Nottapong Boonprakob had never spent much time thinking about the judicial system before making The Evil Lawyer. That changed the moment he started sitting through court proceedings. I observed judges, lawyers, and prosecutors performing rituals. From the outside, the ritual appears absolute and sacred, but from the inside, it turns out to be something more disturbing, deeply fallible, and human.
“Once I started doing research and started talking directly to the people in the system, the system became more human-like,” he told Variety. “We began to see the individuals who are part of the system: their faces, their life experiences, their views on the world.”
The dissonance between ideals of justice and the imperfect people charged with realizing them is at the heart of “The Wicked Lawyer,” the second Netflix original after Notthaporn’s “Mad Unicorn” and the most ambitious Thai legal drama ever attempted on the platform. Produced by Sompong Jantarasom and co-directed by Jakarin Thepvong, the series stars Lata Phongam as Jittri, a lawyer notorious in the legal world for using her expertise as a weapon and doing whatever it takes to win acquittals. Nat Kitcharit plays Mek, an idealistic young lawyer. After Mek is framed for the murder of the son of the powerful police chief Annan (Sonsit Ronnofaqunsiri), his trust in the system is systematically dismantled. Driven into a corner and abandoned by the institutions she trusted, Meku turns to Jittori (a so-called unscrupulous lawyer), but Jittori agrees to take on the case on the condition that he will work for her.
The series uses multiple interconnected cases to draw viewers into different corners of Thailand’s judicial system, keeping Mech’s ordeal as its emotional spine. The ensemble also includes Achariya Potipipittanakorn who plays Anne, a politician and human rights lawyer. Lit, played by Folawat Manuprasat, is Mek’s father, a high-ranking judge who is forced to choose between his cause and his son. Paopech Charonsuk played the role of Techin, the son of the police chief.
Nottapong, who joined the UnderDOC team as director and co-writer after Jakarin and Jantarasom had already developed the initial concept, explains that the show could not have been created without immersing himself in a world he knew little about. The investigative process, which included interviews with lawyers, judges, prosecutors, and forensic experts, not only provided the series with authentic details; It reoriented his understanding of what justice actually is. “Everyone has flaws, blind spots and imperfections,” he says. “But these same people are entrusted with roles within a system intended to pursue something incredibly pure and sacred: determining the truth, proving someone’s innocence, or determining the direction of another’s life.” While people strive toward ideals of fairness and truth, mistakes happen and blind spots exist, he added. “No system is perfect.”
He was also convinced of the limits of language itself. Law depends on words, but words can only approximate truth. And that gap, he realized, is a lot of the real drama.
That insight shaped one of the series’ most distinctive formal choices: stylized transitions that take the viewer directly out of the courtroom and into competing reconstructions of the events at issue. Nottapong said the idea grew out of an idea that Jacalin articulated during development: the idea that courtrooms are a kind of theater rather than a place of discovery, with each side staging its own version of reality for the judge. “Once we started thinking about the courtroom in this light, it felt natural to draw the audience directly into the reality that each lawyer is trying to construct and visualize,” Nottapong says. “Thus, the concept of moving from the courtroom to reconstructed events became part of the series’ storytelling language.”
To get the balance right, the team had to build out the device’s entire internal grammar: the rules for camera movement, visual effects, and, crucially, what characters entering the reconstructed scene could see, do, and interact with. “We spent a lot of time defining the rules of this world,” says Nottapong. The goal was to create a visually imaginative approach without sacrificing the show’s authenticity.
At the center of that drama is Jittori, who began her growth process as an older male lawyer before the writing room recognized her as a woman. For Nottapong, the change in gender has been transformative. In a profession that is still largely dominated by those in power, those who accumulate enough experience, resilience, and authority to go head-to-head with those in power become instantly more persuasive and more revealing. “She’s not just 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.” After getting past her strength and morally ambiguous ways, what he hopes viewers ultimately ask is a simpler, more human question: “What happened to this woman?”
Mek is designed to withstand different weights. He is intentionally a surrogate for the audience, someone who enters the world of Jittori knowing roughly what most viewers know, and whose show changes with it in a way that makes the audience feel right along with him. “He is the entry point for viewers to enter the series and explore the complexities of Thailand’s justice system,” says Nottaporn. “As his perspective evolves, I hope viewers will also question and reevaluate their own assumptions.”
Courtroom dramas rarely get attention in Thailand, where romance, comedy and horror have long been favored by viewers. Some of the resistance is cultural, with court proceedings far removed from most people’s daily lives, but some is industrial. Stories built around specific professions require in-depth research that can be really costly, and investors have historically been reluctant to back projects they perceive as having a niche audience. Nottapong speaks candidly about what the “evil lawyer” is up against. He calls this an experiment. It’s a test of how far Thai audiences will accept a story set in a demanding, morally unresolved world that few have ever entered. If it works, he believes it could serve as a reference point, proof that there is an appetite for more ambitious and unconventional Thai storytelling.
Netflix helped create the conditions for that experiment. Notthapon points to “The Believers,” which dealt with religious themes that would have been difficult to explore in the earlier days of Thai drama, as one indicator of how the platform has expanded what is possible. On the global stage, the logic of competition also changes completely. Thai content is now competing for the same viewers alongside series from the US, South Korea, Japan, and more. That pressure, counterintuitively, increased rather than diminished creative freedom.
Asked whether the series’ deep idiosyncrasies, rooted in Thailand’s legal culture, politics and social tensions, might make it difficult to connect with international audiences, Nottaporn is unequivocal. “No, that’s not true. In fact, I believe the opposite.” He cites “Parasite” as a comparison. Director Bong Joon-ho did not try to soften or universalize the Korean specificity of his films. He leaned into it, and the film communicated not in spite of its idiosyncrasies, but precisely because of its idiosyncrasies. “I look at The Evil Lawyer the same way,” Nottapong says. He points out that while Korean dramas themselves were once foreign to most international viewers, exposure to well-known stories has gradually made them more familiar. He believes the same is possible in Thailand.
“The more authentic local voices we have telling stories from their unique perspectives, the richer, more unique and more diverse global cinema becomes,” he says. “What makes storytelling exciting is not uniformity, but the fact that people from different cultures can share stories that only they can tell.”
“The Evil Lawyer” is available on Netflix.
