Perry Mason Returns To The Screen With An HBO Remake

HBO’s new series ‘Perry Mason’, a remake of an older television series of the same name, debuted on the 21st of June this year.

Highlights

What can fans expect from the new show?
What was ‘Perry Mason’ the original show about?
Who comprises the show’s cast?

In the original TV series, ‘Perry Mason’ was a Los Angeles based criminal lawyer who took on cases of people being accused of murders and defended their innocence in the courts by finding out the real criminal and forcing him/her to confess to their crimes in the court.

The new show was created by Rolin Jones and Ron Fitzgerald and it stars Matthew Rhys as the lead protagonist.

What can fans expect from the new show?

In the new show, ‘Perry Mason’, the lead protagonist is a P.I. (private investigator) unlike a licensed lawyer like in the original series. The new show takes us to 1932 Los Angeles, to Perry Mason’s days before he even became a lawyer.

Perry soon becomes involved in a grisly case of the kidnapping of a young child, due to which he gets in close contact with the sinister and corrupt elements of American society, from churches to police departments etc.

The HBO show is guaranteed to be thrilling, noirish, and full of suspense. The show creators have admitted to scouring through the tens of novels published by Erle Stanley Gardner (the novelist accredited with creating the character, Perry Mason, and whose books were the source of the original tv series), but they have also made it clear that the plot of the new HBO series will not be based on any of Gardner’s works.

Not only that, but the show creators have also promised to give Perry an origin story, something he had been lacking until now.

According to them, Perry is a private detective who is suffering from PTSD due to his participation in World War 1. He will also be seen taking on cheap gimmicks to make ends meet and struggling with his mental health.

After meeting with Jonathan, Perry becomes involved in the dark case of a kidnapping gone bad, forcing him to delve into Los Angeles’s underbelly that is full of violence, closely guarded secrets, institutional corruption, and to cope with his trauma while he attempts to solve the case.

The show basically throws into the trash the original ‘Perry Mason’s’ reputation of a reputable lawyer for his younger and much less law-abiding version that is still struggling to claw his way to the top.

What was ‘Perry Mason’, the original show, about?

Between the years of 1957 and 1966, ‘Perry Mason’ was one of, if not the most, the popular and commercially successful crime and mystery TV shows. Even today, the name of the show is a household term.

In the original show, Perry was a popular and successful Los Angeles Lawyer who specialized in defending people accused of murder in seemingly unwinnable cases. He would win the case by bringing the culprit to the stand in the last few minutes of the episode and grill him with his outstanding lawyering skills, making him confess and thereby saving his client from imminent prison time.

The original show was loosely based around the huge collection of literary works of Erle Gardner, comprising more than eighty novels and numerous articles submitted by him to detective magazines during the early 1900s.

Each 45-minute episode followed a code, Perry and his team are called in to defend a person who is accused of murder and put on trial, they investigate the case thoroughly, and finally, in the end, Perry awes the jury in the last moment and closes the case in his client’s favour. The plots of any episode were hardly ever-ambitious and a bit “cookie-cutter” most times, but were extremely well-liked among the audience at the time.

What comprises the show’s cast?

The new HBO show has cast Matthew Rhys (Perry Mason), Juliet Rylance (Della Street), Chris Chalk (Paul Drake), Shea Whigham (Pete Strickland), Tatiana Maslany (Sister Alice McKeegan), and John Lithgow (Elias Birchard) among others.

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