‘The Lincoln Lawyer’ Spinoff About Cobie Smulders’ Character in the Works at Netflix

The Lincoln Lawyer may be ending with its upcoming fifth season, but viewers may not have to say goodbye to that world — or at least one of the characters in it — just yet.

A spinoff following Cobie Smulders‘ character, Artemisia “Emi” Finch, is in the works at Netflix, Deadline reports. Emi is the half-sister of The Lincoln Lawyer‘s lead character, Mickey Haller (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), who approached him in the final scene of Season 4; she’ll be a series regular in the final season. The Lincoln Lawyer executive producers Ted Humphrey, Dailyn Rodriguez, and Matthew J. Lieberman are writing the script.

Emi seems to be The Lincoln Lawyer‘s answer to Mickey’s half-brother in the Michael Connelly books; the series around Harry Bosch is on Prime Video, which has always been the obstacle in any sort of crossover, the executive producers have told TV Insider in the past. “We really can’t use that character. They can’t use [Mickey]. It’s unfortunate. So we try and figure out ways to do those storylines with other characters,” Rodriguez said ahead of Season 3.

Courtesy of Netflix

In the Season 4 finale, after Mickey wrapped his latest case — and his trial ended and his reputation was restored — he stopped at the grocery store, where Emi watched him, then approached him in the parking lot and confirmed his identity. She then saved him when he was shot at, by the Armenians targeting him after the case. She told him her instincts kicked in when she saw a guy eyeballing him and reaching into his jacket — then revealed, “I’m your sister.”

“Is this how we’re bringing in Bosch? Well, I wouldn’t put it that way because, of course, we don’t have the rights to Bosch,” Humphrey told TV Insider. “Bosch is on another network. But there’s obvious parallels, I suppose you could say, in some ways. It’s how we’re expanding the world of the show, the world of Mickey’s family, and introducing what we think is going to be a really compelling new character who can stand on her own two feet.”

Humphrey also shared that adding in Emi was part of the show evolving, and that’s certainly true with the news of this possible spinoff.

“It’s always important to be introducing new situations for characters and new characters and new situations for existing characters. I think Mickey is a loner. We’ve seen that and he struggles with that and he has a lot of close people in his life who are like his family, like Lorna [Becki Newton], Maggie [Neve Campbell], his daughter [Krista Warner], Legal Siegel [Elliott Gould], and these people around him, Cisco [Angus Sampson]. He has his mother, but that relationship is complicated, let’s put it that way. And he has these very complicated memories of his father,” the EP said.

“And so the idea that there’s actually a real familial connection there, and what does that mean, and first of all, is it real? Where does it come from? And if it is real, how are they alike? How are they different? What are their different skillsets and things that they bring to life?” he continued.

Humphrey also told us that Emi is “the vehicle through which the main story of another season will come to Mickey, that she needs his help with something, basically. And there’s a whole twisted story as to why that is, and that part of the fun of that season would be unraveling what that is and what it means.”

The Lincoln Lawyer Season 5 is based on Connelly’s Resurrection Walk, the seventh book in his series. The logline reads: “Mickey Haller’s world is upended when the half-sister he never knew existed, Emi (Cobie Smulders), comes to him with a plea to help free a wrongfully convicted woman. In a season defined by blood ties and buried secrets, Mickey takes on a grueling habeas petition to overturn a six-year-old murder conviction, but the deeper he digs, the more nefarious the forces arrayed against him become. Meanwhile, the stakes rise for his trusted team as Lorna (Becki Newton), Izzy (Jazz Raycole), and Cisco (Angus Sampson) step up to tackle high-profile challenges of their own. Having just saved himself from a wrongful conviction in Season 4, Mickey is now determined to set right an enormous miscarriage of justice. But as he unravels a dangerous web of corruption and lies, he must grapple with the fractured legacy of his family — both his chosen family and the family he never knew he had.”

Do you want to see a spinoff about Cobie Smulders’ Emi? Let us know in the comments section below.

The Lincoln Lawyer, Fifth and Final Season Premiere, TBA, Netflix