HBO’s Perry Mason Reimagined, not Remade – How the Creators Adapted the Character for 21st Century Viewers

For the creators for HBO’s new drama, PERRY MASON, rebooting the 1960s series meant turning back the clock to tell the famed defense lawyer’s origin story. Set in 1932 Los Angeles, Perry Mason is living cheque-to-cheque as a low-rent private investigator, haunted by his wartime experiences in France and suffering the effects of a broken marriage. L.A. is booming while the rest of the country reels from the Great Depression — but a kidnapping gone very wrong leads to Mason exposing a fractured city as he uncovers the truth of the crime. With new episodes debuting Sundays at 9 p.m. ET, only on Crave, series star, Matthew Rhys, and executive producer Susan Downey, took a moment to reflect on the series’ conception and the adaptation of the beloved character for modern audiences. Matthew Rhys on his initial thoughts on the series: “It was September 2018 when my agent left me a message. I thought, ‘why do you want to remake Perry Mason?’ You can’t remake Perry Mason and you’d be foolish to do so. Then when I spoke to my agent, he said HBO are remaking it and I was like, “oh, it’s not going to be a remake, they’re going to HBO-ify it!’ When I met with Susan Downey and the writers I quickly realized it was a reimagining rather than a remake. They said they were interested in the origin story of how Perry Mason became a defense attorney and went on to describe who this person was. I was immediately hooked.” Rhys shares what he remembers from the original series and what he wanted to do differently: “I have a vague and hazy memory; it was the kind of show your grandparents watched. My memories are of this upright servant of justice who did the right thing. I wasn’t interested in playing a clean-cut version or a superhero. What I hoped for, and what I discussed with the writers in the development of the scripts, was the complexity of justice. I didn’t want anything straightforward or easily earned. I was very interested in the [grey] areas and the complexity of it, as opposed to justice being miraculously served at the end.” Susan Downey on how the idea of Perry Mason’s origin story came to be: “It was really our ambition to follow the journey of somebody who is very much an outsider in this incredibly bustling city, try to come in and take on these larger forces. To create that outsider element, we decided it was best to portray him pre-lawyer and that’s how the origin story came about.”  Downey describes Perry Mason’s enduring appeal: “There’s always something interesting about someone who has a dogged pursuit of justice and what makes Perry even more interesting is while he has that, and he has his own moral compass, he’s not some purist; he is willing to break some rules and bend some laws if he knows he’s ultimately going for a result that is the greater good. A character like that is someone we can really get behind.”