Which The Rainmaker Character Are You?

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John Grisham's The Rainmaker has now been adapted twice, and the two versions could hardly be more different in shape. Francis Ford Coppola's 1997 film compressed the novel into a little over two hours with Matt Damon as the rookie lawyer Rudy Baylor. The 2025 USA Network series, developed by Jason Richman and produced with Blumhouse Television, takes the opposite approach: it stretches the material across a full season, adds a murder case the novel never had, and treats the legal system less as a puzzle to be solved than as an ecosystem to be survived.

Milo Callaghan plays Rudy, fresh out of law school and immediately fired from the white-shoe firm that hired him. He lands instead at an outfit that is best described as an ambulance chaser with ambitions, run by Jocelyn Stone, known universally as Bruiser, played by Lana Parrilla. The pairing is the show's smartest invention. Rudy still has the capacity to be genuinely offended by unfairness, which is his only real advantage. Bruiser lost that years ago and replaced it with tactics.

Opposite them is John Slattery as Leo Drummond, the opposing counsel who fired Rudy on his first day and then has to watch him keep turning up. Slattery, who spent seven seasons on Mad Men perfecting the art of the charming man who has stopped examining himself, is well cast. Drummond is not written as a villain in his own telling. He is a man who decided long ago that winning cleanly and winning are the same thing provided nobody checks the difference.

P.J. Byrne plays Deck Shifflet, the paralegal who has failed the bar repeatedly and does not especially care, because credentials were never his currency. Deck knows where every file is, who owes whom, and which door is unlocked. He is the character the show uses to demonstrate that competence and qualification are related but not identical, and Byrne plays him with a shabby dignity that keeps the comedy from tipping into condescension.

The season builds around two intertwined cases: an insurance company refusing to pay a claim, which is the plot of the original novel, and a murder trial layered on top. That structure lets the series do something the film could not, which is show how a case actually accumulates. Documents surface. Witnesses shade their answers. Someone talks who was not supposed to. The show is unusually patient about the grinding, unglamorous middle of litigation, where most legal dramas cut straight to closing arguments.

Robyn Cara plays Sarah Plankmore, and Dan Fogler and Wade Briggs fill out a cast that USA has assembled with more care than the network's recent output might lead you to expect. The show premiered in August 2025 and has drawn comparisons to the era when USA built its identity on exactly this kind of character-first procedural, back when Suits and Burn Notice were the network's calling cards.

If you like watching lawyers make morally interesting mistakes, try our Suits quiz, our Better Call Saul quiz, or our Task quiz for another recent crime drama built on procedure and bad options.

So who are you in that courtroom? The rookie who cannot let it go, the polished veteran who stopped asking, the fixer without a license, the boss who built her own firm, or the one still deciding which side she is on? Take the quiz above and find out.