HBO’s Perry Mason is slick, steady, salacious…and pretty good

Last might, HBO aired the first episode of its remake of Perry Mason, the 1950s-era courtroom drama that pioneered the idea of the weekly one-hour television series, the great-grandfather of pretty much every legal show you’ve ever heard of.

This new version of Perry Mason has been in the works for years; originally, executive producer Robert Downey Jr. was going to play the title role, but due to scheduling issues it ended up going to The Americans veteran Matthew Rhys, who’s very solid.

Perry Mason is a bit of an odd one to reboot. It’s got name recognition, but probably not among a lot of younger people — the last Perry Mason thing to come out was a string of TV movies that came out in the ’80s and ’90s, and those were mostly aimed at people who remembered the original series.

And this new Perry Mason is nothing like the old. Gone are the case-of-the-week plotlines, replaced by a serialized story about Mason’s career as a private investigator, before he became a lawyer. In this new series, Mason is working with attorney Elias Birchard “E.B.” Jonathan (John Lithgow) to crack a case involving a brutal child killing, the result of a kidnapping gone horribly wrong.

That’s the other big difference. The original show started in the ’50s and feels like it; it’s very sanitized by today’s standards, sparing us the grisly details of the cases Perry works on, most of which end with the revelation that his client has been falsely accused.  By contrast, here we have a baby who’s been not only killed but brutalized, something we see up close on multiple times. It’s grisly and uncomfortable.

Perry has acrobatic sex with his neighbor Lupe (Veronica Falcón), screams at his ex-wife to let him talk to their son, and is branded with the white-hot barrel of his gun after he unsuccessfully tries to blackmail a movie executive with compromising pictures of one of its up-and-coming starlets. And of course, there’s full-frontal nudity, male and female. This is indisputably an HBO take on the source material, with everything that implies: it’s gritty, messy, and profane, with no character coming away looking like a hero. It’s also very well-made, polished to a mirror shine.

And it’s pretty good, at least the first episode. Matthew Rhys plays Perry as a pretty standard-issue antihero, a guy who basically wants to do the right thing but is far too jaded and compromised to much care about how it gets done. I feel like we’re basically gotten used to this type on HBO shows — there are definite shades of True Detective here — but Rhys plays him with heart and melancholy, and is worth watching.

The story unfolds slowly as we meet the people in Perry’s life: the grieving parents of the dead child, smug members of the LAPD, his cheery(er) assistant, and more. Lithgow makes an impression as the lawyer, and his presence alone underlines that this is supposed to be the prestige version of Perry Mason; HBO isn’t just reviving this series for nostalgia. It’s elevating this pulpy detective tale to the level of high art, thank you very much.

Or at least that’s the idea. So far, it’s hard to tell if it’ll succeed. You can cast award-winning actors and build incredible sets and give it all that signature coat of HBO polish, but will the underlying hard-boiled crime story ever be worthy of all that?

For now, it’s enough to enjoy what the show does well. The setting is interesting: 1932 Los Angeles, a city that’s experiencing an oil boom as the rest of the country is mired in the Great Depression. It’s a cool era that makes for lots of interesting visuals — you’ve got your hats, you’ve got your smokes, one plot point makes use of a little tram car that goes up and down a hill…although I can’t help but notice that the setup shares a ton in common with Penny Dreadful: City of Angels over an Showtime. They’re both crime stories set in Depression-era Los Angeles that kick off with a brutal murder and somehow involve Christian revivalism. Did HBO and Showtime execs get their notes mixed up or something?

Or maybe there’s something about this particular period that’s attracting artists at the moment. Penny Dreadful is using the lead-up to World War II to explore the temptations of fascism, and the divide between the haves and have-nots in LA to comment on our current economic gulfs. What will Perry Mason’s take be? Like any good noir story, I expect him to overturn a lot of rocks in places both high and low. What will he find underneath.

He has my curiosity.

“Chapter 1” Grade: B

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