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HBO has given Perry Mason a superhero origin story, writes Robert Lloyd, but does he really need one?
AND so another old crime show is brought down from the attic, dusted off and given a fresh coat of paint. Perry Mason, which most famously ran from 1957 to 1966 in the United States, with Raymond Burr as the infallible defender of the defenseless, is back as a longarc series. Unusually, the strategy has been not to modernise the setting, but to backdate it, to 1932, the year before Erle
Stanley Gardner published his first Perry Mason novel and retired from the law.
It is an origin story, and so Perry — if I may call him Perry — is not yet the attorney he will become.
With his wide shoulders and kind eyes, Burr’s Perry was the still centre around whom the melodrama swirled, displaying emotions no hotter than the furrowing of a brow, some contemplative hand rubbing, or a marginal increase in the volume of his voice. He was a rock, and the trial scenes, pitting Mason against the same opponent week after week — excitable District Attorney Hamilton Burger, with perennially mistaken Lt Tragg usually at his elbow — almost an abstraction. Juries were never to decide his cases, as a confession from the stand reliably arrived minutes before the last commercial break. (There is a clever joke about that in the new show.)
Gardner’s Mason (and Burr’s) was always an enigma, not so much a man of mystery as a person whose personality didn’t enter into it; like Jack Webb’s Joe Friday, he is there to ask questions, a metaphorically masked superhero without an alter ego. The creators of this reboot, Rolin Jones and Ron Fitzgerald, who have
Weeds and Friday Night Lights in their shared resume, have filled that empty vessel to the brim with biographical details, psychology and a little sex.
New Perry, in the lean and hungrylooking person of Matthew Rhys, is a former farm boy, living with a skinny cow on what remains of his parents’ spread. The old Mason place is now backed up against an airfield, whose proprietor, Lupe (Veronica Falcon), wants to buy the property from him; meanwhile, they sleep together, noncommittally. Perry has an exwife and a 9yearold son living in Salinas and a single suit in need of a good cleaning. (Lacking a tie without a mustard stain, he hits up a friend in the coroner’s office to see what effects the dead might have left behind.) He had some bad times in World War 1, which haunt him in flashbacks. He is drunk between hangovers and perennially unshaven, like a Halloween hobo.
As if to include as many definitions as possible of the word ‘‘grubby’’, Perry is working as a lowrent private eye. ‘‘You need to think about your actions; you need to decide what kind of person you want to be,’’ chides a Hollywood executive who has employed him to tail a comedy star, when
Perry tries to enlarge his fee with a little blackmail. Studio goons beat him up, by way of further reply, beginning something of a serieslong theme.
Into this literal mess steps attorney and old family friend Elias Birchard ‘‘E.B.’’ Jonathan, (John Lithgow), who enlists Perry to look into the death of a kidnapped infant, on behalf of one Herman Baggerly (Robert Patrick), one of those wealthy types who have a habit of turning up in stories like this. Baggerly is acting on behalf of the baby’s parents (Nate Corddry and Gayle Rankin), fellow followers of Sister Alice (Tatiana Maslany), an evangelist modelled on Aimee Semple McPherson, minus the husbands and the scandals.
Yes, yes, you say, but what of Della Street? What of Paul Drake? Della (Juliet Rylance) is here, introduced as Jonathan’s legal assistant, and she is given an identity, and a sexual identity — a woman before her time not content to wait for time to catch up with her and seemingly the inventor of jury analysis. The third major canonical character, Drake (Chris Chalk), will arrive as a black Los Angeles police officer whose rising level of disgust with his superiors, along with certain things he has uncovered regarding the case at hand, will usher him eventually on to Team
Mason. Shea Whigham plays Pete
Strickland, Perry’s slightly less upright investigative subcontractor, original to this series.
Where the police and prosecutors in the old
Perry Mason are wellmeaning and honourable, if nearly always wrong, here they form a familiar coterie of selfserving bad actors, with a sprinkling of better bad actors for contrast. The seedy underbelly of sunny LA is a bit of a cliche by now, but Perry Mason handles it pretty well, and with some scholarly affection.
The series, which ultimately feels like the very long pilot for what could make a fine series yet to come, is easily enjoyable, nicely played and smartly designed, with some wellexecuted big set pieces; it is also occasionally unpleasant, a little nutty towards the end and too long and too busy for the material. By the time the last loose threads are tied, mostly in expected knots, you may find your emotional investment has dwindled considerably, or even that, among its many sidestreams and backstories, you have forgotten what the point was. — TCA ■ Perry Mason screens Mondays at 8.30pm on SoHo. It is also available to stream on Neon.