The ace lawyer has been a part of the American cultural lexicon for the better part of a
century, recently reemerging as a gritty HBO 1930s period piece that stayed faithful to
the novels that inspired it. From the page to the screen, here's a look into the curious
case of Perry Mason.
Despite dropping out of law school, Erle Stanley Gardner passed the California state bar exam
and started working as an attorney in 1911. He specialized in representing underdogs,
particularly immigrant laborers from Mexico and China, and spent hours in law libraries
each night after arguing cases all day looking for obscure statutes that he could unleash
in court at the perfect moment.
That would become a signature move of his literary creation, Perry Mason, when in the
1920s, Gardner adopted a side hustle of writing legal thrillers.
At first, Gardner planned to pen novels about a series of different attorneys, but on the
advice of a publisher, he opted to focus solely on Mason's adventures.
The character debuted in the 1933 novel The Case of the Velvet Claws, a bestseller and
the first of around 80 Perry Mason mysteries that Gardner would pen through 1969.
The public liked Gardner's entertaining, and purportedly accurate courtroom dramas, and
he obliged. He referred to himself as "the fiction factory" and at one point employed
six secretaries to type out the manuscripts he dictated into a tape recorder. After he
passed away in 1970, the New York Times called Garner "the best-selling American author of
the century," on account of how he'd moved 170 million copies of his Perry Mason books
in the U.S. alone.
The Perry Mason franchise is most famous for its iterations as a television show the intense
courtroom series starring Raymond Burr from the 1950s and 1960s, and the moody, 1930s-set
reimagining with Matthew Rhys that debuted on HBO in 2020. But long before Earle Stanley
Gardner's popular books about Perry Mason were adapted for the small screen, they were
successfully converted into other media formats.
In 1934, just a year after the first Perry Mason novel delighted readers, the first Perry
Mason movie, The Case of the Howling Dog, was released. Within three years' time, Warner
Bros. would release a total of six Perry Mason movies based on Gardner's stories, four of
them starring Warren William as the world's greatest attorney.
"How did you know I went there?" "It's my business to know things. Now give me the details."
The Perry Mason radio program, a 15-minute serial that ran five afternoons a week from
1943 to 1955 on CBS Radio, more closely resembled Gardner's crime-and-action-filled novels,
as opposed to the somber, courtroom-dominated TV series.
The radio show was popular enough that in 1956, CBS Radio tried to move it, format intact,
to CBS television, but Gardner said no, leading the network to adapt it into the long-running
daytime drama The Edge of Night.
The original Perry Mason TV series ran from 1957 to 1966, and as a full season of a show
back then ran around 30 episodes, a whopping 271 installments were produced. That provided
syndicators with a huge volume of content to rerun on local stations hundreds of times
over the ensuing 50-odd years.
Perry Mason wasn't a serialized show each episode generally focused on a single case,
wrapped up within the self-contained story so even dedicated fans probably wouldn't notice
that the rerun package was one episode short for years.
The Oliver Twist-inspired February 1966 installment "The Case of the Twice-Told Twist" is otherwise
a run-of-the-mill episode, except for the fact that it was produced in full color the
only episode in the original series run not presented in black-and-white.
"...and now we see you for what you really are."
As color took hold of TV by the mid-'60s, "Twice-Told Twist" was a test to see how Mason
would look if it were renewed for a tenth season. But it wasn't meant to be. Star Raymond
Burr told the Washington Post in 1986,
"When we got to the end of nine, they asked me for one more year in color, and they shot
one show in color and I said 'no.'"
With no tenth season, there were no more color episodes of Perry Mason at least not this
version of the series, anyway.
Perry Mason was so good at arguing his case in front of a judge and jury that, unlike
a real-life attorney, his win-loss ratio leaned staggeringly in favor of the former: 268 wins
and three losses.
After all, he was the good guy and the title character, and in the relatively quaint world
of early television, it would've been unthinkable for him to actually lose a case. In order
to balance shocking twists with his winning record, show writers sometimes used some courtroom
maneuvering to give the lawyer technical victories after the fact.
The 1963 episode "The Case of the Deadly Verdict" begins with a confused Mason receiving a guilty
verdict, and a death sentence, for his client, accused of murder. But then he investigates
and finds the real killer, his loss turns into another win.
In 1958's "The Case of the Terrified Typist," Mason's defendant is found guilty, but is
later revealed to be a trickster pretending to be the real bad guy.
"Your Honor, this is just another wild-eyed, dramatic, grandstand play for which counsel
is so noted."
Mason's only actual loss came in 1963's "The Case of the Witless Witness," an episode that
begins with the attorney losing an appeal a rare, but relatively minor loss for the
improbably capable attorney.
By the early 1970s, nostalgia for decades very recently gone by was in full swing. Fans
of 50s culture helped turn Grease into a Broadway smash and make American Graffiti a blockbuster
movie. On TV, shows starring old favorites and revivals of classics filled network schedules.
Everything old was new again. In 1973 alone, CBS programmed The New Bill Cosby Show, The
New Dick Van Dyke Show, and The New Perry Mason. The original Perry Mason show had only
been off the air for seven years at that point, and none of the original cast returned for
the reboot.
Instead of bringing back Raymond Burr, producers hired lesser-known actor Monte Markham, to
take over for Burr in the iconic role of Perry Mason. CBS was apparently so confident in
the project that according to Markham, they bypassed a pilot and ordered it straight to
series, asking for 26 episodes. But only 15 installments aired before CBS canceled The
New Perry Mason, which finished the season with low ratings in 1974. Out of 80 shows,
the new take on an old favorite reportedly ranked in at #71.
Despite the failure of The New Perry Mason on CBS, the undefeatable attorney returned
to television a mere 11 years later. This time, it was on NBC and in a different format:
a succession of semi-regular, made-for-TV movies, this time bringing back the biggest
names from the original -- the ones who were still alive, at least.
Raymond Burr returned as Perry Mason, and so did Barbara Hale as secretary Della Street.
The role of investigator Paul Drake, played by the deceased William Hopper, was reworked
as Paul Drake, Jr., and Hale's real-life son, William Katt, took the part.
Perry Mason showed up on TV three or four times a season for a two-hour time slot in
these formulaic, Matlock-esque films, in which a crime was investigated and then tried in
intense courtroom scenes. A total of 26 Perry Mason movies aired between 1985 and 1993.
Perry Mason: The Case of the Killer Kiss was the last project Burr would star in, with
the movie airing two months after his death.
The made-for-TV Mason movies were so reliable for NBC that the network kept the franchise
going for two years after Burr's passing.
In four movies with the umbrella title A Perry Mason Mystery, the character Perry Mason is
said to be out of town, and memorable lawyers Anthony Caruso, played by Paul Sorvino, and
"Wild Bill" McKenzie, played by Hal Holbrook, argue some very Perry Mason-esque cases in
his absence.
The Perry Mason character more or less died when Raymond Burr did in 1993. But in 2011,
plans began in earnest to revive the crackerjack attorney and his cast of characters for a
feature film starring one of the biggest movie stars in the world.
Robert Downey Jr. and his wife, producer Susan Downey, set the project up at Warner Bros.,
with the Iron Man actor also serving as the lead actor and co-writer the script was to
be based on a brand new Perry Mason story, set in the dark and seedy Los Angeles of Gardner's
novels, that he wrote with production associate David Gambino.
The movie never got off the ground, but in 2016, the project shifted to HBO, where execs
were eager to make a new Perry Mason show and hired True Detective creator Nic Pizzolatto
to write the episodes. A year later, however, Pizzolatto had dropped out in favor of a third
season of True Detective, and HBO brought in Weeds and Friday Night Lights writers Rolin
Jones and Ron Fitzgerald.
The series was further delayed when Downey decided to serve only as an executive producer
on Perry Mason and not act in it, opening the door for the Emmy-winning star of The
Americans, Matthew Rhys . Finally, in March 2019, HBO officially ordered a Mason miniseries.
"You've done such a great job on this Perry Mason series."
When Matthew Rhys got the offer to play Perry Mason, he was initially skeptical. He recalled
in an interview with Collider,
"I got this message saying, 'They wanna talk to you about a remake of Perry Mason.' And
I was like, 'Why would you wanna remake Perry Mason? You can't remake Perry Mason.'"
"I don't know if that's a good idea."
When Rhys received the full context of the offer from his agent, that it was an HBO reimagining
of Perry Mason, his interest piqued. He said,
"At the pitch meeting with the producers and writers, I realized very quickly that it wasn't
a remake. It's a firm re-imagining and a redefining of Perry Mason, in a very interesting way."
Then when production got moving along, Rhys realized his initial aversion to stepping
into the shoes of a classic character was even more misguided, because upon reflection,
he realized that he had few concrete, preconceived notions of the show and its main character.
He told NPR,
"I, for one, had this image of who Perry Mason was, and then you have these vague memories
of people confessing on the stand, but I had no real specifics of Perry Mason."
Nevertheless, Rhys became interested in the role, finding it to be, quote, "a very dark
Perry Mason to which I was instantly attracted."
He's also not nearly as experienced in his role as an attorney, providing an opportunity
to see the early days of a fictional icon -- much in the same way the movie Casino Royale
showed a version of secret agent James Bond before he was, you know, James Bond.
"You may have heard I'm I'm new to this."
"Objection!"
"Sustained."
"See what I mean?"
The Perry Mason of HBO's 2020 reimagining is nothing like the Perry Mason of days past.
Not yet an established criminal defense attorney, the Mason portrayed by Matthew Rhys is more
like the one from Gardner's novels a broke, bitter private detective, complicated and
burdened, still suffering from PTSD years after fighting in World War I, haunted by
a divorce, and self-medicating with alcohol.
"You look terrible. Are you drunk?" "Probably." "Jesus, Perry."
Despite putting all of its significant resources into producing and promoting its Perry Mason
origin series, HBO apparently didn't have exceptionally high expectations for how the
series would perform.
According to Entertainment Weekly, the network initially billed the program as a one-off
miniseries. That way, if it failed to attract viewers over the course of its eight episodes,
the network could limit the perception of failure. But all of that trepidation was for
naught the series' premiere episode in June 2020 attracted 1.7 million viewers the cable
service's biggest debut in two years, outdrawing recent hits like The Outsider and Watchmen.
Within a month, Perry Mason had an audience of eight million, leading HBO to reclassify
the show and then renew it for season two.
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