Fan of the original Perry Mason? Then steer clear
If you’re in the market for an enjoyable hour of the courtroom drama Perry Mason, please don’t tune in to the new Perry Mason (Sky Atlantic). It is called Perry Mason, and Matthew Rhys plays the title character, Perry Mason. But it is not, by any stretch of the imagination, Perry Mason.
In the original series, which ran from 1957-66 and later made a comeback as a series of feature-length episodes, Raymond Burr was the defence lawyer who extracted confessions from the witness box after some dogged detective work. He was the show’s moral centre in a world of scumbags, and he wore good suits. If he had ever encountered Rhys’s character, a drunk in a grimy white vest who steals a tie from a corpse when he needs to smarten up before a judge, he would have been horrified.
This is Perry Mason: the origin story, as if such a thing were needed. It is set in Depression-era California and Mason isn’t yet a lawyer, but a down-on-hisluck gumshoe scrabbling for money and living alone on the dilapidated family farm. He is scarred by his experiences in the war and appears to be a deadbeat father. There is very little to like about him, but Rhys is an excellent actor who imbues the character with a sorrow that makes us – just – want to root for him.
It is hard to take this drama on its own terms, because its creators clearly don’t want us to; they’ve hitched their wagon to the Perry Mason name, and have thrown in re-imagined versions of familiar characters. Della Street is now secretary to Mason’s boss, EB Jonathan. Paul Drake, once Mason’s investigator, is a black beat cop.
But casting aside comparisons with the original, this is a good-looking but bleak piece of television. The crime, to be investigated over eight episodes, involves the kidnap and murder of a baby boy. We see the corpse more than once, including a horrendous scene in which Mason pulls a thread from the baby’s face – in a macabre touch, the kidnappers sewed up his eyes. There is sex and violence. I feel grubby after watching it. The show is based on the books by Erle Stanley Gardner, but its creators are clearly more in love with the work of Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy. And one question HBO should answer: if they’re so determined to revive the Perry Mason brand, why ditch one of TV’S all-time great theme tunes?
The second episode of Murder in the Car Park (Channel 4) was where it got complicated. What began as an investigation into the unsolved killing of Daniel Morgan and subsequent cover-up became embroiled with the News of the World, phone hacking and the Fake Sheikh. At times I had to stop and remind myself just what these connections were, coming as they did some time after Morgan’s murder.
It was, though, an engrossing study of undercover operations, and how police deal with allegations of corruption within their ranks. David Zinzan took on the Morgan murder as a cold case in 2001. Wary of letting others in the force know about the operation, he ran the investigation from a secret location outside London. In order to keep an address under surveillance, police bought the house next door when it came up for sale and planted listening devices in the adjoining walls.
We heard some of these bugged conversations, accompanied by visual reconstructions. But the programmemakers muddied the waters by moving from genuine transcripts to imagined conversations, without letting us know what was real and what was not. Towards the end we saw a dramatisation of Morgan on the phone, talking urgently about a story he wanted to break on Metropolitan Police corruption – but what evidence is there that this call took place? It was unclear, and there were other examples like this. In a documentary concerned with scrupulous adherence to the truth, it felt shoddy.
The Daily Telegraph played a small part in the tale: the police placed a story claiming they had discovered the getaway car, hoping that the killers would panic and discuss the find while police were listening in. But it all came to nothing.
The behaviour of News of the World executives was laid bare, from the tawdry to the downright despicable: the latter involved targeting a detective who had launched a fresh Crimewatch appeal about the Morgan murder, following him as he took his young children on the school run. But when the documentary recreated the shenanigans of the Fake Sheikh, it felt as if we were straying off course and forgetting the real victim here.
Perry Mason ★★
Murder in the Car Park ★★★