The Rainmaker Season 1 Episode 1 Review: Another Rainy Day Kicks Off a Promising Storm

When The Rainmaker dropped its first episode, I wasn’t sure what to expect, especially knowing the long shadow cast by the John Grisham novel and its 1997 film adaptation. 

Add to that the high bar set by series like Goliath, which felt like the spiritual evolution of these underdog legal dramas, and you’d better come out swinging.

 Good news: this one just might.

“Another Rainy Day” doesn’t waste time setting the tone. From the opening scene — literal fire, fear, and abandonment — it’s clear this show is reaching for emotional depth and character trauma right out of the gate. 

And the Goliath vibes? Yeah, they’re here. A slick firm with questionable morals, a scrappy crew of legal outsiders, and one idealistic new lawyer caught in between.

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Meet Rudy Baylor. Fresh out of law school, he’s got a heart, a big mouth, and apparently only one hand-me-down suit, which is one punch away from being unwearable. 

Rudy is immediately likable, if a little too idealistic for the world he’s just entered. 

His personal life gives us some pretty big clues as to why: he’s living at home with a mother who is emotionally frozen in time after the death of his brother, John. She still dusts his old room like it’s a shrine. 

There’s no father in the picture, and the man now occupying that role — her new boyfriend, Hank — is aggressive and territorial, physically shoving Rudy before socking him in the face.

It doesn’t take much to imagine the history here. The silence of his mother, the lingering grief, the barely contained rage in Rudy — all signs point to a household touched by domestic violence. 

His mother’s refusal to intervene, followed by her asking him to leave, says more than words ever could. 

It’s a damning, quiet acceptance of abuse, and it likely shaped Rudy and his late brother’s entire trajectory. It also explains why Rudy, despite everything, is still trying to be a good man — a man with meaning.

Enter Leo Drummond, the smug, silver-haired head of Tinley Britt and Rudy’s potential boss. John Slattery plays him with zero warmth and maximum arrogance. 

If you’re hoping for a complicated villain with a flicker of buried humanity, keep walking. Leo isn’t Miles Drentell — he’s not hiding a soul behind his smirk. 

He believes the law isn’t about justice, but about persuasion and power, and he wields both like a sledgehammer.

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Rudy dares to push back, citing real legal cases about domestic violence victims the courts didn’t protect. Leo mocks him mercilessly, but Rudy holds his ground. 

For a moment, it seems like Leo might secretly respect his nerve. He doesn’t. Rudy is fired before the day is over.

Sarah Plankmore, Rudy’s fellow associate and quasi-girlfriend, shows some spine when she verbally cuts down Rudy’s statistics, but loses all credibility later when Leo tests her loyalty in the creepiest way imaginable. 

He drops a french fry on the ground. She picks it up. He drops another. She picks it up. And then he tells her he’s “defining their relationship.” It’s not just humiliating — it’s stomach-turning.

Sarah’s clearly clever, with an encyclopedic memory for book quotes, but there’s something missing. For someone so ambitious, she’s surprisingly quick to bow her head and kiss the ring. 

She’ll likely go far in a firm like Tinley Britt, but will she ever be a good lawyer? I have my doubts. She doesn’t seem to understand the weight of what they do — or why it matters. 

Rudy, on the other hand, is all weight. His soul is heavy with purpose, which is likely why he was drawn to Sarah in the first place.

She represents an escape, a life untouched by trauma. But there’s no real future there. Not for the man Rudy wants to be.

After burning out at Tinley Britt, Rudy lands at the bottom of the legal food chain — an old Taco Hut turned law office led by the tough-as-nails Jocelyn “Bruiser” Stone. 

She runs a cash-strapped, hustle-based operation with Deck Shifflet, a para-lawyer who’s failed the bar seven times and speaks with the twitchy energy of someone trying to win a courtroom argument before lunch.

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It’s not glamorous, but it’s real. Bruiser may not have Leo’s polish, but she has a code. 

She tells Rudy the truth: these clients are desperate, the system is rigged, and if he doesn’t have fire in his belly, he’d be better off waiting tables. She’s not wrong.

Rudy’s first potential client is Mrs. Black, a grieving mother whose son, Donny Rae, died of pneumonia while hospitalized, after kicking opioids and trying to rebuild his life. 

The hospital’s quick offer of a $50,000 settlement (while a motion to dismiss is still pending) raises red flags, and Rudy knows it. There’s something fishy here. 

And while Mrs. Black is as sharp as she is heartbroken, she gives Rudy a brutal reality check: just because he’s suffered doesn’t mean he understands her pain.

Still, she signs. And just like that, Rudy is in it.

But nothing’s easy. The hospital staff who saw Donny Ray that night are gone. All but one — Melvin Pritcher, a nurse now under arrest for killing his own mother. Matricide. 

And oh yeah, we already saw him inject an innocent woman in the neck while claiming, “It’s OK. I’m a nurse.”

This is Rudy’s star witness. And if you think that’s not going to hit uncomfortably close to home, think again.

The story is already circling back on itself in poetic, painful ways. Rudy’s entire sense of justice is rooted in his broken family, his silent mother, and the abuse they endured. 

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Now he’s representing a mother who lost her son and trying to build a case on the testimony of a man who murdered his. How’s that for moral complexity?

If the show is smart — and it seems to be — Rudy’s own past will keep bubbling up in unexpected ways. 

He’s not just here to make a living. He’s trying to make peace with his ghosts. And unlike Sarah, who wants to charm her way to the top, Rudy is clawing his way out of a hole that life dug for him long before law school.

There are a few TV-isms to swallow. Rudy’s dream loft is ridiculous, even with a $5k advance. No broke recent grad is living in an enormous brick loft with 50-foot ceilings across from his future love interest.

But hey, it’s TV. We forgive.

What The Rainmaker gets right is tone. It’s angry but grounded and stylized without being smug. 

It understands the core of these kinds of stories: the law isn’t always about what’s legal — it’s about what’s right. And that fight is never clean.

If Rudy keeps wrestling with his demons and the show digs into the emotional fallout of his upbringing, this series could be more than just another courtroom drama. It could be a reckoning.

What did you think of The Rainmaker Season 1 Episode 1?

The trailer alone had people fired up, and now that the premiere has landed, it feels like the show just might live up to the hype. 

Did Rudy win you over? Is Leo already on your “most punchable characters” list? 

Drop your thoughts in the comments — we want to hear what you’re loving, hating, and everything in between.

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