Lol same here

No, he had 2 daughters. Charlene and Leanne(Brynn Thayer). Charlene was played by 2 different actresses. In Season 1 episodes 1 & 2(The Diary) had the original Charlene then Season 1 Episode 3 is when Linda Purl played the character Charlene, Matlock's daughter who moved to Philly to practice law.

Yes, there has always been an arguement as to whether Linda Purl & Brynn Thayer were the same character! And yes an different actress did the pilot!

Lori Lethin was her name.

It's debatable. If it was the same character why did she have a different name? And if it was two daughters, why wasn't it ever mentioned that Matlock had two daughters or that either daughter had a sister? What they should have done was either bring back Lori Lethin from the pilot after Linda Purl left to continue the character in the second season* or name Leanne's character Charlene.

*This has been done before: On the 90s sitcom Parker Lewis Can't Lose actress Mary Ellen Trainor played Parker's mother in pilot but was replaced in the first season by Anne Bloom. When she left after the first season, Mary Ellen Trainor returned to the part.

The daughters question was the only one I got wrong🙉😁

Yes, strangely J&TFM has NEVER been seen in syndication or released on DVD!

Actually, Jake & The Fatman has been released on DVD.
Not a bootleg either - a full-dress box set from CBS Video!
I know this because I've got it here at home!
(Think I'll watch one or two as soon as I stand down from here … )

Jake and the Fatman was indeed a spinoff of Matlock. Both William Conrad and Alan Campbell recreated their Matlock roles on the series and produced by the same people/company. The fact that Joe Penny played a different part is irrelevant. The only difference was the locale was changed to Los Angeles and their character names were slightly altered. But both of those changes also happened to Good Times (New York to Chicago and Henry Evans to James Evans). Are you saying that Good Times wasn't a spinoff of Maude either?

Conrad played James L. McShane on Matlock and Jason Lochinvar 'J.L.' McCabe (he was sworn to testify in something or other and gave his full name. Jake chuckled when he heard McCabe's middle name and got the Conrad 'glare of death' for it!) on JATF.

Joe Penny played a mobster on Matlock and a cop (private investigator, some folks say) on JATF. I think the difference is VERY relevant.

CBS didn't do the set. It was VEI out of Canada, that has been issuing lesser series in the CBS vaults on DVD. CBS did do individual sets of the first and second seasons, though (the first season broken down into the annoying Volume 1/Volume 2 format, the second season--which was the first of their Hawaii seasons--is only one set, as there were only nine episodes, due to the writer's strike).

One final note about JATF...the ratings on the first season were abysmal and they were about to be canceled. What saved them was their willingness to move to Hawaii...CBS had that very expensive set that they built for the original Hawaii Five-O (lovingly known as 'Mongoose Manor') that later served for Magnum, P.I. They didn't want to leave it vacant, so they looked at the ratings and discovered that, while the overall ratings sucked, JATF pulled the same demographic as Magnum. Lo and behold, the ratings moved upward considerably after the Hawaiian move!

The end of the Hawaiian period came when CBS decided to shut down 'Mongoose Manor', so the series returned to L.A. (every time they moved, there was a big two-hour episode). The producers didn't mind moving back, as they were getting scripts of a more noirish nature, and they felt Hawaii was too pretty to do those kind of stories.