Perry Mason’s season finale gives us a detective show for our current moment

The season finale of Perry Mason gives us answers, but they’re not easy answers. The show is set in the 30s, but it speaks to modern viewers.

And the first season of Perry Mason comes to a close. I started out a bit of a non-believer, started to have my interest piqued around the time John Lithgow’s character died, and by the end I really came to appreciate this slow burn of a series.

Perry Mason always seemed like a bit of an odd choice for a reboot. The character really became famous in the ’50s, when Raymond Burr played him first on TV and then in a series of TV movies. All in all, Burr played Mason for decades, and he did make his way into the pop culture collective unconscious.

Still, in 2020, he seems like an old-fashioned choice. The classic Perry Mason moment involves Perry doing such a good job of grilling the witness that they confess right there on the stand, proving his client innocent:

HBO’s Perry Mason gives us a character better suited for our current moment. The season finale dashes our hopes of getting a courtroom confession early, with a fantasy sequence where an immaculately articulate Perry grills Detective Ennis into confessing his role in Charlie Dodson’s kidnapping and murder. Back in the real world, Perry is just practicing his strategy on his new investigator, Paul Drake, and coach Hamilton Burger is not impressed. “No one confesses on the stand,” he says.

That’s 100% true, but it happened all the time on the original Perry Mason show, so why not here? Because this show wants to update things, to give us a Perry Mason for the 21st Century. And it does a great job.

We get an ending in “Chapter 8,” but it’s a messy one, one that lays the ground for later stories now that the show has gotten renewed for a second season. Emily Dodson gets to walk free…for now. The jury doesn’t find her not guilty; they’re deadlocked, and the judge declares a mistrial, much to the chagrin of DA Maynard Barnes, who’s been ably, slimily played by Stephen Root all season. For all we know, she could go on trial again. In the meantime, she accepts the baby found by Sister Alice’s mother even though she’s knows he’s not hers, and then accompany’s Birdy as she steps into her daughter’s role as a revivalist preacher.

Meanwhile, Ennis does get his comeuppance, but only because his partner teams up with what I’m assuming are people upset with Ennis for killing the prostitute Tang Yin (Pamela Chau); they drown him in a fountain. Strickland and Perry make up, kind of, but then Strickland goes to work as an investigator for Hamilton Burger. And oh, in an attempt to guarantee a hung jury, Perry has Strickland one of the jurors to hold out for a not guilty verdict, although apparently his performance and stirring closing argument about the power of truth convinced two others to see things his way without needing any help.

None of this is an unambiguous win. It’s all half-wins, at least. The legal system does not punish Ennis for his crimes, but he is punished. Emily isn’t exonerated, but she does find someone she can love, and some employment. The new Perry Mason leaves threads untied, questions unanswered, and justice just out of reach.

It also refuses to solve the mystery of its most enigmatic character, Sister Alice, whom Perry finally tracks down at the end of the episode, after she ran away last week. Does she know who pulled little Charlie Dodson out of the ground? Where he is? Did she really think she could bring him back?

I wanted to know the answers to these questions as much as Perry, but I like that the show let Sister Alice fade into the Los Angeles fog without answering them. That feels like the right choice for a hard-boiled detective drama in 2020. Any answers you get aren’t going to be completely satisfying, and even if they were, they wouldn’t make you happy. The justice system, the police, Los Angeles itself…the corruption runs so deep that the best you can hope for is to chip away at the problems, helping who you can and hope you find some peace doing work worth doing.

What happiness there is to be found in “Chapter 8” comes from these little nuggets of hope. After hammering at him all season, Lupe finally her hands on Perry’s childhood home, which she can turn into an airstrip and, she hopes, a nest egg, and Perry relents and lets her have it without a fight. And Perry’s firm is off and running, with Paul Drake officially on staff as an investigator and Della holding everything together behind the scenes…at least until she gets her law license, joins the firm, and becomes what I will assume will be the super-lawyer the world needs right now.

And that’s something I’m interested in watching, particularly if HBO keeps up the slick production values. From the sets to the costumes to the performances to the music, everything comes together to create a distinctive film noir mood, but one that feels as up to the moment as the storytelling.

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