Before Nottapon Boonprakob made “The Evil Lawyer,” he had never spent much time thinking about the justice system. That changed the moment he started sitting in on courtroom proceedings – watching judges, lawyers and prosecutors move through rituals that, from the outside, look absolute and sacred, and from the inside, turn out to be something more unsettling: deeply, fallibly human.
“Once we started researching and speaking directly with people inside the system, it became much more human,” he tells Variety. “We began to see the individuals who are part of the system – their faces, their life experiences, their perspectives on the world.”
That dissonance – between the ideal of justice and the imperfect people charged with delivering it – sits at the heart of “The Evil Lawyer,” Nottapon’s second Netflix original following “Mad Unicorn” and the most ambitious Thai legal drama yet attempted on the platform. Produced by Songphon Jantharasom and co-directed by Jakkarin Thepvong, the series stars Rhatha Phongam as Jittri, a defense attorney notorious in legal circles for weaponizing technicalities and doing whatever it takes to secure an acquittal. Nat Kitcharit plays Mek, an idealistic young lawyer whose faith in the system is systematically dismantled after he is framed for the murder of the son of Anan (Songsit Roongnophakunsri), a powerful police chief. Backed into a corner and abandoned by the institutions he trusted, Mek turns to Jittri – the so-called evil lawyer of the title – who agrees to take his case on one condition: he must work for her.
The series uses multiple interconnected cases to pull viewers through different corners of Thailand’s justice system, keeping Mek’s ordeal as its emotional spine. Also in the ensemble are Atchareeya Potipipittanakorn as Ang, a politician and human rights lawyer; Phollawat Manuprasert as Rit, Mek’s father and a high-ranking judge forced to choose between his principles and his son; and Paopetch Charoensook as Techin, the police chief’s son.
Nottapon, who joined the underDOC team as director and co-writer after Jakkarin and Jantharasom had already developed the initial concept, describes the show as something he could not have made without immersing himself in a world he barely knew. The research process – interviews with lawyers, judges, prosecutors and forensic specialists – did more than supply the series with authentic detail. It reoriented his understanding of what justice actually is. “Every person has flaws, blind spots, and imperfections,” he says. “Yet these same people are entrusted with roles within a system that is meant to pursue something incredibly pure and sacred, determining the truth, proving someone’s innocence, or deciding the course of another person’s life.” People are striving toward ideals of fairness and truth, he adds – but mistakes happen, blind spots exist. “No system is perfect.”
He also came away with a conviction about the limits of language itself. The law depends on words, but words can only approximate truth – and that gap, he realized, is where much of the drama actually lives.
That insight shaped one of the series’ most distinctive formal choices: stylized transitions that carry viewers directly out of the courtroom and into competing reconstructions of disputed events. The idea, Nottapon says, emerged from a thought Jakkarin articulated during development – that a courtroom is less a place of discovery than a kind of theater, where each side stages its own version of reality for the judge. “Once we started thinking about the courtroom in those terms, it felt natural to bring viewers directly into the reality that each lawyer is trying to construct and visualize,” Nottapon says. “This is how the concept of transitioning from the courtroom into reconstructed events became part of the storytelling language of the series.”
Getting the balance right required the team to construct an entire internal grammar for the device – rules about camera movement, visual effects, and crucially, what characters entering a reconstructed scene could see, do and interact with. “We spent a lot of time defining the rules of this world,” Nottapon says. The goal was a technique that felt visually imaginative without undermining the credibility of the drama around it.
At the center of that drama is Jittri, who began the development process as an older male lawyer before the writing room reconceived her as a woman. For Nottapon, the gender shift was transformative. A figure who has accumulated enough experience, resilience and authority to go head-to-head with powerful men in a profession that remains largely dominated by them is immediately more compelling – and more revealing. “She’s not simply an ‘evil lawyer’ or an anti-hero,” he says. “She’s someone whose choices and worldview have been shaped by everything she’s been through.” What he hopes viewers will eventually ask, once they have moved past her toughness and her morally ambiguous methods, is a simpler and more human question: what happened to this woman?
Mek was designed to carry a different weight. He is, by intention, the audience’s surrogate – someone who enters Jittri’s world knowing roughly what most viewers know, and is changed by it in ways the show hopes viewers will feel alongside him. “He is the doorway through which audiences enter the series and explore the complexities of Thailand’s justice system,” Nottapon says. “As his perspective evolves, we hope viewers will find themselves questioning and reassessing their own assumptions as well.”
Legal dramas have rarely found traction in Thailand, where audiences have long favored romance, comedy and horror. Part of the resistance is cultural – courtroom procedure is remote from most people’s daily lives – but part is industrial. Stories built around a specific profession demand a depth of research that is genuinely costly, and investors have historically been reluctant to back projects with what they perceive as a niche audience. Nottapon is candid about what “The Evil Lawyer” is up against. He calls it an experiment: a test of how far Thai audiences are willing to go with a story that is demanding, morally unresolved and set in a world most of them have never entered. If it works, he believes it can serve as a reference point – evidence that the appetite exists for more ambitious, unconventional Thai storytelling.
Netflix has helped create the conditions for that experiment. Nottapon points to “The Believers” – which engaged with religious themes that would have been difficult to attempt in an earlier era of Thai drama – as one marker of how the platform has expanded what feels possible. The global stage also shifts the competitive logic entirely: Thai content now sits alongside series from the U.S., South Korea, Japan and everywhere else, competing for the same viewers. That pressure, counterintuitively, has created more creative freedom rather than less.
When asked whether the series’ deep specificity – its grounding in Thai legal culture, politics and social tensions – might make it harder for international audiences to connect, Nottapon is unequivocal. “No, not at all. In fact, I believe the opposite.” The comparison he reaches for is “Parasite”: Bong Joon Ho did not soften or universalize his film’s Korean particularity. He leaned into it, and the film travelled precisely because of that specificity, not in spite of it. “I see ‘The Evil Lawyer’ in a similar way,” Nottapon says. Korean drama itself, he notes, was once unfamiliar to most international viewers – and familiarity built gradually, through exposure to well-told stories. He believes the same is possible for Thailand.
“The more we have authentic local voices telling stories from their own perspectives, the richer, more unique, and more diverse global cinema becomes,” he says. “What makes storytelling exciting is not uniformity, it is the fact that people from different cultures can share stories that only they can tell.”
“The Evil Lawyer” streams on Netflix.