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

^^^

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?