Perry Mason debuted on HBO tonight. As I'm sure - or I hope I'm sure - you know, this is the umpteenth time Perry Mason has appeared on TV in a series. Well, a little less than umpteenth. One brilliantly iconic time on CBS-TV in the late 50s through mid 60s starring Raymond Burr in the title role with that signature theme song, "Da da da dah, da da..." And a couple of more times on TV, most of the time still starring Burr. All of this following Erle Stanley Gardner's numerous novels, from which some half a dozen movies and a radio series were also made.
All of them had one thing in common, which the new HBO series does not. Perry was a lawyer. On HBO, he's a detective. He's also much younger on HBO, where he's played by The Americans' Matthew Rhys. Whether it's correct to say he's "still" a detective, implying that the Raymond Burr Perry started his professional life as a detective, I couldn't tell you. I haven't read the earliest novels, the first of which was published in 1933, about a year after the narrative in the HBO series begins. There is the fact, cited on Wikipedia, that Mason's antagonist in the courtroom, DA Hamilton Burger (Gardner had the magic touch with names) tells Perry in the 1935 novel, The Case of the Caretaker's Cat (Gardner had a real talent for titles, too) "You're a better detective than you are a lawyer." So I guess that gives the creators of the new Perry on HBO writ to make him a detective, though they hardly need my or anyone's permission.
But since this television series begins a little bit before the publication of the first novel, there's still time for Perry, if not to go to law school, to try to take a bar exam anyway? I don't know. But I'll give this new series a shot. It does have a better kind of Delia Street than in the network series - I think the HBO street is more dynamic - though some purists think the Delia who worked as Burr's Perry's secretary was the gem of that Perry's multiple series. Paul Drake, Perry the lawyer's detective, is also in this HBO series, but I don't think we've seen him yet.
I'll conclude with one thing I liked and one thing I didn't in the HBO series. The sex was good, gritty when it needed to be, also sometimes funny. But there was too much violence, and I really don't like stories in which kids are victims.
But as I said, I'll give this a chance. I owe it to Gardner, whose writing I not only admired, but his advice, too. as when he famously said he said to an editor, "If you have any recommendations about the story, write it on the back of the damned check". Or something like that.
Philip says to Elizabeth, in The Americans 3.6, that "Jesus came through for me tonight". And that just about captures this strong episode, big time.
