Goliath is a Amazon Prime tv show starring (
Billy Bob Thornton) as Billy
McBride, a once-esteemed lawyer who
now spends more time at a bar than doing work.
This miniseries provides examples of:
- The Alcoholic: Billy McBride, but many other characters as well.
- An Arm and a Leg: Gabriel does this as a punishment to anyone who defies him.
- Arms Dealer: Borns Tech.
- Asshole Victim: Numerous examples, but a special mention should go to one of the mooks who kidnaps Billy and Janet. He's given no redeeming qualities, is especially dumb, and is practically a rapist, so when Janet has to stab him in the groin in order to escape, the audience isn't feeling too disgusted or sympathetic.
- Berserk Button: Ned Berring. They are munitions, not bombs! Eccentricities such as this are the reason he was fired from Borns Tech.
- Better to Die than Be Killed: Faced with an assassin and already missing a bit of flesh, Danny chooses to jump rather than be murdered.
- Broken Ace: Both McBride and JT. The former broke after he got a murderer set free on a technicality, who then murdered an entire family, the latter after he did his best to defend someone he believed to be innocent, and failed, and then watched as the man was executed.
- Broken Pedestal: In season 2, Billy and Denise are both intrigued by Marisol, who promises to clean up Los Angeles as mayor. Denise goes to work for her while Billy enters a relationship with Marisol. They're both rocked to find Marisol is from a cartel family who is involved with several murders. Denise goes on a drunken rampage outside Marisol's campaign headquarters while she and her dad are both affected by trusting her.
- Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Billy is an alcoholic who struggles with life in general, but is extremely competent at his job. Cooperman too, until it's revealed he's had a stroke and has gone partially insane, making him too unstable for his work.
- The Cartel: The main villains of season 2.
- David Versus Goliath: Naturally. Billy takes on organizations far, far larger and more dangerous than a law firm run out of a cheap motel room should ever be dealing with.
- Determinator: Once Billy takes on a case, nothing short of murder will stop him.
- Dirty Cop: Half of the LAPD, apparently.
- Disney Acid Sequence: the opening of Season 4, Episode 2 begins at a high school basketball game showing the cheerleading accident that led Tom True's daughter being prescribed the opiods that led to her eventual death. The moment the accident occurs, the lights dim and it becomes an elaborate Broadway number sung by George Zax about the 'benefits' of opiate-based painkillers, aptly named The Pain Killer.
- Driven by Envy: Cooperman. He built the company, not McBride, yet everyone likes McBride more.
- Home Porn Movie: Used by Ned as revenge porn. Though it inadvertently works in his favor, as it ended up causing him to reconcile with his ex-girlfriend.
- Foil: Cooperman to McBride. McBride is an extremely friendly and forgiving man, has a strong sense of morals, is able to let things go when it's clear he can't win, beloved by many, and has fallen in his career. Cooperman hides in the dark, has no tolerance for any sort of vulnerability, has no morals, can never let go of a grudge, is feared by nearly everyone, and is in control of one of the biggest law firms in the country.
- Groin Attack: How Janet and Billy escape from their kidnappers. Share the male pain.
- Hooker with a Heart of Gold: Brittany Gold
- Idiot Ball: Justified in the case of Cooperman, who suffered a minor stroke months prior, causing his more eccentric and foolish decisions.
- Interservice Rivalry: The FBI loves to get one over the DEA, apparently.
- Lady in a Power Suit: The show is about big corporations/organizations and attorneys, so it comes with the territory.
- Magical Native American: Littlecrow. He appears to be a shaman or medicine man of some sort, and is able to tell if someone is going to die soon.
- Ms. Fanservice: Brittany.
- Murder Is the Best Solution: How the cartel operates. However, murdering a random gangster on the off-chance he will betray you later is basically begging for the police to get involved, and when you start killing even your loyal underlings so they can't say anything, your remaining underlings aren't going to remain loyal.
- Never My Fault: Diana Blackwood, full stop. Most of the plot of season 3 wouldn't exist if she were capable of ever admitting the possibility that she could, in fact, be wrong.
- Nightmare Fetishist: Tom takes an unhealthy obsession in watching a woman have a leg removed. He even builds a special room to watch a video of amputees pretend to be his mother and sister, which he then masturbates to.
- Professional Killer: Quite a few, though the "professional" part seems to be optional.
- Pronouncing My Name for You: In several episodes Patty Solis-Papagian corrects how others pronounce her last name, sometimes correcting the same person more than once.
- Redemption Equals Death: Professional death but in Season 4, Sam. who has been colluding with George Zax to save her firm, gets a crisis of conscience and ends up helping bring him down, albeit at the cost of possibly going to jail. Although, Billy explicitly hints that he will take her case.
- Red Right Hand: Cooperman, Billy's former partner and now main partner at Cooperman-McBride. Half his body is severely burned, and he often communicates with a clicking device.
- Revenge Before Reason: Cooperman wants a chance to take down McBride more than he wants to win his case.
- Soundtrack Dissonance: At the end of season 2, episode 3 Tito is killed by Gabriel as the theme song to H.R. Pufnstuf plays.
- Too Dumb to Live: None of the mooks who kidnap Billy (and Janet) are particularly bright. There are reasons kidnappers generally don't let their victims walk around unrestrained…
- Witness Protection: Invoked, but when facing someone as powerful as the cartel…
- Would Hurt a Child: Gabriel and Claudia/Marisol, who both are willing to do whatever it takes to ensure an innocent kid goes to prison — or the morgue — in order to cover up their own involvement in the murder.
- You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Happens to Tito, and later most of the rest of the people in on the murder-plot, when the cartel needs to make sure no one talks.
