Manuel Garcia-Rulfo as Mickey Haller in “The Lincoln Lawyer,” Season 3. (Lara Solanki/Netflix)

Television audiences can’t get enough stories about crime. And almost invariably, whether we’re talking about real-life or fictional homicide detectives, crime-scene investigators or prosecutors, those working to maintain law and order are portrayed as staunch heroes.

True, there are exceptions. Take the FX series “The Shield,” for example. Or the character Denzel Washington plays in the 2001 feature film “Training Day.”

Lawyers, though – at least those whose job it is to defend people charged with breaking the law – are typically seen as sleazy opportunists. Think of the various characters who face off against the likes of Jack McCoy (Sam Waterson) in the NBC series “Law and Order.”

Mickey Haller is one of those guys for the defense. Created in 2005 by the novelist Michael Connelly, Haller was portrayed by Matthew McConaughey on the big screen in the 2011 film “The Lincoln Lawyer.” Since 2022, and over the course of three seasons on Netflix, the character has been played by Mexican-born actor Manuel Garcia-Rulfo.

Season 3 of “The Lincoln Lawyer,” which culminated in the 10th episode that premiered Oct. 17, is based on Connelly’s 2013 novel “The Gods of Guilt.” In it, Haller is hired to defend a guy accused of murdering a woman he was working with.

The woman, who was known to Haller in previous seasons as Glory Days – but whose real name was Gloria Dayton (Fiona Rene) – was working as an “escort.” And the accused murderer, Julian La Cosse (Devon Graye), was the guy who ran the online “escort” service that she worked for.

Pretty soon, though, Haller figures out that Glory Days had lied to him and that both a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent and an imprisoned Mexican cartel hotshot are implicated. He strives to prove his client’s innocence even as the threats begin to mount – as do a couple more deaths.

While all this is going on, Haller’s ex-wife-now-associate Lorna (Becki Newton) is studying for the bar exam, his former-driver-now-office-assistant Izzy (Jazz Raycole) is attempting to keep alive her dream of becoming a professional dancer, and, following a fatal car crash, his daughter ends up ghosting him.

On the romantic front, Haller becomes intimate with Andrea Freeman (Yaya DaCosta), a prosecuter he once clashed with.

As in the first two seasons, Garcia-Rulfo is effective as both an attorney striving to live up to the expectations of his late father and as a zealous advocate for his clients. The uneasy mix causes him to take the occasional shady legal shortcut, which he – and the series writers – justify as a way to fight a corrupt system.

It’s that system itself that, in the end, is seen as the problem. And as the 10th and final episode of Season 3 shows, that problem is likely to continue – maybe, though, with bright-but-inexperienced Lorna in charge of solving it.