ThreeNow), which has already been renewed for a second season.
Fans of the source material should be warned, however, gender-swapping, race-changing and alterations to significant details about characters and their cases abound, while the action has shifted from Tennessee to South Carolina (although it was actually filmed in Dublin, Ireland). These all result in something of a tonal shift as well, more than a hint of fellow Grisham fable The Firm here, a splash of Nicholas Sparks there.
However, despite creators Jason Richman (The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon) and Michael Seitzman (North Country, Intelligence) monkeying around with the plot, this is still, at its heart, a compelling story of choosing the fight for legal equality rather than chasing an equity partnership. And it helps that the show’s Rudy, Rivals’ Milo Callaghan, is almost a dead ringer for Damon.
When we first meet him, Rudy seemingly has a bright, brilliant future in front of him. Top of his graduating class, he and girlfriend Sarah Plankmore (Madison Iseman) have been hired by prestigious legal firm Tinley Britt. But after an altercation with his Mom’s boyfriend leaves him with a cut lip and a bloodied shirt ahead of his first day in the office, Rudy then finds managing partner Leo F. Drummond’s (Mad Men’s John Slattery) induction speech about victory in court being “what you can convince a jury that you have proof of” somewhat unpalatable. Not only are his objections dismissed, he is too.
Facing up to the prospect of returning to the evening bar work that helped him scrape to make ends meet during his studies, Rudy’s lament that no reputable firms are hiring, is met with the query, “how about a not-so-reputable one?” Homed on the site of a former taco restaurant, J. Lyman Stone and Associates specialises in personal injury claims, promising to charge only if the client wins. “We represent people on the worst day of their lives,” Jocelyn “Bruiser” Stone (Lana Parrilla) explains. “They want someone to screw the people who screwed them.”
Despite being dismayed at potentially earning less than a waitress and shocked at the ambulance-chasing of the firm’s paralegal Deck Shifflet (P.J. Byrne), Rudy reluctantly signs on.
What follows is a series of opportunities to test his courtroom skills, the American justice system and compare the ethos and culture of J. Lyman Stone with Tinley Britt. The result is sometimes heavy handed and obvious drama, but delivered with a swagger, style and sense of purpose sadly missing from last year’s awful Suits sequel.
The Rainmaker is now available to stream on ThreeNow.