When I first heard about the Perry Mason reboot for HBO, I couldn’t help but laugh. A gritty version of Perry Mason’s origins where he has sex, drinks too much, and says the f word? That sounds like it could have been a premise of an SNL skit 10 years ago, making fun of how ridiculous gritty reboots have gotten.

However, after watching the first season, not only did I feel it was a good show… I felt it was a great and oddly prescient one.

Matthew Rhys’s performance of Mason is at times heartbreaking, making it resonate all the more. I received Season 1 of HBO’s Perry Mason on Blu-ray to review, but it was a show I watched as it was initially released. It’s binge-worthy and after rewatching the first episode for this review, it took some willpower not to fall into a full-season rewatch.

In the show, you’re transported to 1932 Los Angeles, smack dab in the middle of noir territory, which tracks since the first Perry Mason novel was published in 1933. The Los Angeles we’re introduced to is limping out of the Great Depression and has two separate sides: a Hollywood that is exploding with popularity and rolling in the money, and the rest of the city, still in a ramshackle recovery.

Matthew Rhys plays the titular character and exemplifies the latter as he wades through the dirty side of the former. His family farm is on the edge of being yanked from under him, he’s psychologically scarred from his time in World War I, and he’s working from job to job taking work he’s not too proud of. His performance of drunkenly screaming into a phone to have an operator reconnect him to his ex-wife so he can talk to his son at midnight pretty much sets the bar for how low we meet this character. We only meet him after a kidnapping results in a truly heinous conclusion, which acts as the focal story for the season.

Watching the special features on the Blu-ray, you learn a little bit about all of the research the entire production crew did to revive a Los Angeles from almost 90 years ago. It’s easy to say the effort shows, but it truly doesn’t. You can’t tell where the CGI begins and the meticulously designed setting ends. It’s masterful in how effortlessly the viewer enters the historical world of this show.

It’s also odd how much seems to have changed in that time – until you meet Paul Drake (played by Chris Chalk), a Black beat cop, and you see how little some things have changed. The show premiered in late June, just on the heels of the protests over the police shooting of George Floyd. Perry Mason put a spotlight on how, in the 1930s, there was very little oversight over the violence police officers could inflict on various communities.

In any other year, it might have been easy to dismiss it as “another age.” However, put next to the vocal calls to defund an increasingly militarized police system that sees no repercussions for murdering scores of Black men and women, it reveals disturbing echoes in American history and makes the viewer question exactly how much has really changed.

Chris Chalk as Paul Drake

One of the prevalent themes of this season of Perry Mason is one of crossroads. What do you do when the system is perverted by corruption? Do you drink yourself to oblivion to forget all the darkness? Or do you stand up against it? As you can guess with a character like Perry Mason, the thematic answer is one of hope.

Despite all the grittiness and darkness that the setting and characters present, there is a truly hopeful sense of justice that fights back against it. Alongside Rhys’s Mason and Chalk’s Drake, there’s Juliet Rylance as Della Street, embodying this hope.

Rylance as Della Street, alongside E.B. Jonathan, Mason’s legal mentor, performed by the incomparable John Lithgow

The first season of Perry Mason is a truly immersive ride, bringing all the legal drama of what you (might) remember from your grandpa’s TV show of the same name, but with a noir bite that keeps it engrossing. Brought together, it becomes a phenomenal example of prestige television that you should make time to watch.

(Disclosure: Warner Bros. Home Entertainment provided me with a free copy of the Blu-ray I reviewed in this post. The opinions I share are my own.)