Pushing the Old Guys Aside: HBO's Perry Mason Season 1

by
Scott D. Parker

I finally finished Season 1 of the updated and re-imagined Perry Mason TV series on HBO Ma. Yeah, I know: I’m two years behind. There’s just too much good content to watch and not enough time.

Here’s a funny thing: when I pulled it up on HBO Max late last week, my time stamp was halfway through episode three. I asked my wife if she’d be up for watching. She was and, without going back to re-watch the opening two installments, we forged ahead.

The cheeky summation I’ve heard about this show is that it is not your grandfather’s Perry Mason. That’s certainly true, both in the language and the personal relationships. The moment where Della Street, assistant to E.B. Jonathan (Jonathan Lithgow), the nearly-too-old-for-this lawyer defending Emily Dodson, climbs into bed with her girlfriend, my wife asked about it. Cue said cheeky comment.

I enjoy the old TV show quite a bit, but I’m nowhere near an expert. It’s just good comfort television. As for the books, I’ve only read the first one. What’s fascinating about the first book and the 2020 series is how much alike they are. If the only Perry Mason you know is Raymond Burr, well, he’s not like Matthew Rhys but Burr is also not exactly like the character we first see in 1933. Rhys and 1933 Mason are scrappers, not afraid to poke a hornet’s nest and see what happens. It’s rather remarkable how well that type of character fit both in the Depression as well as ninety years later.

This being an origin story, I thoroughly enjoyed seeing how far down Mason was when this series began. Employed by E.B., Mason drinks way too much, is estranged from his wife and son, and constantly is threatened to have his family’s house taken away from him.

But the core quality of Perry Mason is his drive for justice. He can’t let things go when he knows there is something just under the surface. To quote Mason’s own self description when asked what he does, “He snapped out two words at her. “I fight!””

Rhys fights, both with his fists as well as his brain. The problem is that he often goes a few steps too far and says things to people like Della or his investigator, Pete Strickland, who are trying to help. I appreciated seeing Rhys try and smooth over Mason’s rough edges by the end of the season and never quite finishing the job.

It’s also fascinating to see how they inject 21st Century themes into a show set in the Depression. It’s obvious that same sex relationships and racial prejudices existed in the 1930s (and the 1950s era of the TV show) but it’s good to see it out in the open. Paul Drake, Mason’s main investigator by the end of the 2020 series, is now portrayed by Chris Chalk, an African-American. That itself brings up a lot of possibilities of narratives and themes. But I liked that Drake, a beat cop when we first meet him, has an inner integrity that is stronger that any position or job. Ditto for Della. The old TV show always showed her as all but an equal partner, but she always remained a secretary. The 2020 Della is an assistant, but she’s already enrolled in school and plans on becoming a lawyer. “A woman lawyer,” Mason says at the end. “A lawyer,” Della replied. “No modifier.”

Author Erle Stanley Gardner’s books are famous for their intricate nature. This 2020 season lives up to that bar. I did not see the ending coming and I really liked how the trial was resolved.

Oh, a quick shout out: Stephen Root, known for his comedy chops, plays the smarmy, publicity-hungry DA is all of his greasy glory. It made me want to see how many other non-comedy roles the actor has done. Loved him as I did Lithgow.

I suppose, with any origin story, you have to have older characters in places of authority that the younger characters seek to overcome. It’s pretty much the same in Season 1. So, in a very literal sense, the young Perry Mason beat a couple of old guys. You know, so it really isn’t your grandfather’s Perry Mason.

From Sonny Liston to Marcel Proust

In the first place, if Sonny Liston had fought Marcel Proust, the fight would have lasted a shorter time than the two fights Sonny Liston had, one winning the Heavyweight Championship of the World, one defending it, against Floyd Patterson. Both those fights ended fast.  In the first bout, on September 25, 1962 in Chicago, challenger Liston knocked out champion Patterson in 2:06 of the first round.  A left hook to Patterson's jaw, one knockdown, and it was over.  Patterson, who president John F. Kennedy had telephoned, telling him how imperative it was that he (the good Black) beat Liston (the Black who had been in prison, tussled with cops, and had mob connections), left Chicago after the fight wearing a fake beard and mustache, so embarrassed was he by his performance. In the second fight, held on July 22, 1963 in Las Vegas, Liston knocked Patterson down three times and the fight lasted 2:10, four seconds longer than the first fight.  The crowd, reacting to Liston's victory, booed.

Now all this, at least about the first fight between the two men, is the main subject of a long essay I recently read called "Ten Thousand Words a Minute", by Norman Mailer. Published in Esquire Magazine in 1963, it's Mailer at the top of his game, which means talking about something he loves with brilliance and funny insights, expanding outward from his subjects -- Liston versus Patterson, boxing -- into any number of subjects about the United States at the time. It is also Mailer being Mailer, which means you get silly and at times antediluvian ideas mixed in with the thought-provoking ones.  And as always with Mailer, when he discusses race and Blackness, there are things now, if they didn't then, that read as cringe-worthy.  But he was one of the foremost boxing writers who ever lived, and if you like boxing, as I do, and love reading about its history and how it has tied to the culture and world around it, he makes for pleasurable and stimulating reading.  But this is reading, just to be clear, that is about a subject I'm interested in. It's not surprising I would come away from a foremost boxing writer writing about boxing and like what I've read.

But what about when you read a writer on something you don't have a longstanding interest in?  Or any particular interest in, really.  What about then, and when, without question, do you know that a writer is great?  It's not necessarily when they write about a subject you love and that you know in depth. Sometimes it’s when the writer tells you about something you know virtually nothing about, haven’t thought about much, and will never ever do (not that I'd box), and still, as you read, it’s fascinating. That writer can be great company and you may feel that you're in a cafe or bar with them, just talking.

This has been my experience reading Essays Two by Lydia Davis, the companion book to her, you guessed it, Essays One. Her first book of essays concentrated on writing and writers, and this one focuses on the activity Davis has pursued throughout her professional career, as a way to make a living: translation. The book consists of numerous pieces connected to her translation endeavors, and these include her work translating the first volume of Proust's seven-volume In Search of Lost Time, which is Du côté de chez Swann, or Swann's Way.

I happen to have finally started reading Proust myself, and I'm working my way through Swann's Way.  I'm only about 200 pages in, so I'd rather not talk too much about the experience of reading Proust yet, but I can say that reading Swann's Way in the Lydia Davis translation, from a little over 20 years ago, is what led me not to reading Davis herself (I've been reading her short stories for years), but to acquiring this particular book of hers.  When I first looked through it, I saw that it has a lot of Davis dissecting Proust and talking about the joys and challenges of translating him, and I was persuaded to buy it.

And how is Davis on translation, breaking down the art and the craft of it? She's got me immersed. I'm totally into these pieces and actually wish at times that I had become a translator, in whatever language. Davis compares translating to sentence-by-sentence problem solving, and since she is a fiction writer as well, she talks in great detail about how translating differs from fiction writing but also how it can help your fiction writing. She talks about how such complete engagement with language, when translating, benefits her, in myriad ways, when it comes to her own writing. After all the years of doing it, she has plenty to say about translating, and the fact that she's made it as interesting to me as, say, boxing, is evidence yet again of what a great writer she is and what a great writer can do.

A certain writer's obsession becomes your obsession (or at least to you a strong point of interest), and you love exploring the subject with them. I liked hanging out with Mailer talking about Liston, but I'm enjoying even more spending time with Lydia Davis talking about translation and Proust.