The First Perry Mason Almost Never Lost a Case. The New One Lost His Whole Show. Rats.
This week’s most depressing news includes the fact that HBO cancelled Perry Mason.
The radically reimagined quasi-prequel to the popular 1950s and 1960s drama ran for two seasons, the second of which ended with multiple plots and subplots dangling in the air.
That happens in television, and every fan of the affected shows is disappointed when it does — particularly since a number of networks these days try to let creators craft an ending for good shows.
My reaction to the demise of Perry Mason is on one level purely personal, the same reaction we might hear from a fan of, say, Chrisley Knows Best, a reality show I found excruciatingly unwatchable.
Still, I would argue there are good reasons to mourn Perry Mason, starting with the idea that in an age when we have way more television than anyone could possibly watch, we still get only a relative handful of shows that tell a compelling story, have intelligent things to say and say them well. Perry Mason did all three.
I should confess I was among those who couldn’t envision a prequel to the original Perry Mason, which ran from 1957 to 1968 and later spawned a string of movies.
The original Mason, a character created in the crime/mystery novels of Erle Stanley Gardner, was a defense lawyer. Played in the original TV series by Raymond Burr, he seemingly had only innocent clients, whom he exonerated by deducing who actually committed the crimes with which they were falsely charged.
Perry Mason always won, to the chagrin of prosecutor Hamilton A. Burger, who correspondingly always lost.
While Perry Mason could fairly be described as formula TV, the clever paths to the solution of the cases — often thanks in part to Mason’s loyal secretary Della Street (Barbara Hale) and his private investigator Paul Drake (William Hopper) — kept the show fresh. Crime mysteries play well on television, as the likes of Law & Order or CSI prove, and the original Perry Mason earned its place in the figurative TV hall of fame.
The new Perry Mason, which starred Matthew Rhys as Perry, Juliet Rylance as Della and Chris Chalk as Paul, felt no compulsion to line the characters up with the original series, and that turned out to be one reason it worked so well.
Rhys’s Mason had none of the calm stoicism of Burr’s. He was volatile, restless and deeply troubled. He made mistakes. He was the sort of character who looked like he woke up every morning and questioned everything he was doing.
Rylance’s Della wasn’t a secretary at all. She was a smart, ambitious woman determined to become a lawyer herself and meanwhile chafing under the thick glass ceiling of the legal world in 1930s Los Angeles. She was also a lesbian.
Chalk’s Drake was, for starters, black. He was also an ex-cop who knew and resisted — often to little avail — the deep racism of the day, the city and the world. Only gradually did he develop enough trust in Mason to accept a working relationship.
Then there were the cases, one in each season. It could be argued that Mason won, but both times you’d need a gleaming asterisk, because victory was neither clear-cut nor in many ways wholly satisfying.
As all this suggests, the new Perry Mason had a dark side. It had something of a noir feel, both in its mesmerizing visuals of the era and the unease of its central characters as they waded through the grey areas of right, wrong and justice.
None of this, in the end, persuaded HBO to order the third season the writers clearly had in mind.
In keeping with TV network tradition, HBO had only praise for the show it was sending to the gallows. No specific reason was given for the cancellation, though a good guess would be that the show cost more to make than its audience was delivering in direct or indirect revenue.
It apparently couldn’t compensate for its relatively modest viewership with great buzz — unlike, say, Succession, a less ambitious and interesting show that worked the safer turf of outrageously awful rich people.
Perry Mason wasn’t King Lear, but it required more commitment to a difficult world than many viewers were likely to have. That’s not a criticism, just a fact of our overstuffed media age.
HBO is also undergoing a transition, with the unveiling last month of its new Max brand. The first wave of Max programming includes some ambitious drama, but on the whole it tilts more toward documentaries and unscripted shows, which often have a higher ratio of viewership to cost.
Clearly that’s what HBO feels will position it best in a world where “TV” viewership increasingly means streaming. It would be a shame, though, if that means HBO will be taking a chance on fewer dramas that, like Perry Mason, gamble on finding more engaged viewers.
HBO has done that sort of show with great success in the past — most notably with The Sopranos, though some of us would argue that HBO did a better job of combining a great story with compelling dark ambivalence in Boardwalk Empire or Deadwood.
In any case, despite the blizzard of new shows with which TV pelts us these days, smart dramas remain rare. But when they do score, they create some of our best TV. If the new Perry Mason didn’t immediately ascend to that level, it was as good as it was different.
Its cancellation made this week less good and TV less interesting.
