I came up with an inspired idea for a complementary post for the new series.
How do I follow up an eight-episode serialized miniseries with a 271-episode long-form procedural?
I use a random number generator to pick which one of the original 271 episodes to watch after seeing each of the eight new ones! (Note: For whatever reason various seasons are missing from CBS All Access so if the number generator gave me an episode I couldn’t watch I just reran the generator)
Season 1, Episode 3: “The Case of the Nervous Accomplice” – Quintessential Perry Mason story, with people seeking financial gain, only for someone to wind up dead. This episode showed his ability to think outside the box to win in the courtroom. Sometimes his techniques may border on unethical, but he always has the truth on his side ultimately and he certainly crosses far fewer boundaries than cops on modern shows, who are glamourized for beating confessions of out suspects.
Season 1, Episode 10: “The Case of the Runaway Corpse” – Par for the course, so many twists and turns until you find out the killer when Perry gets that person to confess on the stand. So exciting!
Season 1, Episode 18: “The Case of the Cautious Coquette” – Wow this was a winding journey, with a sympathetic heroine, a weasely villain…and more and more characters until everything gets resolved in a very satisfying way!
Season 2, Episode 2: “The Case of the Lucky Loser” – Very high concept premise. Specifically, a guy gets tried twice for killing the same person, both via murder and via manslaughter. Really ingenious and keeps you guessing!
Season 3, Episode 11: “The Case of the Violent Village” – Here we have a damaged, but still sympathetic, murder suspect. Of course, on this series the killer is never who it seems at first, but it’s consistently thrilling finding out who did it, why, and how.
Season 5, Episode 19: “The Case of the Glamorous Ghost” – This one starts off shrouded in dark mystery and only continues to rivet you. Highly recommended.
Season 7, Episode 1: “The Case of the Nebulous Nephew” – By far my favorite out of all these episodes! Perry Mason is similar to Law & Order or CSI, in that it’s a pure procedural; it doesn’t feature character development among the regulars. That leaves the guest characters to get us emotionally invested in the mystery, and even though the mysteries are always brilliant there’s usually only so much you can care about characters with whom you spend a mere hour. This episode is a major exception. A tragedy really captures your heart, and whether there’s a happy ending or not I urge you to watch and see!
Season 7, Episode 27: “The Case of the Careless Kidnapper” – Another great mystery where what starts out looking like mere tension and misunderstanding between characters instead keeps you on your feet, with all sorts of twists you would have never guessed!
That’s eight episodes out of 271. Not a huge sample but they are fairly spread out over the course of the series and considering I loved them at a rate of 100% that’s enough for me to highly recommend this show!
I’ll elaborate on the comparison I made. Although I’ve never seen any Law & Order, (I know, I know, shame on me), I did watch CSI for a while in the early 2000s. I now call Perry Mason the CSI of its day. Mystery after mystery after mystery that is consistently brilliant and unpredictable, in all its beautiful complexity.
Some people might prefer their crime shows serialized, like The Wire, NYPD Blue, or Hill Street Blues. To a lesser extent, even shows like Monk, which have some character development. However, there is something to be said for the rewatchability of pure procedurals. There’s a reason L&O and CSI each had so many spinoffs people would make jokes about it.
There’s also a reason Perry Mason has been such an enduring part of our culture; in fact in my next post I’ll talk about various things in which the character has been featured.
Early in the pandemic I downloaded the app “To Do”, which is actually really useful. Admittedly most people might use it for productive things, but I have mainly used it for TV series I wanna binge on. There are so many, and it often gets intimidating that for just one series there will be dozens, if not hundreds of episodes I need to watch to get the whole story.
Thus it’s a breath of fresh air, sometimes, having a series like Perry Mason for which you can just pop in any random episode (whether you use a generator or not, LOL) and enjoy a wonderful self-contained yarn.
I recommend all you CBS All Access subscribers do that. This series accomplishes what it sets out to do absolutely perfectly, and I’m glad CBS All Access exists so you don’t have to seek it out on tiny local stations. J
Bottom line: I’ll reiterate the “absolutely perfectly” part!
Up Next: A hodgepodge of Perry!
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