Perry Mason

I was well into my thirties when my parents acquired a television set, for no good reason that I could discern after they’d gone so many years without one without obvious damage to their health or intellects. Growing up in the Fifties and Sixties, my sister and I were permitted to watch two television shows while visiting with relatives. One was Topper. The other was Perry Mason, which they occasionally joined us for: a small family grouping that was the closest thing the Williamsons ever came to resembling a painting by Norman Rockwell. Over the past year and a half, I have been re-watching episodes of the original show starring Raymond Burr as Mason, Barbara Hale as Della Street, William Hopper as Paul Drake, Ray Collins as Lieutenant Tragg and William Talman as Hamilton Burger.

Unpopular opinion: film noir is dull, self-indulgent and grossly overrated. I recognize it has given us some great performances — Bogart, Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon, say — as well as chiaroscuro lighting, laconic dialogue, cynical hard-bittenness and cancerously heroic quantities of smoking. But that’s exactly the problem. Film noir is so in love with its look and style, the plotting comes a very poor sixth. What, though, does any of this have to do with Perry Mason, the suave, brilliant, clean-cut lawyer played by Raymond Burr in the long-running Fifties and Sixties courtroom drama series? Well, bizarrely, HBO has decided to revive him for another of those dark and grimy origin stories that Joker made so fashionable.