The exciting and sometimes disgusting origin story of Perry Mason starring Matthew Rhys

Yeah this was the week I completely got on the bus, it was great.

god I'm so glad Rhys took over from RDJ

aphex twin?

Downey Jr. He's an exec producer on this and apparently at one point going to be playing Mason.

i really like shea wigham in this. i've mostly seen him play repressed white-collar types in the past so it's fun to see him let loose.

he's a fucking blast to watch yes. I hope he sticks around.

really enjoyed this week’s episode as they start pulling the threads together for the finale

love shea wigham as well, but i gotta say i'm worried he won't make it out alive! he drew too much attention from murder vice cop guy. and in the old show, drake was pm's investigatin' sidekick. and in the new show we have a drake who, if he survives murder vice cop guy, may or may not remain po-lice. could he become pm's new drake sidekick? that makes me worry for wigham.

i type all of this having not seen last night's episode yet. so caveats.

Decent finale. Just as / possibly more importantly, renewed for s2.

NA... watch Boardwalk Empire

Really enjoyed the finale, overall loved this show & am glad it got renewed for s2

am i the only person that didnt catch that Della’s girlfriend wore gloves 24/7 bc she was a hand model until Perry says it out loud in the finale? obv missed that key early detail

and a very noir-ish ending too

Wigham and lots of others are good in Boardwalk Empire but the show kinda mostly blows tbh

I realize that might be challopsy esp on the Perry Mason thread lol

thanks for the spoiler alert before revealing the mystery of the gloves!

gonna watch the finale tonight.

Simon’s take is fair. I like the scenery chewing but overall Boardwalk Empire is pretty meh

Wigham playing a corrupt sheriff that eventually loses the sheriff bit almost seems like a parallel character to the role in this show

xpost sorry! fwiw it’s not really a spoiler of anything other than her being a hand model

I don't believe her being a hand model was mentioned at all, I think when Mason mentioned it in the finale was the first time her gloves were officially discussed. It had just been a quirk up until then.

i enjoyed this show.

this is not unique to this show but it was very blatant in it: the almost sci-fi feeling of a show that is set in the past but was obviously written in the present by people with present perspectives. basically the way that women, people of color, and other minorities talked about their identities the way someone from 2020 would talk about their identities if they time-traveled back to the 1930s, instead of the way a person actually from the 1930s would.

to be clear, i don't think this is necessarily bad, i'm not eager to watch a show where people are throwing the n-word around constantly, but it was particularly prevalent and not subtle. it took me out of the reality of the show, but this seemed almost intentional.

I cringed at one point when Perry talked about "doubling-down" on something, a phrase I don't remember being used in such a context until after the poker boom of the mid 2000s. It seems an odd anachronism in a show that has taken such expensive pains to create a visually "realistic" 1930s world.

I can't speak to the 1930s, but I can confirm 100% that people were saying "doubling down" in the 1990s. It's not that new.

poker has been around for quite some time

Xps, Maybe after Swingers, but I don’t remember it being used much before then.

Although how can we forget the KFC Double Down sandwich. Maybe Perry will ask Della to order him one of those in S2.

Google ngram says it’s been used for a long time but started taking off mid-20th century and really took off circa poker boom. Shockingly, I didn’t see a Swingers bump.

Enjoyed this, Rhys is great, Della and Drake too and of course Lithgow

Doubling down = blackjack tho

enjoying this so far. Mason's pretty indelicate at pretty inappropriate times, and seems horrible at being a social animal.

is Shea Whigham contractually obligated to appear in any old timey New York crime show?

yes

this show takes place around LA, though

Lol guess i wasn't paying as close attention to the first ep as i shoulda

Google tells me it's still possible to be admitted to the bar in California without a law school degree, if the candidate meets various apprenticeship and testing requirements

Gardner himself had about one month of law school and then studied on his own and passed the California bar exam in 1911

― Brad C., Tuesday, July 7, 2020 7:43 AM (five months ago)

Just started watching this show! So only now looking at this thread ... my great great uncle actually was a lawyer in California around the time this show was set and apparently never went to law school. ... He actually ended up as a judge ... so, in summary, it was probably fairly common at the time.

I never read any of the novels but there are a lot of references to other things, that could themselves be references to the source material here ... like, Angels Flight plays a prominent role in one of the Bosch novels, the detective/coroner relationship (and appearance of the morgue) that looks like Chinatown, there was something that reminded me of a James Ellroy scene in passing, and then the bit where Lili Taylor calls Alice (I keep wanting to say Aimee, because the character is based on Aimee Semple, yeah?) her Daughter, and Sister ... like they got a "my sister and my daughter" reference in that I'm doubting was anything but a reference to Chinatown

just saw on hbo that s2 starts on monday?

thank God, the world has been holding its breath.

so excited. i love this damn show

never finished the first season, assumed it wasn't going forward, so now maybe I will

anyone watching s2?

enjoying so far, loved della & anita at the boxing match

yeah me too. i forgot how much i love watching Rhys act. last one was pretty good considering it was a getting the band back together episode

I forgot how much I liked this show ... everyone is so enjoyable to watch. The soundtrack (the non-songs) for some reason reminds me of Blade Runner? I could totally be mis-remembering the Blade Runner soundtrack, but there's definitely some iconic LA detective movie that it reminds me of.

though this show also gives me the same frustration as I had with Transatlantic where I have this urge to look up historical stuff online to look for references / fictionalization.

It's a good frustration tbh

its really good, if id to name the vibe its kind of got a black dahlia thing going on, which ofc is itself a stitch of ten other things but

terence blanchard’s score is incredible, i love it so much.

also similar to mrs maisel i love when thry go to a new location, like that amazing mission-style house in palm springs … i like trying to work out from exteriors how much is real & how much is added in, like beach scenes & stuff too

i’m finding this season i am having a hard time keeping track of the story threads in this one so i am stressed that there’s only 2 more episodes left

there aren’t that many story threads? some have kind of gotten short shrift though

i didn’t say there were that many, i just can’t keep them in my head well enough to keep up

The show is pretty great overall.

They’ve used the N-word several times now though, just seems unnecessary and in bad taste. That never stood out to me in season 1.

xxxpost sarahell you’re so otm about the bladerunner-ness of blanchard’s score, i havent stopped thinking about it. some similar qualities for sure

it never ceases to amaze me how quickly & unquestioningly perry is up for anything pete suggests.
we should go get on that boat.
we should jump off, it’s only an hour back to shore. LOLOLOLL

also perry + pete brawl was so fucking good, omg.

big lol for me when Perry references the brawl as Drake & Pete start puffing chests and squaring off

lol yes that was funny
pete’s look was like wtf man

‘Perry Mason’ Canceled at HBO After Two Seasons

Too bad. Admittedly, I kinda liked (but did not love) this season but thought that Juliet Rylance and Chris Chalk were both really good.

Boo! We are three episodes into episode two and really loving it so far. It's less grim than the first season (one reason why we put off watching it for as long as we did). I suspected something, though, when they just dumped all the episodes out at once as an afterthought over here without any ads or trailers or anything. I only found it on my Sky box by accident. It deserved more.

rats! i could have watched this show forever

this sucks this show was such a great vibe

maybe i can pay blanchard to play the perry score for me just around the house, driving to the store, etc

Damn. Was looking forward to S3.

I liked this show, but how long did people seriously expect it to run? Two very solid seasons was plenty.

strange rhetorical question

if they had written another plot and everyone was available id have expected it to run another time

and so on

^^^

^^^

damn it, I still need to watch S2

currently I'm going through the 1958-59 season of the original show

the HBO series had a great look, tons of period atmosphere, and an excellent cast, but I think by focusing so heavily on the Mason-and-team ensemble, it missed the unique quality of the novels, which is their bizarrely convoluted mystery plotting

crushed into hour-long episodes for nine seasons of the Raymond Burr series, those plots became a kind of running joke, with the constant repetition of confessions on the witness stand obscuring just how creatively twisted all the preceding events were

while the tricky complications of the novels tend to lose impact when squeezed into two acts of 50s-60s TV drama, Perry and the rest of the characters come across much more powerfully as performed by Burr, Hale, Hopper, Talman, and Collins than they do on the page

it's not surprising that RDJ and the other HBO producers latched onto the ensemble acting of the original show as the key to the property's appeal, but trying to recreate and modernize that resulted in a new version that was not very different from other crime/police dramas with colorful bantering characters

i dunno i found the mysteries pretty convoluted but i am also a known smoothbrain so ymmv

(in the hbo show i mean)

but trying to recreate and modernize that resulted in a new version that was not very different from other crime/police dramas with colorful bantering characters

Yes, but there are about 8,000 of those on the television, why do they have to take MY one?