Perry Mason (2020) premise: In 1932, the Great Depression grips the United States but Los Angeles is prospering thanks to an oil boom, the film industry, the summer's Olympic Games, and a massive evangelical Christian revival. Down-and-out private investigator Perry Mason is retained for a sensational child kidnapping trial and his investigation portends major consequences for Mason, his client, and the city itself.
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Originally Posted by Earl Boebert
They made a standard Noir film and just tacked the names from Perry Mason onto the characters. Nothing to do with Mason or Erle Stanley Gardner.
The Perry Mason books and shows have a specific aura dealing with right, wrong, the legal system and rational thought. Leave that out and you have nothing.
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From what I've read about this Perry Mason, the info on this series says it is meant "to be more like the early novels of Erle Stanley Gardner, that were written when this show takes place, the 1930's, and where Perry Mason is more hands-on as an investigator, before he became a lawyer."
So, not your father's Perry Mason, as the saying goes...
In the following responses there's a lot of information from an article in the NYT that I decided to include because people often have to have a subscription to read articles online from there, or you only get a few free articles a month and for some that could be over by now this month. But here's the link to that article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/18/a...n-history.html
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Originally Posted by JimCraig
Why, oh why are they remaking Perry Mason? Some works were so well done the first time that attempting to remake them is almost a sacrilege.
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Well, they keep remaking superhero movies with Batman and Superman and The Joker. And Sherlock Holmes movies are one of the most redone characters and stories ever. Etc.
As for Perry Mason being so well done the first time...
The first time:
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Between 1934 and 1937, Warner Bros. released six Perry Mason movies, the first four of which had Warren William playing the charming, crusading attorney.
In one of those Della Street and Perry Mason got married.
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From 1943 to 1955, five times a week, CBS Radio aired a 15-minute serial version of Perry Mason.
Stanley Erle Gardner wasn't happy with the radio series and when CBS wanted to move the show to television in 1956, Gardner balked. So the producers tweaked the names and locations and turned radio’s “Perry Mason” into TV’s daytime drama “The Edge of Night,” which ran for 28 years.
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Before the character’s nighttime TV debut, the best Perry Mason adaptation was a newspaper comic strip, which ran from 1950 to 1952.
Gardner was the credited writer.
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The Raymond Burr Perry Mason was more to Gardner's liking, a properly formulaic version, comforting in its familiar arcs.
The unsung hero of this Perry Mason is its producer Gail Patrick, who in the mid-1950's was a retired actress married to Gardner’s literary agent, Thomas Cornwell Jackson. She won over Gardner, who was so impressed with her that he put her in charge of a series truer to his ideals.
But wait--THERE WAS MORE?
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In 1973, CBS debuted “The New Perry Mason” with a fresh cast, but the show’s overall squareness didn’t fit with the era, and it was canceled.
It stared Monte Markham, Sharon Acker, Albert Stratton and Dane Clark and many well-known TV actors in guest roles.
And...
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In 1985, Burr returned to the role (while Barbara Hale reprised her role as Della Street) for a popular string of NBC movies.
But these stories and the style were more like "Matlock" than his earlier Perry Mason series.
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Now here’s HBO’s “Perry Mason,” decidedly different from what’s come before — like a cross between Gardener’s pre-Perry pulp mysteries and the seedy Los Angeles noirs “Chinatown” and “L.A. Confidential.” Would the author have approved? Probably not — if only because this new show has a long, winding narrative, not a punchy one. But the new “Perry Mason” does have a Della Street (Juliet Rylance) and a Paul Drake (Chris Chalk). And this Perry is still pushing against the powerful, using every resource he has to make sure the system works for those who need it most.
I agree that it's maybe hard to overcome people who are familiar with a 9 year Perry Mason series that was also in syndication after that for years and then became available on DVD and then streaming markets.
But, as with anything that is rebooted, none of us have to watch it if we don't want to. I'm more interested in the time period and location it's set in than the fact it's Perry Mason, which is why I'm going to watch it.
P.S.: The only COLOR episode of the Raymond Burr Perry Mason series starts out with Perry and Della riding Angels Flight and Angels Flight is where this new Perry Mason series starts as well.
Has anyone watched PENNY DREADFUL-CITY OF ANGELS, which takes place in 1930's Los Angeles? I'm wondering about giving that one a go.