HBO’S Perry Mason

It’s the Stubble, Stupid!

After wading through the sordid wallow that was HBO’s PERRY MASON, my first urge was to dig up some of my tattered paperbacks by Erle Stanley Gardner, or stream a few episodes of the old TV show starring Raymond Burr. I might even dig up some of the flicks from the thirties starring Warren Williams, or try to find a few episodes of the short-lived “nice try” 1970s TV remake starring Monte Markam.

Almost any version of Mason would do–anything to see Mason, perhaps the world’s most beloved lawyer for a couple of generations, not treated with so much cynical contempt, or painted with so much clueless pretension.

Yes, yes, the show is beautifully shot, and the art direction (by Chris Farmer and Robert W. Joseph?) and all the period props are breathtaking (both accurate and believable), and the acting is generally top notch.

I know.

But that ghostly WTF? That’s coming from Erle Stanley Gardner.

Set in 1930s Los Angeles, HBO decided to focus on Perry BEFORE he became a hot-shot criminal lawyer, when he was–get this–a hardluck private eye (I admit my ears perked up at that), recently divorced and struggling to hold on to the family farm. The family farm? WTF?

This show was originally going to star Robert Downey Jr., who may have envisioned a more traditional approach (with him playing the charming and cocky attorney to the hilt), but he bailed to be Iron Man (although he remained executive producer). The project was then handed off to be written and produced by Nic Pizzolatto. Possibly it was Pizzolatto who darkened up things–after all, True Detective was his baby. But he jumped ship too, to work on the third season of True Detective. Which left the project in the allegedly capable hands of showrunners Ron Fitzgerald and Rolin Jones, who are billed as the “creators.”

Now, I can abide a little creative tweaking (I’m a huge Chandler fan, and I like Robert Altman’s take on The Long Goodbye, for example), and to be fair, some of the new characters created here are excellent; some of the plot twists quite clever.

What turned the Girl Detective off—and irritated the hell out of me—is the forced faux-noir trappings that covered almost every iota of this mess. Does everything have to be spritzed with pain and suffering? That’s not “noir”—that’s a pity party; based on the dubious assumption that if it’s squalid or depressing or squirm-inducing enough, it must be significant. I’m sure 14-year olds of all ages will lap it up. That dead baby shot in episode one is a winner!

Yeah, right.

The HBO hype machine encouraged comparisons to Chinatown, but here’s a scoop, boys: Chinatown wasn’t a bloated, turgid, light-sucking eight-part dirge. There was movement and grace and vividly drawn characters who didn’t need twenty minutes of exposition to make them interesting. These people had lives. They laughed, they cried, they screwed up. They lived. And most of them ended up screwed, one way or another.

Nor was I particularly impressed with the writers’ creative tweaking. Like, Della’s a lesbian? Whoop-tee-doo! I don’t mind, but I don’t care, either. It’s not pertinent to who she is, or to the story being told. And it sure pisses all over the relationship that traditionally existed between Perry and Della in books, film, radio and television.

As for Paul Drake being Black or both Hamilton Burger and Della Street being gay (and now Perry’s law partner, not his secretary), well, that’s nice. Good for them. But it doesn’t feel like some brave, woke storytelling–more like a few more boxes being checked off on the woke list. You want to do a series about a Black investigator or a Lesbian lawyer in 1930s LA? Go ahead. Have at it. But don’t drag Perry Mason or Erle Stanley Gardner into it.

Oh, the show has its moments. Just not eight episodes worth. The courtroom scenes near the end, for example, are truly compelling, and there are some memorable scenes and characters along the way (Perry’s ambitious Hispanic aviatrix is more interesting than most of the major characters–another story that deserves a story of it own). But there’s so much wheel-spinning and tacked-on plot threads that go nowhere that I’m still wondering what a trimmed down six or five-part series would have been like. Or a two hour movie…

So, yeah, a lot to potentially like–but please don’t look too closely at the multiple anachronisms (“throwing shade” in the thirties?) or the many leaps of internal logic that have nothing to do with this very unfaithful adaptation.

Like, we meet Perry in the very first episode, and he’s basically a scumbag, threatening his own client with blackmail, but a few episodes later Della, whom we’re supposed to see as a smart and savvy woman held back by her gender, is dumb enough to think Perry’s the only man righteous enough to see justice done? So she then arranges for Perry to take the bar exam. We see him cramming for all of two weeks, and then… he passes the bar!

Your Honour, I object!

But perhaps the single most obvious symbol of how forced and phony this show ultimately is lies in Perry’s face, for all to see.

It’s the stubble, stupid.

•  he drinks too much
• he has a troubled personal life
• he has a tragic family history is hinted
• he’s divorced, with a child he rarely sees
• he has PTSD from “the war”
• he has slovenly living conditions
• he has casual sex with a fuck buddy (of course, this being HBO, we get to witness it. Lucky us)
• he has dubious personal hygiene

But all these affectations lead absolutely nowhere. Again and again, something dark and dreary is tossed into the mix, and then never addressed again.

Like, I’m still trying to figure out why we were subjected to episode two’s gratuitous war flashbacks (which look like leftovers scenes from Christopher Nolan’s 1917), since Perry’s war experience is never mentioned again. To tell us war isn’t fun? Somebody write that down!

Of course, HBO has announced that due to the “strong numbers,” there will be a second season, and why not?

It looks good.