Cobie Smulders was on screen for roughly sixty seconds in the closing stretch of The Lincoln Lawyer season 4 — and Netflix is constructing a whole spinoff on top of that appearance.
Here’s the play. The character she plays, Emi Finch, is a half-sister to Mickey Haller. No such person exists anywhere in Michael Connelly’s novels. And she’s poised to take over one of the franchise’s most consequential roles.
The reason why comes down to something Netflix was never able to get its hands on.
The Bosch problem
On the page, Connelly gave Mickey Haller a half-brother on his father’s side: Hieronymus “Harry” Bosch. The bond between them runs through both of their book series. It’s bedrock material.
On Netflix, it simply couldn’t happen. The Bosch IP belongs to Prime Video, which has left The Lincoln Lawyer unable to ever feature him. The series wrote him out and built around the gap.
Two successful shows, two rival platforms, and a single character that neither one is able to share. For Prime Video, Bosch has been an enormous success. For Netflix, The Lincoln Lawyer has been a huge win. That these two men can never share a scene has been a source of friction on both sides.
The season 4 finale supplied the fix.
Enter Emi Finch
Smulders turned up only briefly, yet there’s nothing understated about the plan. Emi is the half-sibling Mickey has only just learned about, and she’s sliding into the position Bosch would hold if the rights weren’t in the way.
The stakes there are higher than they first appear, since the next season adapts a Lincoln Lawyer novel that rests substantially on a Bosch plotline. That load needs a carrier. She’s it.
Netflix has now announced a spinoff constructed squarely around Emi. Put bluntly: the streamer is heading up its own gender-bent take on Bosch.
Not the same character, and that’s the point
By no measure is Emi a stand-in copy of Harry Bosch. Her background is her own, she’s a different person, and her methods are presumably different too. What she does inherit is the Bosch function within The Lincoln Lawyer — and however the writers choose to handle that makes her spinoff a far more intriguing prospect than the usual procedural offshoot.
Connelly has a hand in the show. That’s the comfort here. The odds seem good that the character will be handled with the right touch for this TV universe instead of coming across as a rights-workaround dreamed up in a conference room.
Season 5 is the audition
Audiences have had a moment with Emi. Next comes an entire season of her. Smulders has signed on to The Lincoln Lawyer season 5 in a substantially expanded role spanning 10 episodes.
That’s ample room to construct a character from nothing, and ample time for viewers to work out whether they’d follow her wherever she goes. The show intends to spend it nudging them toward investing in the spinoff.
Anticipate a season that hands Emi storylines of her own rather than confining her to reactions opposite Mickey. Anticipate the sibling dynamic being assembled with care, gradually, as the pair share a season’s worth of screen time.
What we don’t know yet
Nearly all of it. Details on what lies ahead are scarce, and the credits rolled before Emi had much chance to make a first impression at all.
Even so, she reads well on paper, and the slot she fills in this universe genuinely matters. Should Netflix want an actual franchise from The Lincoln Lawyer — instead of one series that wraps up and another crossing its fingers — season 5 needs to make her land.
Manuel Garcia-Rulfo’s Mickey Haller is still the lead of a show that is now winding down. The entire operation is being passed to a woman who never appeared in a single novel.
Netflix gets 10 episodes to sell you on her belonging there.