HBO's Perry Mason: Spoiler-Free Review

The latest game news from IGN - one of my fave channels ever - check it out This is a spoiler-free review for all eight episodes of HBO's Perry Mason, which premieres Sunday, June 21. [poilib element="accentDivider"] In the same way Daniel Craig's string of modern James Bond films provides fans with a pre-Dr. No backstory for 007 -- from his humble beginnings as a newly-licensed "blunt instrument" to the suave super-spy we've seen over seven decades of movies -- HBO's Perry Mason provides us with an origin tale for a different, but still iconic, literary and screen hero. One huge difference here, however, is that Ian Fleming's Bond novels gave us a complex and layered protagonist, while defense attorney Perry Mason - in both the books by Erle Stanley Gardner or the long-running TV series (or later TV movies) - was a thin character at best. A towering figure, yes, but not one that was complex or fleshed out. With actor Raymond Burr portraying the character (the most frequently) for 40 years, Perry Mason was the linchpin for landmark procedural TV, giving viewers an unflappable courtroom crusader who defended the wrongfully-accused. Mason's cases were both legal dramas and murder mysteries, since the story always involved Mason uncovering the real culprit while protecting his client. HBO's take on Perry Mason is a gritty, Depression-era noir that swings wide and wild, using the character's blank canvas and non-existent past to forge a formidable and complex startup saga that, in its own way, takes Perry Mason from "blunt instrument" into something more resembling a character who could lead his own courtroom show. In fact, the series doesn't even present Mason as a lawyer - or an excellent legal mind - at all. He is bare-bones and from this unseemly, un-molded form, a hero will rise. [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=perry-mason-chapter-one-gallery&captions=true"] It's wonderful to have The Americans' Matthew Rhys back on TV. Instead of inhabiting the quiet storm of Philip Jennings, Rhys is now playing an unmade bed of a man. A textbook '30s hard-boiled P.I. with a love of drink, a penchant for getting in over his head, a habit of making enemies, and a knack for just scraping by, Perry is a far cry from the clean-cut justice-seeker TV fans know, even if they just know the character peripherally. He's a traumatized trouble-magnet who works under the wing, and charity, of John Lithgow's fatherly attorney E.B. Jonathan, having been tutored as P.I. by a super sleuth named Pete Strickland (Joker and Boardwalk Empire's Shea Whigham). Almost 10 years ago, Robert Downey Jr. bought the rights to Perry Mason and by 2016 he and True Detective's Nic Pizzolatto were set to turn it into an HBO series, with Downey headlining. Downey eventually bowed out of starring (but is still an executive producer), Rhys was in, and the showrunning was handed over to Rolin Jones and Ron Fitzgerald, who'd both done Weeds and Friday Night Lights. What remains after a decade of development is a seedy, scintillating mystery that propels Mason through a maze of corruption and coverup while placing him, as an underdog, in the crosshairs of crooked cops and a grandstanding D.A. (the always great Stephen Root). Obviously, story-wise, this era of Los Angeles is well-worn territory. In fact, just from a 2020 TV standpoint, you can watch similar themes unfold over on Showtime's Penny Dreadful: City of Angels (with added demons and Nazis). The lone gumshoe ruled this tumultuous terrain, slipping through the cracks of a city steeped in racial tension, cutthroat Hollywood producers, and radio evangelicals. Orphan Black's Tatiana Maslany fills the celebrity preacher role here which, like the character Kerry Bishé plays on Penny Dreadful: City of Angels, is based partly on Sister Aimee McPherson from the '20s and '30s. As "Sister Alice," Maslany's ministry storyline takes up a large chunk of the series, and one that provides the least amount of dividends overall, but it still weaves integrally into the story's main case involving a mother wrongfully accused of killing her infant son after it's revealed she had an affair with one of the men involved in the boy's kidnapping. Check out the trailer for HBO's next literary adaptation, Lovecraft Country: [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2020/06/05/hbos-lovecraft-country-teaser-trailer"] Maslany, like Root and Lithgow, emits a fierce and fine performance, providing the type of theatrical sermons that only Tinseltown could inadvertently manifest. During the '30s, citizens flocked to these three-ring faith healing carnivals in an attempt to cleanse themselves of the town's surface-level griminess. Narratively, the church aspect gives Mason, himself a lost soul due to wartime atrocities and a recently estranged wife and son, some sunbeams to deflect and neglect. His redemption won't be found in the same way his fellow neighbors seek enlightenment. Mason, who lives off the grid on his family's dilapidated dairy farm near an airstrip (that's now known as the Van Nuys Airport), has become addicted to wallowing and stumbling. Little does he know that his ultimate savior will be truth and justice. The case here, which in the past has been the real star of Perry Mason as a courtroom drama, involves a heinous baby-snatching, a steep ransom, and a trade-off gone horribly awry when parents Matthew and Emily Dodson (Nate Corddry and GLOW's Gayle Rankin) cough up a hundred grand to get their son back, only to discover the baby has been killed. Hired by Matthew's secret father (a Mr. Moneybags played by Robert Patrick), Lithgow's E.B. employs Mason to dig into the case. It's a headline-making crime in a town where police are pressured to quickly close cases, not solve them - and it's the catalyst for Mason's maturation and metamorphosis.   [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2020/05/21/justice-league-the-snyder-cut-official-hbo-max-announcement"] The series, which most of the time focuses more on character development than crime-busting, isn't just an origin story for Mason. Other characters from the Mason books and TV series arrive and find their footing in new ways. The Knick's Juliet Rylance breathes vital life into Della Street, known in lore as Mason's dutiful secretary, while Gotham's Chris Chalk provides a new and unique avenue into Paul Drake, known as Mason's investigator in the books and old series. Even Weeds' Justin Kirk pops up eventually in a fun role that Mason fans might recognize. Again though, as important as Perry Mason is in the overall annals of TV, the old series doesn't exactly come with a "fandom." It was too cut and dry, and not serialized enough, to create die-hards. So it's not like Street, Blake, and the other characters in Mason's orbit are known commodities. Still, it's cool to see that effort was made to build up these characters into layered, three-dimensional beings. Perry Mason, at eight episodes, is almost separated into two equal sections. No, the case never changes, but Mason's role does. The stakes shift and swerve and sometimes the actual mystery thread becomes a bit murky. While it's not exactly a "whodunit," the series still devotes a lot of time to the gathering of information and evidence, only for a lot of the effort to crumble in the face of how actual law is practiced and packaged in a "trial by jury" setting. In that regard, the series clashes hugely with the traditional Perry Mason, which was all about Mason being able to unravel and undo his enemies in a court of law and on the witness stand. This miniseries (which most definitely sets up a Season 2) has Mason inhabiting a more grounded and cynical world where the law can be twisted and contorted; a world that more closely mirrors our own.

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