The Rainmaker TV series: John Grisham, the king of legal thrillers, is back in fashion

Legal thrillers never really went out of fashion but there was definitely a time when you couldn’t walk into an airport or a cinema without being smacked in the face with a John Grisham book or adaptation.

And Grisham will be back on screen with a new TV series in the works based on his 1995 novel The Rainmaker. Commissioned by the same American TV network that made Suits, The Rainmaker was previously a 1997 Francis Ford Coppola film starring Matt Damon, Claire Danes and Jon Voight.

The new version will star Milo Callaghan as Rudy, the role Damon had played. Rudy is a young lawyer fresh out of school who ends up in a David v Goliath battle against a larger-than-life veteran (Mad Men’s John Slattery). The series also stars Madison Iseman, Lana Parrilla and P.J. Byrne.

The 1990s was dominated by A-list movie stars in jeopardy in a John Grisham movie. It started with Tom Cruise in The Firm, playing a young lawyer who thought he landed his dream job when he joined a venerated legal practice only to find himself literally running (so, so much running) for his life.

The Sydney Pollack-directed movie was a huge hit and cemented Cruise’s star status. It also made everyone paranoid and saw government and corporate conspiracies everywhere they turned.

That same year, an ascendent Julia Roberts was also on the run, as a young law student who accidentally and correctly theorised the death of a Supreme Court Justice was an assassination linked to corrupt politicians doing the bidding of an oil giant. It also featured Denzel Washington as a reporter and a basically mute Stanley Tucci as a contract killer.

It was also steeped in paranoia, and it’s no coincidence that the first two Grisham adaptations were directed by Pollack and Alan J. Pakula, masters of 1970s conspiracy thrillers.

The Pelican Brief didn’t make as much money as The Firm but it was respectable. And the studios knew they were onto a good thing. As with anything in Hollywood, if it makes bank, it needs to be emulated and repeated.

Before the decade was out, there was The Client (Susan Sarandon, Tommy Lee Jones), A Time to Kill (Matthew McConaughey, Sandra Bullock, Samuel L. Jackson), The Chamber (Gene Hackman, Chris O’Donnell), The Rainmaker and The Gingerbread Man (Kenneth Branagh, Robert Downey Jr., Robert Duvall).

By the time the last Grisham legal thriller came out in 2003, A Runaway Jury with John Cusack and Rachel Weisz, audiences had moved on. Although two more Grisham books would be adapted for the screen, neither saw the inside of a courtroom – one was a baseball movie with Harry Connick Jr and the other was Christmas with the Kranks.

There was a 2012 TV adaptation of The Firm with Josh Lucas, picking up 10 years after the dramatic events of the film but it was canned after one season.

Entertainment is cyclical and everything old is new again. The only thing that might change is the medium.

After the streaming success of The Lincoln Lawyer, a TV series adapted from a Michael Connelly book series, which had previously been a McConaughey movie, there was clearly room for more legal stories again.

Who else to turn to, or back to, than the grandmaster himself, Grisham?