Perry Mason Season Two Review: A Reset with Diminishing Returns

The show’s second season may be watchable, but it’s so much louder about saying so much less.

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Perry Mason
Photo: Merrick Morton/HBO

Tasked with reimagining the 1950s legal drama based on Erle Stanley Gardner’s detective stories, the first season of HBO’s Perry Mason offered a gritty origin story for the eponymous character. As portrayed by Matthew Rhys in what was originally billed as a limited series, Perry Mason wasn’t yet a lawyer but a down-on-his-luck private investigator.

Haunted by the ghosts of World War I and his outstanding alimony payments, Mason navigated a Depression-era Los Angeles that suggested something out of a James Ellroy novel rather than the Raymond Burr-led TV show. By the end of the first season, Mason had clawed his way to bona fide lawyerdom and a fledgling courtroom victory against impossible odds.

Though Perry Mason’s new showrunners, Jack Amiel and Michael Berger (creators of The Knick), dial back the gore and near-apocalyptic grimness for season two, they immediately set out to once again make Mason as miserable as possible. The character may have started wearing suits and shaving, but his law practice is now taking on soul-sucking civil cases that hardly inspire the kind of drama worth building a TV series around. Early on, for example, we see Mason and secretary-turned-partner Della Street (Juliet Rylance) representing a spiteful, enterprising grocer (Sean Astin) who wants to sue his competition into oblivion.

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Mason hides the true reason for his professional pivot from everyone, even Della: Elizabeth Dodson (Gayle Rankin), his client at the center of the first season, has committed suicide, leaving him shaken and uncertain of his ability to help others in similar circumstances. Yet news of Mason’s shift in priorities hasn’t reached the Hooverville shanties, whose denizens plead with him to take another criminal case when two Mexican brothers (Fabrizio Guido and Peter Mendoza) stand accused of murdering a wealthy white luminary (Tommy Dewey) in a robbery gone wrong. With the boys being crucified in the press at the behest of a racist, ambitious prosecutor (Mark O’Brien), the wheels are put in motion for another long shot to victory and another media circus that reverberates through the rungs of 1930s L.A. society.

There’s a certain contrivance to how the series more or less hits the reset button on Mason rather than deal with the aftermath of the success he found at the end of season one, placing him back into the position of the tortured, impoverished underdog. It feels like an easy out, mechanical in a fashion that extends to the entire new season. The series again uses a court case to probe prejudice, class disparity, public perception, and the compromises we all make to survive, but it sands down the messiest parts in the interest of easy viewer consumption.

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At one point, L.A. County’s new district attorney, Hamilton Burger (Justin Kirk), a closeted gay friend of Della’s who’s ostensibly more sympathetic than his conniving predecessor, goes on about justice being an illusion, a performance put on by the system for benefit of the public. His monologue might charitably be considered a restatement of the show’s thesis, and it exemplifies the new season’s tendency to state outright the things that are on its mind.

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Last season’s church subplot was often criticized for being meandering and tenuously connected to the main story, but the lack of any equivalent in season two is sorely felt. The figures involved with the church vitally expanded the world of the series beyond the legal proceedings, making room for perspectives from the masses and the moneyed alike. Now, though, we get far fewer scenes from the sidelines, of people struggling to make ends meet or reacting to the news about the crimes that are the focus of the season. The defendants and their families in particular are glaringly underwritten, with the series, in lieu of providing a snapshot of what it meant to live in squalor during this time period, having them simply state and restate their social standing.

Season two is also overcrowded with peripheral characters who provide scant, piecemeal insight into the business entanglements that are central to its slow-burning mystery. And it struggles to emphasize subplots like a media smear campaign in the midst of straining to give returning characters like Shea Whigham’s P.I. working for the prosecution and Eric Lange’s shifty L.A.P.D. detective enough screen time. Without the first season’s more panoramic view of society, long stretches of the season’s eight episodes simply feel insular, given to languid, dialogue-heavy scenes where the love interests serve as sounding boards.

To its credit, Perry Mason hasn’t lost nearly as much in terms of atmosphere and production value, right down to the pensive, mournful score by Terence Blanchard. But there’s an overriding sense of emptiness that’s tough to shake, a lack of inspired gambits or conflicted sympathies because of how tidily all the plotlines and politics coalesce. Della’s sexuality gives way to a cautionary tale about being too much of a girlboss, while investigator Paul Drake (Chris Chalk) essentially relearns that white people might not have his best interests at heart.

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In a closing argument, Mason entreats the jury to consider their prejudice and privilege before they deliberate. It’s perhaps the most unflattering encapsulation of the show’s shallow gestures toward social commentary, doing little to find a way of working through or around those preconceptions and instead inviting applause for merely pointing out that they exist. Perry Mason’s second season may be watchable, but it’s so much louder about saying so much less.

Score: 
 Cast: Matthew Rhys, Juliet Rylance, Chris Chalk, Justin Kirk, Diarra Kilpatrick, Eric Lange, Shea Whigham, Katherine Waterston, Jen Tullock, Fabrizio Guido, Peter Mendoza, Paul Raci, Mark O’Brien, Hope Davis, Wallace Langham, Sean Astin, Tommy Dewey  Network: HBO

Steven Scaife

Steven Nguyen Scaife is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Buzzfeed News, Fanbyte, Polygon, The Awl, Rock Paper Shotgun, EGM, and others. He is reluctantly based in the Midwest.

7 Comments

  1. I watched the first episode of season 2 and was disappointed. It seemed rather contrived and superficial, trying too hard.

  2. Hello, I thought episode 2 was better than the first episode of season 2. Maybe I am just expecting too much because season 1 was so good. Giving it some time to evolve this time around.

  3. I could really care less about the personal lives of these characters, Della, Perry, and Paul. That’s not why I am a fan of Perry Mason and while willing to put up with some of the shenanigans do we really need political agendas forced down our throats. Just give me a good Crime Drama and stop with romantic scenes of Della and Perry riding horses with teachers. Last episode was a waste towards the season story. I would rather 1 less episode in the season than the character building in the last episode last night.

  4. As a fan of the original Perry Mason TV series and Erle Gardner’s pulp fiction I truly enjoyed season one and found it fairly easy to welcome the “newer” interpretations of Gardner’s novel’s original characters, but season two took that artistic license much too far, IMHO. With less focus on the actual crime, the criminals, victims and even the courtroom drama and yet more attention paid to ancillary characters’ sordid love affairs and underground night clubs, the show has slipped away from what made it so famous for so many years: Perry Mason. The story even goes so far as to suggest Mason’s assistant Della Street is a much more effective litigator in the courtroom than Mr. Mason himself. Where are the infamous “Perry Mason moments” where he wears down a defiant witness to the point of confession right on the stand? Nope, not on this rendition. Unfortunately this series has become a Perry Mason show in name only, certainly not in content.

  5. A heroically dull, tortuously slow, depressive, uninspiring, somehow formulaic, wasted opportunity.
    Really disappointing that they have squandered season one’s progress to deliver such a, boring show with a uniquely un-engaging lead character who plumbs Morrisey-level depths of depression. A pretty-much unwatchable show. Avoid.

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