I don’t think so. They had a big scene where Mason and Strickland discuss “the one play” Perry has left. When asked why he doesn’t have Drake do it, he tells Strickland that only he can do it and explains ( off camera ) what he needs done. Strickland then does literally one thing to help the case. He couldnt have a black guy pay off white jurors and as far as the convo you refer to, the girls didnt know about the payoff so Mason was just playing along. They also intimated that Mason turned 3 jurors and Strickland only paid off one. So Perry could have been honestly surprised that there were jurors who honestly sided with the defendant,
I am in agreement that they quite heavy-handedly altered who Perry Mason was in his past in a major way. They made him a person who I just couldn’t see as becoming Earle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason. So all I could do is accept that this Perry is not that Perry and take the show for what it is, a good noir series. It only disappoints me because I feel that they could have easily gone with a whole new central character and that they only used “Perry Mason” as a promotional tool. They threw out the OG Perry Mason in the very first episode.
The church wasn’t continuing to rake in “The suckers”. The mother was starting a new traveling road show/scam with Emily and the “saved” baby schtick while the church was in court for fraud. No one comes across as clean and truly good. The closest thing to a moral center is maybe Della or the black cop Drake.
Just started this. I was pretty skeptical of a Perry Mason reboot by HBO, but I will admit that it is a damn impressive period piece. HBO doesn’t screw around.
I’m getting Boardwalk Empire vibes from this, and looking at the IMDb, HBO went back to the well for some familiar BE faces, including Shea Whigam.
I finally got around to watching this. I did enjoy it but it’s not Perry Mason. I’m ok with it not being Perry Mason but I’m not sure I’m ok with this Perry Mason mostly working in the courtroom in future seasons. I liked him as the hard-boiled detective. I would have been fine with Lithgow staying as the lawyer and Mason continuing to be a detective. If you’re going to change the character of Mason so much that he doesn’t really seem like Perry Mason, you could keep him a detective.
I like what they did with Della Street. There was no romantic tension in the TV series with Burr and there won’t be in this incarnation either. I guess her engagement with the next DA is just a sham of convenience for them both?
I don’t see how the new Paul Drake will function. The police won’t hesitate to beat him and he’ll stick out in some places. Perhaps he will get information from Blacks who work in service roles and see and hear things? A lot of white people wouldn’t even talk to him.
I wasn’t crazy about the ending but justice was served.
Yay. I too am glad this show has returned. Loved the first season. Love the period setting, and they do everything so well. I hope HBO continues to support it, as it can’t be cheap.
I loved the first season so add me to the list of people thrilled to see it back. All the recent HBO WB stuff had me worried this would be one of the first things to go.
Re: chances of this getting cancelled. I was going to say it might be able to dodge a bullet, given the show could potentially be a bit cheaper to film than other historical dramas, because it’s set and filmed in LA. But probably not if it’s going to do things like open its episodes with elaborate production scenes on shipboard casinos (that immediately go up in smoke.)
Thought Episode 2 was still a table-setting episode, but liked Episode 3 a lot. Mystery is building.
I love the look of this show, but it’s always jarring to see anachronisms creepn in. Like those very modern metal railings on the courthouse steps. They sure as hell never had those in the 1930s. Or when Hope Davis is swimming in the pool and you see all the intake and outake vents.
This is also the same era as the recent movie Babylon. And it did a fantastic job of recreating the 1930s. Of course, it had a much larger budget, too.
On that note, I want to see if that nursing home that Perry Mason visited also doubled as (Babylon spoiler) the hotel where Jack Conrad blew his brains out.
Is it just me or did they change the theme music? I liked the first season’s with its subtle homage to the 1950s show’s theme at one point.
BTW, I was racking my brain trying to figure out where I’d seen the actress who played Emily Dodson from the first season, so I looked her up. She played the eccentric “she-wolf” character in GLOW (criminally cancelled before it got a fourth season).
I’ve got a couple of questions about the second episode, particularly–if I’d been paying more attention and not watching it in spurts on my phone I’d probably know the answers: How does Hope Davis’ character figure into anything? Is she just supposed to be the rich matron lesbian (closeted, of course) that has connections with/intel on everyone? What’s up with the produce guy (Goldstein?), and why does he first get served a subpoena and then end up dead (in a rather grisly fashion)? Apart from maybe being the stiffed supplier of vegetables to the dead rich guy’s failing casino yacht, what’s his connection?
Also, I didn’t quite catch how the surveillance/intel work Paul Drake did for the cops, indirectly, through Shea Whigham’s character (Strickland), ended up making him feel used for something nefarious. Did it somehow make the bogus arrest of the scapegoat Chicano guys easier?
These may be answered in the third episode, which I haven’t watched yet.
Oh, one comment about the scene where the mom and wife of one of the arrested guys go to Mason’s office: a woman of that period would not have used the informal “tú” when addressing Mason (“Te necesitamos.”*), but usted.
*(which is an awkward way of saying it in any case-- “Necesitamos su ayuda” sounds more like what a native speaker would say.)
I do think the show delights in throwing random stuff at you – “Look, the name on the box of produce is the same as the name of the guy who got a subpoena!” – without explaining it to give a sense that a lot of stuff is happening that must relate somehow but they aren’t going to tell you yet, and will all get tied up later. It’s a bit exhausting.
All very good questions. Not much has yet been revealed, as this show likes to dole out information out of context and then string the clues and events together as Mason (or his associates) figure them out. My best guess so far is:
Everything centers on the murdered son. It’s already apparent that pretty much everything he was involved in, from the ship casino to the baseball stadium to bringing a team to L.A., was coming apart at the seams. Given his father’s refusal to support the ventures any further I suspect the father is also involved in some enterprises that are less than savory, perhaps funded by or in partnership with a criminal element, and was worried the sons failure might expose his dealings (though I doubt the father had his own son killed, that was probably a warning from someone else).
The dead grocer was being subpoenaed to testify most likely in the racketeering case that Strickland mentioned to Drake, a case that also seems to have involved the African American community leader (and possible gang boss) that Drake was investigating for him. Drake tried to make it clear that the man he was investigating was offsetting his low-level criminal activity with a lot of good deeds and money in the community, but Strickland didn’t care and the task force seems to have arrested the guy anyway, thus Drake’s feelings of betrayal. It’s likely that whole thing will factor into what is going on with the father and the murdered son as well.
Then you have the son’s penchant for sadism. He’s shown nearly strangling the casino waitress during their sexual encounter, which seems to have been a frequent occurrence, and then he’s got an ex-girlfriend who apparently had his child aborted and lost her mind somewhere in the process. This on top of the wife and two kids. Brooks was a piece of work for sure, but as we see this episode when his father Lindell ruins a man’s face by grinding it with the oil well gear, it’s probably inherited. Hell, it’s possible there is no third party criminal organization involved in the murder at all, and that Lindell really is evil enough to have his own son killed rather than face embarrassment and financial ruin when Brooks’ business and personal failings eventually came to light.
