Perry Mason (Matthew Rhys) did it! He solved the case of Charlie Dodson’s homicide, even when he could not show it in court docket, identical to all of us thought he would. Within the unsurprising Season 1 finale of HBO’s Perry Mason, the investigator-turned-lawyer was in a position to impasse the jury within the homicide trial of Emily Dodson (Gayle Rankin), which could not be an harmless verdict, nevertheless it’s certain as heck so much higher than an enormous G on Emily’s head. (For the report, Stephen Root‘s Maynard Barnes stated he could be retrying the case… Season 2 maybe?)
The victory for Perry and Emily was considerably bittersweet as a result of the actual perpetrators, corrupt cop Joe Ennis (Andrew Howard) and Radiant Meeting of God elder Eric Seidel (Taylor Nichols), by no means confronted justice and had been by no means branded as responsible. (Nevertheless, each acquired karmic justice after they had been discreetly murdered.) That is the marginally extra difficult shades-of-grey method to HBO’s Perry Mason, the fashionable twist on the unique, through which guilt was absolute when Perry received the dangerous guys to admit on the stand. In actual fact, nobody got here out of this season completely responsible — not Perry for paying jurors, breaking and coming into, or tampering with proof; not Della (Juliet Rylance) for stealing ledgers from the church; not Ennis and Seidel for child murdering; not Alice (Tatiana Maslany) or Birdy (Lili Taylor) or anybody else within the church for fraud.
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The one factor responsible in Perry Mason is the present itself: responsible of being against the law procedural with a narrative that might match on fundamental cable and even community tv if it weren’t for all of the costly set items and big-name expertise. Let’s not sugarcoat something; by the point a riot broke out on the cemetery when child Charlie’s physique was being exhumed in order that Alice might resurrect the child to get Emily off the hook for homicide (yikes), the story, as many pre-release reviews warned, had stalled. However Perry Mason remained immensely watchable — I loved the heck out of it — as a result of it combined the gloss of what we’re used to from a standard status drama with the consolation of an extended episode of a procedural sequence. It is a prototype for the post-prestige period of tv that we’re embarking on, spurred by Netflix’s deluge of content material that has each different competitor scrambling to catch up.
For HBO, which was, together with AMC and some others, the progenitor of the status drama, Perry Mason is an evolution of a model that’s feeling the stress to ramp up content material. HBO had lengthy been a champion of “much less is extra,” delivering fewer exhibits, however exhibits that we might rely on to be actually, actually good. It is a mannequin that labored nicely earlier than streaming (learn: Netflix) turned the business right into a content material farm in perpetual spring. Early in 2019, HBO’s new AT&T overlords introduced that as a way to sustain, HBO’s output would enhance considerably, primarily blowing up the mannequin that had labored for HBO for years. Now with HBO Max, HBO is scaling up in magnitudes, and we’re seeing that with HBO Max originals and HBO programming on Mondays (one among HBO’s finest exhibits in years, I May Destroy You, airs Monday nights; that might by no means have occurred two years in the past).
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Perry Mason is what you get out of that. It seems and looks like an Emmy winner however is structured like a procedural that is been on tv for many years. The primary season was by no means too difficult, nevertheless it was all the time intriguing. If the Radiant Meeting of God storyline received too boring — which it did, steadily — there was all the time Tatiana Maslany’s intense efficiency or Alice fantastically tripping out in a metaphorical boat to maintain your consideration. Perry Mason dipped its toe in social points, however by no means went under the knee, as if it had seen one too many status wannabes get sucked beneath and drown. In Perry Mason, we’re seeing the affect of status dramas — The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, and, significantly in Perry Mason‘s case, True Detective — with none jibber-jabber about time as flat circles. Rust Cohle’s ramblings required recurring rewinds and echoed in your cranium; Perry Mason was out of your head as quickly because the credit rolled.
In some unspecified time in the future, HBO stopped billing Perry Mason as a restricted sequence and introduced in July that it would be coming back for a second season. The reason being easy: That is the kind of present that this new, extra prolific HBO wants now. A present that may compete come Emmy time, perhaps not within the Finest Drama class however actually within the appearing and manufacturing fields, whereas working on the tried-and-true engine of procedural detective tv. Too typically, as HBO discovered with Game of Thrones, TV sequence are measured by their finales and the conclusions of epic tales. With Perry Mason, we knew the season’s ending earlier than the credit rolled on the primary episode as a result of, like the unique, we had been witness to the crime, and the present was about watching Perry determine it out. It is laborious to be too disenchanted in an ending when the present tells us what the ending is early on.
Perry Mason is now streaming on HBO Max.
Matthew Rhys and Shea Whigham, Perry Mason