A new brief for Perry Mason
Perry Mason returns to the small screen in a new drama screening on SoHo – but just don’t expect to see the 60s courtroom lawyer. Kerry Harvey reports.
Matthew Rhys laughs when asked what he thinks author Erle Stanley Gardner would make of his take on Gardner’s courtroom warrior Perry Mason.
“I think he would be thoroughly confused, borderline disgusted,” the 45-year-old The Americans’ actor says, before turning serious.
“We worked incredibly closely with the estate and I know there were concerns with a number of things we wanted, but they were so collaborative at every step.
“We were blessed with their blessing. If (Gardner) does have any problems he should take it up with his own estate.”
Joking aside, the much-anticipated HBO series Perry Mason is very different to the long-running series that starred Raymond Burr as the legendary lawyer.
The original – which ran from 1957 to 1966 – made history as Hollywood’s first hour-long television series.
In 1985, Burr reprised the role of Mason in a successful series of made-for-TV movies and there was even a radio series. However, not all met with Gardner’s approval.
The 2020 revival is set in 1931 Los Angeles and focuses on Mason’s early days when he was living cheque-to-cheque as a low-rent private investigator, haunted by his wartime experiences in France and suffering the effects of a broken marriage.
When a kidnapping goes wrong, he begins an investigation in a city that, while apparently booming, has a dark underbelly.
The eight-part series has an strong ensemble cast including The Knick’s Juliet Rylance as Della Street, Chris Chalk (Gotham) as Paul Drake, and Orphan Black’s Tatiana Maslany as a celebrity evangelist who becomes caught up in the case Mason is investigating.
According to the series’ writers, Rolin Jones (Boardwalk Empire) and Ron Fitzgerald (Westworld), there was never any intention
to remake the original series or upset the millions who have fond memories of it.
“You’ve got to make sure you are doing it with some reverence and you are doing it with respect,” Fitzgerald says.
It soon became apparent a prequel was the way to go, adds Jones.
“The most significant change is he’s not a lawyer. When you hear the words Perry Mason, I think you immediately picture black and white and Raymond Burr but he is not that guy when we meet him.”
For inspiration, the pair consulted Gardner – not the man himself given he died in 1970 – but his books and quickly discovered Perry Mason spent little time in court in the early novels.
“We went back to the source material, to the novels – there’s 80 of them. We went to the first ones and this is the guy that we worked to pull out of the pages and put on the screen,” Jones says.
“I feel like we did a good job of it. If people look at it, it might not be exactly what they expected or wanted but if you look at those novels I think you can see that that guy’s in the ball park.”
Fitzgerald agrees, revealing the pair, knowing Gardner was himself a lawyer, went out to Ventura County where he worked and consulted some old-timers – lawyers and private investigators – about their work.
“Knowing what type of guy (Gardner) was outside of his books, I think he would have been very, very pleased.
“It was a conversation we would return to once a month – ‘What would Erle Stanley think of this?’ We would try to keep him present in the room even though he’s no longer with us,” Fitzgerald says.
Rhys says it was the flawed nature of this new Mason that attracted him to the role.
“I think one of the reasons he does well as a private investigator is that he’s kind of so untethered,” the actor says. “He’s always looking in at people. He’s so misplaced.
“He’s inherited this land that he doesn’t necessarily want to farm. There’s this encroaching circus that is Los Angeles that he feels no part of and the great displacement that he feels after coming back from combat played into that.
“He was kind of this lost character in one way that I thought the journey of him finding a vocation would be interesting.” Rhys hopes this will not be the end of the new Perry Mason. “They’ve set up this incredible person so who knows what could happen,” he says. “As long as we keep telling interesting stories, I’d be more than happy to jump
on that.”