‘Perry Mason’: The new version of the TV classic has a big new season

The name Perry Mason It sounds familiar to many generations of viewers as this character has gone on to be one of the biggest hits in all of television history. This crime and court drama aired between 1957 and 1966 and had a total of nine seasons and two hundred and seventy-one episodes. The protagonist of this series was Raymond Burr and this was his most important role. The series character was a previous creation by writer Erle Stanley Gardner, and many episodes of the series were adaptations of Gardner’s original stories. Mason was a criminal attorney from Los Angeles and his cases involved homicide. The series was so popular that several TV movies with Raymond Burr in the central role were subsequently made from 1985 until his death, after which there were two more films.

The HBO Max series had to do two things, play with the memory of the character and at the same time give him a completely new approach, more faithful to the books of Erle Stanley Gardner and at the same time have a format consistent with the narration of the current series. . When the first season premiered in 2020, it became very clear that both goals had been achieved. Perry Mason it resonates in the imagination to attract attention in the programming grid and when you start watching the series there is nothing old or outdated. However, the spirit is the same. Matthew Rhys is the protagonist of this new version which is accompanied by several great actors, both in the first season and in the second recently released.

The first season begins with the most terrible crime possible. The ransom payment for a kidnapped baby ends in disaster when the parents find their child dead. This atrocity shocks society and Mason, still a partner in a law firm, faces an investigation whose ramifications include a burgeoning religious group and the city police. The series has the purest spirit of classic noir policing and is set in the early thirties. The nightmarish climate typical of the genre recreated to perfection. Mason also undergoes the traumas of having been in the war and the debts for which he will lose a house which belonged to his family. In the ambiguity of the character, it seems that there is a noble side which struggles to appear. This will be even more noticeable in the second season.

The second season confirms the structure of this new series, which takes eight episodes what the classic version solved in one. But the pattern looks similar. The victim appears as a central role in episode 1 of this new season and this chapter closes with the enigma of his murder. Perry Mason will have to defend those who have been charged, opposing what City Hall and law enforcement want to show as an easy case ready to be dismissed. The forensic side of the show increases even more in Season 2. All of the characters and background are accomplished in what has to be one of the most accomplished series today in that regard. Hopefully this second step is one of many to come.

Perry Mason It has a full season and every Monday the first chapters of the second on HBO and HBO Max.

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