Perry Mason (TV Program)

Della shreds a witness in court. The prosecution shreds Perry’s credibility.Season 2, Episode 6: ‘Chapter Fourteen’I can’t remember the last time I shouted at the screen as much as I did during this episode of “Perry Mason.” I’m not kidding: I was hooting and hollering for what seemed like half the duration of this week’s installment. It didn’t work out as well as I’d hoped in the end, of course. But in the meantime? What a rush!The rush came primarily from the episode’s centerpiece scene, in which Della Street takes over the cross-examination of a prosecution witness from Perry midstream. The witness in question is Councilman Taylor, the brother of the murder victim Brooks McCutcheon’s incapacitated mistress Noreen. Della knows where Perry’s line of questioning is headed: directly to the fact that Brooks enjoyed strangling his lovers with his monogrammed belt.Della presents her proposed takeover as a way to better handle the “sensitive nature” of the subject matter. But by the end of her questioning, by which time she has wrapped the belt around her own neck in full view of the jurors, it is apparent her real motives were much less high-minded. She didn’t just want to explain to the jury that Brooks got off on choking beautiful women — she wanted to show them what a beautiful woman being strangled looks like. The resulting display is a slam dunk for the defense.And it all stems from another surprising step into the spotlight. Rather than continue to battle against Perry and his team, our crooked old friend Detective Holcomb decides to volunteer for that team instead. (To be fair, it’s either that or be forced to testify about his role in Brooks’s shady dealings and lose his job and pension.)Holcomb, as we’ve seen, can’t figure out how Brooks’s grift operated, so he turns to Perry, whose deductive mind he recognizes as superior to his own, for help. In return, he hands over Noreen’s medical file from the San Haven rest home and brings Perry to a dumping ground on the shore where McCutcheon produce can be found discarded and soaked with oil. The import of the latter is still unclear, but the info contained in the former very nearly wins Perry the case.But only very nearly. Perry isn’t the only person involved in the case with investigative aces up his sleeve. Mason may have Della and Paul and even Holcomb in his corner at this point, but the prosecutor Tommy Milligan has Perry’s old buddy Pete Strickland. In a development that literally had me booing and hissing (what can I say? I’m a vocal TV watcher), someone, almost certainly Pete, breaks into Perry’s office and discovers the murder weapon hidden in his safe. Later in court, Milligan smugly reveals the news about the gun to the judge, who orders the whole gang over to Perry’s office to witness the retrieval of the weapon firsthand. Shea Whigham’s mustachioed dissolution as Pete really shines through in these scenes; you can certainly believe this is a guy who would turn on his oldest friend if the price were right.Pete and Perry’s relationship at this point can be held up in contrast to that of Paul and his brother-in-law Mo. Paul hires Mo to help him stake out a street corner where a rich junkie implicated in the case is known to score heroin. But Mo is no experienced P.I., so his notes leave something to be desired. Paul, who ought to know better than to hold a rank amateur to his own exacting standards, goes ballistic, causing a family rift.It’s not really Mo’s lack of prowess as a private dick that’s bothering Paul. He is haunted by his role in the beating and, presumably, death of the young, small-time gangster Ozzie Jackson, whom he was forced to rough up. Indeed, Ozzie’s blood-soaked Converse All-Stars are found dangling from a telephone wire by a local kid, who in the opening scene retrieves and wears them in the dead man’s stead, causing Paul to pretty much lose his mind the instant he lays eyes on them.And if anything is going to sink this case, it’s the Mason team’s personal demons. Paul has his guilt over the Ozzie Jackson affair. Della has her budding relationship with the screenwriter Anita St. Pierre, for whom she leaves her previous girlfriend; and don’t forget that a mysterious stranger is aware of her clandestine love life.Della also has a very thinly veiled job offer from the gazillionaire Camilla Nygaard to consider. Camilla invites her over for drinks and “marihuana” and implies heavily that she is considering ditching her existing counsel for Della. Given the choice between a gifted but unpredictable sad sack like Perry and a rich and vivacious piano-virtuoso stoner like Camilla … well, it’s not going to be an easy decision, is it?Finally, Perry himself turns on his schoolteacher girlfriend, Ginny Aimes, on a dime when the gun is brought to light, assuming she is the person who ratted him out. Finally, Ginny is getting a taste of the mercurial side of Perry that isn’t quite as alluring as the Perry who slugged some jerk in the schoolyard.From start to finish, this episode is twisty, sexy, sordid fun, featuring richly realized acting from a double-digit number of lead and supporting players. This may be anecdata, I realize, but I’ve seen more and more people saying what a pleasure it is to watch this show every week. Consider me another voice in favor.From the case files:In the annals of “terrific throwaway shots from ‘Perry Mason,’” the vertiginous angle with which Perry’s fire-escape exit from his compromised apartment, broken into by parties unknown the previous week, takes the cake.I also loved how the “Perry Mason” logo appears just as the kid who retrieves Ozzie’s bloody Converses looks up at the now-empty telephone wire, wondering just what the hell happened to the shoes’ previous owner.Detective Holcomb is one of television’s finest dirtbags at the moment. I’m so happy for the actor Eric Lange, whose work I’ve been enjoying since I watched him play an eccentric drama teacher on Nickelodeon’s “Victorious” with my kids while they were growing up; more recently, he was delightfully sleazy as a Hollywood movie producer in Netflix’s gruesome horror satire “Brand New Cherry Flavor.” He’s perfect in this part, and I admit a part of me hopes that he and Perry reach some kind of permanent rapprochement and work together in the future now that Strick is out of the picture.“Paul. Paul. Put it away.” Clara’s words of wisdom to her transparently distraught husband ring out loud and clear thanks to Diarra Kilpatrick’s restrained but forceful performance. I remain hopeful that she’ll eventually be given more to do than react to the men of the house.Let’s note here that Rafael Gallardo is handling incarceration much worse than his older brother, Mateo, to the point of needlessly picking fights with guards and getting hauled off to the hole. What’s going on there, I wonder?The awkward elevator ride in which the prosecution, the defense and the judge all travel up to Perry’s office is straight out of “Mad Men.”“I just want to know if you’re all right,” Della says to District Attorney Hamilton Burger regarding his unexpected, and frankly unjustifiable, offer of a plea deal to the Gallardos. Is someone squeezing him, perhaps because of his sexuality? And is this the fate that awaits Della, given the shadowy figure who trailed her to the lesbian nightclub last week?Della on Ginny, to Perry: “Nice work. She’s tasty!” Perry to Della: “Oh my God.” Even in the 1930s, it’s awkward to hear your friends tell you how hot your girlfriend is. More

Paul is pushed to new extremes. Perry finds a hole in the prosecution’s case.Season 2, Episode 5: ‘Chapter Thirteen’Whodunit? Oh, we are so far past “whodunit” in this season of “Perry Mason,” folks.We know exactly who killed Brooks McCutcheon now. As put forth by the prosecution and confirmed last week, it was Mateo and Rafael Gallardo. Their motive may be complicated, including a payoff from an unseen puppet master and a personal desire for revenge — their apartment was cleared and burned to make room for Brooks’s baseball stadium, which killed their kid sister. But their guilt is beyond doubt.Fortunately for the second half of the show’s second season, there are now bigger questions to answer: Who paid whodunit, and why? Brooks’s unpopularity with, well, pretty much everyone who knew him doesn’t simplify matters. As Perry puts it regarding Brooks in his opening argument to the jury, “You won’t be asking who in this town wanted him killed, you’ll be asking who in this town didn’t.” To be fair, this is characteristic Masonic bluster, designed to create reasonable doubt in the minds of the jurors without much to back it up … yet.That’s where Paul Drake, the ace up Perry’s sleeve, comes in. In many ways, this is his episode; his story is that of a decent and dogged man who is forced constantly into humiliating or outright morally compromising positions, emerging largely intact but increasingly scarred each time.For example, Paul is the fellow Perry dispatches to interview Councilman Taylor (Damian O’Hare), the influential brother of the mystery-shrouded Noreen Lawson. Perry’s team presumes that Brooks had something to do with Noreen’s current unresponsive state, but all the councilman will do is mindlessly repeat that she was injured in a car accident. Of course, he does this with a heaping helping of racial antagonism — an occupational hazard for a Black private investigator.Paul is also tasked with tracking down Ozzie Jackson (Terrence Hardy Jr.), a low-level gangster whose trademark Converse shoes make him a standout. With help from his no-longer-estranged friend and housemate Mo, Paul learns that Ozzie works for Melvin Perkins (Christopher Carrington), the relatively benevolent racketeer currently mired in legal trouble thanks to pictures taken by Paul while he was working as a stringer for the district attorney’s office.So Paul makes a deal with Perkins: He’ll render the photos useless in court by refusing to testify to their veracity in exchange for Ozzie’s location. When Perkins learns that Paul was the photographer in question, though, he forces the investigator to beat the info he needs out of Ozzie. Then he forces Paul to continue beating Jackson, even after the kid admits that he received the order from the husband of a rich woman to whom he used to sell heroin — until he was paid better not to.Paul winds up crawling into bed with his wife Claire, touching her skin with the same hand he used to beat Jackson. “Am I … good?” he asks her. She assures him he is. What else could she say?Unfortunately for the Mason team, a mysterious person — no really, that’s how he’s listed in the closing credits: “Mysterious Person,” played by Kyle T. Heffner — has eyes on Perry. He’s there when Mason visits the Gallardo family’s Hooverville to ferret out the initial tip about Ozzie and his Converse shoes.Worse, this mystery man tails Della and Anita to an underground lesbian club. I’ve been wondering how long it would be before Della’s sexuality would be weaponized against her the way the more externally obvious fact of Drake’s race has been used against him.It’s worth keeping in mind that District Attorney Burger is vulnerable along the same lines. Note also that he is under some kind of as-yet unidentified pressure to settle the case, despite seeming to be firmly in the driver’s seat. He offers a plea deal to Perry — not an exceedingly generous one, but still, a deal — over the obvious dismay of his ambitious lieutenant Tom Milligan. No one on Perry’s team can figure out why he would do this unless someone was forcing his hand. Who? Why?Milligan doesn’t seem to care either way. What he wants to do is win the case, one virtually designed to put him on the map; the vocal support of the radio firebrand Frank Finnerty could make him a political superstar overnight. (His verminous epithet for Perry has caught on to such a degree that a witness refers to Mason as “Mister Maggot” on the stand.) Milligan helps wrap up the episode by asking Perry’s old pal Pete to turn against him; knowing Pete, he’ll do it if the price is right.And the hits just keep on coming. Della is confronted by her girlfriend (Molly Ephraim) about her late night with Anita. Perry returns to his apartment after another assignation with the surprisingly forward schoolteacher Miss Aimes to discover that someone has set up his son’s model train set and left behind a still-burning cigarette. It’s one of the more whimsical ways of sending someone a warning that they can be gotten to, but it’s no less alarming for that.The message is clear: You can either get on board, or get run over.From the case files:I’m a broken record on this point, I realize, but good gravy, the lighting in this show. This time we can credit the director, Marialy Rivas, and the director of photography, Eliot Rockett, for the way Perry’s cigarette smoke obscures his face as light streams through his blinds; for the near-blinding morning light that similarly illuminates Milligan’s office when Pete pays his fateful visit; for the cold blue-gray glow of the small hours when Paul staggers in from the beatdown Perkins forces him to deliver, a smart, stark divergence from the lighting scheme of pretty much every other scene.I’m impressed with the way the show tied the Perkins story line, which seemed like a minor conflict driver for Paul, Pete and Mo, into the main plot. I didn’t see that coming — not that a mystery tyro like me ever sees anything coming on this show.The closing credits begin unspooling over an image of a little girl’s shoes catching fire and burning up, a grimly poetic metonymy of the Gallardos’ tragic back story.I enjoyed the contrasting demeanors of Burger and Milligan when they discuss the opposition. Milligan reacts with evident disdain when Burger tells him that Perry passed the bar with only a few hours’ preparation, a fact he imparts in order to impress upon the younger man how formidable his opponent is. Burger wears the unmistakable look of “I’ve made a huge mistake,” in terms of both tangling with Perry and relying on Milligan to take the matter seriously.It’s minor in the scheme of things, but a ton of fun in as a scene: Thanks to the fortuitous placement of his shot glass, Perry discovers that the print number on the crime-scene fingerprint photo is reversed. This helps him uncover the fact that the print was bogus, placed on Brooks’s steering wheel in order to more thoroughly frame the Gallardos. It wasn’t enough for the Gallardos to kill the guy — they had to do so in a way that was guaranteed to be found out. Whoever hired them gilded the lily, and now the case against the Gallardos is weaker. When the judge says that “the jury will disregard” Perry’s statement about the fingerprint’s being planted by the cops, Perry simply murmurs, “No they won’t,” under his breath, and he’s right.My favorite bits of physical acting this week: Chris Drake as Paul, wincing with misery every time he has to take a fist to Ozzie, and Katherine Waterston as Miss Aimes, matter-of-factly raising her leg to kick shut the front door when Perry shows up for a little romance.Oh yeah: Della and Anita are now officially in love. So that’s nice! Unless you’re Della’s girlfriend, I guess. More

Perry, Paul and Della aren’t the only people searching for answers about Brooks McCutcheon.Season 2, Episode 4: ‘Chapter Twelve’Life, like a murder case, has its ups and downs. First, the down: Perry, Paul and Della have learned that the brothers Mateo and Rafael Gallardo have been lying and did indeed murder Brooks McCutcheon. Now, the up: Perry, Paul and Della all hooked up. Call it a glass-half-full situation.First, let’s focus on the amorous success of our three heroes. Della scores with her screenwriter inamorata, Anita, at Anita’s retreat in Palm Springs. Paul and his wife, Clara, carve out a little alone time during a rare 40-minute stretch when they’re alone in their crowded house. (Her sultry dance to Louis Armstrong proves persuasive.) And Perry seems downright stunned to discover the fetching schoolteacher Miss Aimes at his door during the small hours.Miss Aimes’s visit caps off the miserable days during which Perry learned of the Gallardos’ guilt, which stretch into a long night during which he briefly takes Lydell McCutcheon’s prize racehorse out for a joyride as retaliation for the negative headlines McCutcheon’s pals have been planting about him in the press. (No one does pointlessly petty like Perry.) It all culminates when Perry shows up at school to pick up his son and winds up socking another parent for calling him “Maggot Mason,” per the nickname generated by the radio firebrand “Fighting” Frank Finnerty (John DiMaggio).Is it reasonable to assume that decking that dude is part of what attracts Miss Aimes to Perry? I’ve never known an educator to respond to an outburst of violence on school grounds by thinking, “Ooh, that guy’s a catch!” Perhaps it’s Perry’s willingness to stick up for himself, and by extension his clients — guilty or not, they’re the victims of vituperative racism among the city’s chattering class — that revs her engine. Either way, we officially have ourselves another new love interest for one of our legal eagles.I wonder if there might be another on the way, too. As part of her research into Brooks McCutcheon’s stadium scheme, Della pays another visit to Camilla Nygaard. A true Renaissance woman, Camilla teaches piano and researches nutrition when she isn’t overseeing her oil empire. Most important, she encourages Della to be direct about her frustration with Perry’s moodiness and about her ambition to have her name on the firm’s front door.Sure, Nygaard may just be providing inspiration as a powerful woman — or, in a more sinister possibility, attempting to throw Della off the scent of her own potential involvement in Brooks’s murder. But considering Della’s already established wandering eye, I don’t think we can completely rule out the possibility of another affair.Getting back to business, Paul is the linchpin figure this week. (Like Juliet Rylance, Chris Chalk has an intense screen presence during his solo sequences that more than compensates for the absence of the title character.) Paul has every confidence that his conclusions about the murder weapon were correct and that the Gallardos used it, just as they later confessed to Perry and Della from jail. But that’s just it: Their confession lines up exactly with what the prosecutors Hamilton Burger and Thomas Milligan say took place. How often does that happen? Paul was a cop long enough to learn that the official story is rarely the correct one.So he does some more digging, bribing the gun dealer who provided the weapon to the Gallardos into admitting that they rented the piece every day for target practice. Where would they get that kind of money, Paul wonders? And is it a coincidence that Brooks’s murder required the skills of an expert marksman?The final scene hints at an answer. Using one of Rafael’s prison drawings as a guide, Mateo’s wife, Sofia, retrieves a huge cache of cash from beneath a nearby car. And since Perry is, ahem, busy at that moment, I’ll provide you a theory of my own about it: The Gallardos were paid to assassinate Brooks in such a way as to make it look like a mugging gone wrong.By whom, though? Was it his disapproving father? A business competitor like Camilla? A rival in the semi-legal casino business? Could it have to do with his violent sexual proclivities, which it seems left Noreen Lawson — the sister of the city councilman in charge of the ward where Brooks’s stadium was to be erected — in her mentally diminished state?Perry, Paul and Della aren’t the only people searching for answers about Brooks, by the way. His employee turned successor aboard the casino boat, Detective Holcomb, is on the hunt for how the guy managed to procure free food. More precisely, he is eager to know how Brooks and his business partners were making money off the operation, since he isn’t seeing a dime. Stumbling upon the man whom Brooks’s father, Lydell, maimed in the previous episode, he learns that Brooks was accepting huge shipments of produce from offshore vessels on a regular basis — from the McCutcheon shipping fleet, no less.Why bring in fruits and veggies in such an expensive manner when California is overflowing with them? Was daddy dearest aware his son was skimming from the family operation? Or, as I suspect, was there a lot more aboard those ships than just potatoes?From the case files:The show’s director of photography, Darran Tiernan, and the director Jessica Lowrey sure know how to light a scene. The huge blue-white stadium lights that illuminate Perry’s devil-may-care ride on that racehorse, the golden sun that illuminates Della and Anita as they kiss and undress, even the familiar flicker of a movie-theater newsreel taken in by Perry (and the sex worker he pays double to leave him alone) — gorgeous stuff from start to finish.“He seems a bit broken,” Camilla says of Perry, nailing it. In fact, it seems she is going to assess his character even more accurately when she says, “It can be a bit difficult to be in the trenches.” But after a pregnant pause, she adds, “with someone like that,” indicating that she was speaking metaphorically instead of speaking about his experience during the Great War. That remains his hero-slash-villain origin story, as far as I’m concerned.The deer-in-the-headlights look Miss Aimes wears when Perry asks her if she wants to come in is priceless. It truly is as if neither of them has any idea what her answer to that question could possibly be — until she answers it by coming in.At the start of the episode, it’s unclear whether Paul will hand over the murder weapon to Perry. Then, it seems as if they and Della might cover it up together. Then it seems as if Perry might quit the case rather than defend guilty men. In all three cases, idealism and illegality go hand in glove. More

Perry tries to be a better dad. Della tries a Turkish cigarette. Paul runs an interesting and inconvenient ballistics experiment.Season 2, Episode 3: ‘Chapter Eleven’Della Street has Perry Mason’s number. She has just learned of the suicide of their former client Emily Dodson, by way of a stack of desperate postcards and letters Perry that dumps on Della after keeping them secret for months. She realizes that this is the reason they switched to civil cases from criminal law — a major career shift, the rationale for which she ought to have been told.It’s the reason she’s had to “walk on eggshells” around his mercurial moods. It’s part and parcel of his overall pattern of evasive, self-isolating behavior. And worst of all, it’s behavior even he doesn’t fully understand.“Why didn’t you tell me?” Della asks Perry when she learns about Emily at long last. His reply seems to baffle even himself: “I don’t know,” he stammers, before repeating himself for emphasis. “I don’t.” Seeming to extrude the words rather than speak them, Matthew Rhys expertly conveys Perry’s confusion about his own motivations. Why didn’t he lean on his strong, capable colleague for support as Emily’s pleas started piling up? Why didn’t he come clean about the suicide?For that matter, as Della pointedly inquires, why didn’t he do anything to stop it before it happened? “When are you ever not alone in anything?” she asks, exasperated with his need to bear every burden in silence.After another hour spent in Perry’s company, I get the sense that injustice and tragedy are, to him, almost like a physical malady from which he suffers. There are times when he can simply take no more and springs into action, as he did with Emily’s case in the first place, and as he is doing with the Gallardo brothers now. It’s this almost impulsive zeal that leads him to stand up against the oil tycoon Lydell McCutcheon, whose goons strong-arm Perry into a meeting that devolves into threats. (Elsewhere in the episode, McCutcheon maims a man who comes looking to collect on a debt owed him by his dead son, Brooks, so we know he is willing to make good on those threats.)But Perry is also capable of ignoring this kind of pain until it’s too late, then wallowing in it, even exacerbating it. Yes, he is the kind of guy who can deftly, gently shame the new case’s slightly pretentious presiding judge (Tom Amandes) into having the Gallardos placed in protective custody after they report finding broken glass in their jailhouse chow. But he is also the kind of guy who’ll deliberately drive his motorcycle at unsafe speeds rather than admit to Della that he may have contributed to his former client’s sense of suicidal isolation and despair.Perhaps the sad tale of his service in the Great War — he was discharged after mercy-killing his own wounded men in the trenches — says everything you need to know about Perry. He’ll fly in the face of authority and society at large to do what he feels is right, but as that judge points out to him, he almost never does so in a way that will lead to a happy ending for anyone.This dynamic plays out in miniature when he allows his son, Teddy (Jack Eyman), who is staying with him overnight while Perry’s ex works overtime, to skip out on homework in order to catch “King Kong” at the movie theater. It’s a well-intentioned gesture, but all Teddy gets out of it is an extra day of makeup work and nightmares about dinosaurs.That said, Perry’s poor parenting gives him another opportunity to flirt gingerly with Teddy’s teacher, the fetching Miss Ames. It’s a more straightforward bit of banter than what goes down between Perry and Camilla Nygaard, Lydell McCutcheon’s rival in the oil biz. When Perry and Della approach her for information about the McCutcheons, she chats with them in a swimsuit while performing a workout that wouldn’t pass the Hays Code.Is she coming on to Perry, about whose core strength she saucily inquires? To Della, whom she invites to return to the estate? Is it all an intimidation tactic? Is it simply how she rolls? For now, her motives are a mystery — although she bristles when Perry drops the name of a medical facility called San Haven and says, inscrutably, that “the Lawson girl’s family has been through quite enough.” (See below for the apparent answer to this particular riddle.)Some other questions turn out to be a bit easier to answer. Perry and Della’s investigator Paul travels to the Hooverville where the Gallardo brothers lived, where he quickly and cleverly acquires the gun used in the Brooks McCutcheon murder and traces it to the brothers. As he tells the gun dealer, who nearly kills him before Paul backs him off, this was not the answer he wanted to find.Perry, meanwhile, traces the phone number we saw that mysterious figure place in Brooks’s wallet to a sanitarium housing a catatonic young woman named Noreen Lawson (Danielle Gross). Perry’s conversations with both Camilla and Lydell leave the strong impression that Brooks was responsible for the woman’s diminished state of cognition. This means, contrary to initial appearances, that the mystery man must have been out to make Brooks look worse, not better, when he planted that number in the police evidence locker. What’s his game? Another open question.But not all of the goons involved in the McCutcheon murder are quite so inscrutable. The episode begins with a surprisingly sympathetic look at the off-duty life of the crooked Detective Holcomb. When he isn’t busy doing the criminal bidding of Los Angeles’s rich and powerful, he comes home to a loving wife and children whom he’s anxious to remove from a city he can no longer stomach.Holcomb comes across here like one of those ancillary “Sopranos” characters who morph from “third goomba from the left” to late-season main character, however briefly — specifically Eugene Pontecorvo (Robert Funaro), the made guy who inherited a fortune and wanted to ditch New Jersey for the sunny climes of Florida. Sadly for Holcomb, I fear there are few more dangerous things to be on prestige television than a goon with dreams of bettering himself.From the case files:Last week, reporters told Perry that the prosecution had found one of Rafael Gallardo’s fingerprints on Brooks McCutcheon’s car. This week, Rafael swears this is impossible. It’s a discrepancy worth keeping an eye on, especially now that it seems the brothers were in possession of the murder weapon. It’s also worth noting that when we spend time with them alone, neither brother shows the slightest sign of having actually committed the crime.Perry’s conversations with Miss Ames and Camilla Nygaard had some spark to them, but Della’s late-night rendezvous with her new love interest, the screenwriter Anita St. Pierre, over Chinese food and Turkish cigarettes is a four-alarm fire by comparison.At least twice, the director Jessica Lowrey finds poetry in afternoon sunlight: first as beams pass through the window to be filtered through an ornate railing as Perry investigates the sanitarium, then through the trees in the little grove where Paul travels to conduct his amateur ballistics test. I’ve gone on and on about how the lively characters and cast make this show; it’s often just plain lovely to look at, too.For that matter, I adore the show’s ever-inventive end-title sequences. (Since each episode kicks off with just a title card bearing the show’s name, it falls to the closing credits to do the cool-looking stuff most shows these days like to start with.) This week, we’ve got a series of rats standing against a black background getting shot at, just like the critters the kids in the Gallardos’ Hooverville attempt to hunt and eat. It’s very “closing shot of ‘The Departed.’”Paul’s pal Morris (Jon Chaffin) listens to a rabidly xenophobic radio broadcaster in the Father Coughlin vein, who rails about the Gallardos and demands mass deportations in response to the McCutcheon murder. Mo is out of work, thanks largely to the incarceration of the relatively benevolent loan shark whom Paul inadvertently helped put away; broke, miserable people desperate for a scapegoat have always been a key demographic for demagogues of this sort.“At some point, Mr. Mason, you must find all of your righteousness just a bit exhausting.” I think the judge who tells Perry this is right. Find me a single shot in this show where Mason looks well-rested, and I’ll bankroll your baseball team. More

Perry gets back to his true calling after his nose tells him something smells funny about the Brooks McCutcheon murder. That was fast.Season 2, Episode 2: ‘Chapter Ten’You can take Perry Mason out of criminal defense lawyering, but you can’t take the criminal defense lawyer out of Perry Mason. That Perry discovers this with no evident chagrin is a testament to the truth of it. You don’t gain a sourpuss like his without a keen sense of the injustice of the world; on the evidence of last season, he has the legal know-how to do something about it, and he’s not about to forget it.His true vocation comes calling again in the form of the Gallardo brothers, Mateo (Peter Mendoza) and Rafael (Fabrizio Guido). These two young Mexican American men have been charged with the oil heir Brooks McCutcheon’s murder by D.A. Hamilton Burger, who assigns his lieutenant Thomas Milligan (Mark O’Brien) as lead prosecutor. There’s just one problem, from the look of things: The Gallardo brothers didn’t do it.At first, Perry and Della are reluctant to take the case, primarily because, well, they don’t take criminal cases anymore. But for both legal minds, the wheels of justice are in motion. Della seizes an opportunity as Burger’s beard for a charity event at the home of the oil magnate Camilla Nygaard (Hope Davis) to try to convince him to accept a plea. (He demurs.) Funny how oil money keeps coming up.Perry, meanwhile, straight-up breaks into impound to case the car in which Brooks was shot, discovering that the official line — McCutcheon was shot by one of the nervous Gallardos during a random stickup — doesn’t match the bullet’s trajectory. After a jailhouse meeting with the brothers further debunks the theory, Perry and Della agree to take the case. Pulling a fat monthly retainer out of the grocer Sunny Gryce in order to bankroll the defense is all it takes.Almost all. To get to the bottom of things, they’ll need a top-notch private investigator, and with Perry’s old partner Pete Strickland working for Burger, the ex-cop Paul Drake is the man for the job. Paul is reluctant to take on another job from Perry, especially after his recent gig with Strickland landed a relatively decent loan shark behind bars. Ironically, it’s Perry’s admission that he has no way to win back Paul’s trust that convinces him that Perry can be trusted.After some nosing around — including in an evidence box tampered with by the same shadowy, fedora’d figure who kept popping up in the pilot — Team Mason discovers that Brooks’s gambling boat was deep in debt to a variety of stiffed contractors, most of whom were retained because the ship is falling apart.Perry and Paul pay a visit to the ailing vessel, with Paul forced to take the employee taxi. In short order, Perry stumbles across Brooks’s cocktail-waitress lover, bearing bruises on her neck from the rough extracurriculars we learned about in the season premiere. Paul learns from a chef that only one produce supplier will do business with them anymore. And the two men narrowly escape the clutches of the crooked Detective Holcomb, whose voice thrums with a lethality he barely bothers to conceal as Perry makes his very public escape.But some elements of the case remain outside Perry’s sphere of perception: to wit, that shadowy figure and his paymaster, an associate of Brooks’s father named Crippen (John Prosky). After the mystery man murders Charlie Goldstein (Matthew Siegan), the boat’s last produce supplier standing, Crippen torches a grand jury subpoena for Brooks that recalls the one served to the slain carrots-and-potatoes man earlier in the episode.It has all the makings of a grand conspiracy of the Los Angeles noir subspecies, but the most impressive thing about the plot of “Perry Mason” so far this season is how dependent it is on the charisma of the characters and the performers behind them. We can start with Juliet Rylance as Della, a character who is as compelling in a red gown and white gloves at a dull charity event as she is when she’s hollering at a boxing match with her new lady friend. As Drake and Holcomb, the actors Chris Chalk and Eric Lange deliver memorable line readings: There’s a lifetime of hard-earned cynicism in Drake’s telling Perry he doesn’t know how they’ll get to a point of trust, and there’s an unmistakable promise of violence in Holcomb’s invitation to Perry to return to his boat “anytime … anytime.”The star of the show in every way remains Matthew Rhys as Mason. Although he does his best to conceal it, he’s still every bit as sexy an actor as he was as Philip Jeffries in “The Americans”; I found myself thinking that it’s a good thing that Della’s romantic inclinations are so firmly established, otherwise the chemistry between him and Rylance might go up like a torched casino boat.But Rhys’s primary talent here is looking not outraged by but disgusted with injustice. From his fury over getting played by Milligan outside the courthouse to his dogged determination to look into the Gallardos’ case, he has the air of a man made physically ill by seeing decent people get jammed up. If you’re going to play a role synonymous with the successful defense of the innocent, that’s a vibe that serves you in good stead.From the case files:Here’s where I admit I’m not a big mystery guy; I’ve got nothing against the genre, it’s just not where my bread is buttered. But I think this redounds to my benefit because I spend approximately zero time trying to figure out whodunit before Perry, Paul, and Della do. I’m not a practiced enough viewer to delude myself into thinking I have any chance.From Davis as the oil tycoon to Gretchen Mol as Perry’s ex-wife to Katherine Waterston as their son’s obviously smitten teacher, this episode drops so many impressive actors on us in such quick succession that it feels like a flex.O’Brien earned my undying admiration with his turn on “Halt and Catch Fire,” a bonafide Peak TV masterpiece. He took a potentially thankless role as the new love interest of Mackenzie Davis’s lead character, Cameron Howe, and showed you what she saw in him, a more impressive feat than it sounds.Remember when I noted that there was no graphic violence in the season premiere? I suppose it depends on your definition of “graphic,” but audibly squishing a guy’s head like a melon is violent all right!I sometimes wish the wives on this show were given more to do than worry about their husbands. Then again, I suppose they wish the same thing. More

New season, new showrunners, same Perry. Who knew that a show with such a grisly beginning could wind up becoming such great comfort viewing?Season 2, Episode 1: ‘Chapter Nine’It’s been nearly two and a half years since we last saw Perry Mason. In that time we’ve weathered (sort of) a global pandemic, a presidential election and an attempt to overturn that election. We’ve also seen the purchase of HBO’s parent company, WarnerMedia, by Discovery, along with all the changes that the newly minted chief executive David Zaslav has wrought for prestige TV’s most storied brand.Even the “Perry Mason” showrunners have been swapped out. Goodbye, Rolin Jones and Ron Fitzgerald, who have moved on to other creative endeavors; hello, Jack Amiel and Michael Begler, creators of the Steven Soderbergh-directed period piece “The Knick.”The times, in short, have changed.Judging by its Season 2 premiere this week, though, “Perry Mason” hasn’t noticed. The cast, led by Matthew Rhys in the role made famous by Raymond Burr decades earlier, is largely intact. So is the jazzy score by the trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard, a million miles removed from the sound of pretty much any other show on television. Ditto the overall vibe of rumpled, boozy Los Angeles noir, pitting the wealthy and sinister against the beaten-down but mostly noble working stiffs who make up Perry and his peers.Funny, isn’t it? A series that began with the mutilated corpse of a murdered infant has become a kind of comfort food.Still, it’s fair to say the time away has not been kind to Mr. Mason. For one thing, he has already retreated from the field of criminal law, despite having successfully navigated his very first, and very complicated, case as a defense attorney during the previous season: the defense of a bereaved mother, Emily Dodson (Gayle Rankin), from the charge of murdering her own baby.The Return of ‘Perry Mason’The second season of the HBO show, which is based on an Erle Stanley Gardner book series that inspired a classic TV courtroom drama, began on March 6.Season 2 Premiere: “Perry Mason” returned with a new season and new showrunners but the same Perry. Who knew that a show with such a grisly beginning could wind up becoming such great comfort viewing?Chris Chalk: The actor has pushed himself hard lately, playing deeply conflicted roles like the ex-cop turned private investigator Paul Drake in “Perry Mason.”Being Perry Mason: The showrunners reimagined a capable, no-nonsense attorney as a schlemiel with unresolved trauma. Casting the actor Matthew Rhys meant that Perry could go even more tragic.Through a harrowing dream sequence, we learn that Dodson has since drowned herself after months of sending unanswered postcards to Perry demanding to know what the point of it all was. Perry has no more of an answer to that than Emily did; perhaps that’s why he races a motorcycle he was given by a client until he crashes. It’s not as if he has his family farm to give him solace: That was sold long ago to Lupe (Veronica Falcón), Perry’s enterprising bootlegger ex-girlfriend.Perry’s current and decidedly lower-stakes focus now is civil law, and his most recent gig is representing the grocery store impresario Sunny Gryce (Sean Astin) against a former employee (Matt Bush) who invented many of Sunny’s successful sales techniques and then used them to start his own store. Perry has no taste for hanging this poor guy out to dry, but he is a very good attorney, as it turns out, and he does what he has to until a favorable verdict is won.The job seems good enough for Della Street (Juliet Rylance), Perry’s assistant and de facto co-counsel, who takes advantage of their steady stream of paying clients to hire an actual secretary (Jee Young Han) to do the work she herself was once tasked with. The civil case work is much less beneficial, however, to the Black ex-cop turned private investigator Paul Drake (Chris Chalk), whose new baby demands a regular source of income that Perry is no longer able to provide. Perry’s former partner, Pete Strickland (Shea Whigham), is able to help by providing Paul with some surveillance work for the ambitious (and, like his friend Della, secretly gay) district attorney Hamilton Burger (Justin Kirk) … but Paul’s family still makes a point of inviting Perry to the cookout when his birthday rolls around. Paul’s wife, Grace (Diarra Kilpatrick), at least, is aware of where his bread can truly be buttered.While Perry quietly rages against his new role as the defender of the petit bourgeois and Della entertains the offer of a date from a woman she encounters at a restaurant — whose gaydar, it seems, is next-gen — the case that will seemingly dominate the season unfolds. A scion of privilege named Brooks McCutcheon (Tommy Dewey), son of a ruthless magnate named Lydell (Paul Raci), spends his days choking his sex partners behind his wife’s back, his nights torching the speakeasy boats of the competition, and is obsessed with trying to convince somebody, anybody, that there is an audience for baseball in Los Angeles. (He is at least two decades ahead of his time in this respect, at least.)Both his sinister father and the crooked Detective Holcomb (Eric Lange) warn him to tread softly, but that doesn’t save Brooks’s life, as we learn when a child in a creepy mask discovers his corpse just before the credits roll.In short, you’ve got everything you would want a Prohibition Era murder mystery to include. Bootleggers, real-estate swindlers, hard-luck investigators, life in the closet, people bearing coins with strange insignia (a star-and-crescent, to be specific), the sense that Los Angeles is an ephemeral fantasyland that nothing so respectable as Major League Baseball would want anything to do with — it’s all there.So are the charming characters — often charming despite themselves — that made the show’s first season a success. Rhys’s resting sour face makes him perfect for Perry, the disgraced veteran of the Great War whose skill at ferreting out other people’s deceptions‌ has made him, in turns, a great detective and a rock-solid lawyer. Della’s competence and ebullience make her equally indispensable to both Perry and Los Angeles County’s most eligible bachelorettes. Drake is a good guy and a good cop in a system with no practical use for either.On the shadier side of the street, the McCutcheons are a solid substitute for the pack of rich evangelical elders who drove the first season’s story along. And it’s fun to trace the parallels between Sunny Gryce and Lupe, both of them thriving in the quasi-legal shadow that capitalism inevitably casts.Working off a script by Amiel and Berger, the director Fernando Coimbra — with Blanchard’s invaluable help — crafts a convincing and familiar 1930s Los Angeles atmosphere for this motley crew of strivers and sad sacks to inhabit; it truly is hard to notice the creative handoff that has occurred between seasons. We’re back in business with Perry, and so far, business is good.From the case files:No graphic violence. No nudity. No explicit sex. Certainly no murdered babies. There’s a distinct ratcheting-down of the taboo from the first season premiere to the second.Isn’t it funny how Della’s dynamism leaves you rooting for her to betray her current partner and cheat with the glamorous woman she meets in the ladies’ room at lunch?“We’re where everyone wants to be!” Brooks hollers when his ballplayer partner communicates the league’s reticence to relocate any teams to Los Angeles. “You think anyone dreams of moving to [expletive] Cincinnati?” Well, that depends, Brooks. Has Skyline Chili opened yet?The closing credits, which on “Perry Mason” take on the role of opening title sequences on other shows, feature sand castles being washed away. If that isn’t the core anxiety at the heart of the California dream, I don’t know what is. More