perry mason

So last week sometime I signed up to another freakin' streaming service, Binge, because I'd heard good things about this new Perry Mason show, particularly its dedication to period style, and that interested me. Unfortunately I was also drawing a lot so I didn't get to look at as much of it as I could have and also unfortunately for whatever reason my chromecast isn't working anymore so I had to watch it on a little screen anyway. 

Also unfortunately, and I honestly would not have even started watching it if I'd known this, the whole story is a mystery re the kidnap and murder of a baby. I know murder is compelling as a story, and I am aware that for whatever weird reason the people of Earth gravitate to stories about the desolation and demolition of the weakest (or perceived weakest) amongst us, but crime is not just or even most interestingly the murder of babies and children and young women. The predictability of this story hinging on the gruesome murder of someone young is so... predictable that of course if the story had not been about such a murder people would be like 'well that was weird'. I guess the second place getter to murder of young people is big bank heists or whatever, which is even more boring. So it's a baby murder.

To be frank, the whole thing is really a bit clumsy (although as I have already admitted, I was a clumsy viewer too so it's possible there were things I just didn't get because I wasn't paying close enough attention. You know those old people who watch shows with a partner and always interrupt with 'who's that - did he do...?' and then everyone misses the next bit of detail? That'd be me, except there's no-one here to ask, so I just suffer and/or read the synopsis on wikipedia). There's a whole corrupt snake oil religious organisation which seems somewhat tacked on for the sake of, I guess, spectacle. There's a tentative and therefore half-arsed, to my mind, attempt to bring a black policeman into the Perry Mason fold, whereby the man in question (Paul Drake - and btw I understand that 'Paul Drake' is a common name in Perry Mason narratives) isn't much more than noble and frustrated, oh, and he loves his wife. What a mysterious character. 

That is the problem really, although I suppose it's my problem, not the show's exactly - that its idea of 1932 is 'the real 1932 is just 2020 people without phones and a little more hicksy'. Hey, I imagine that in 1932 there really were enlightened straights like Perry Mason is in this show, who were wokely accepting of gays and non-whites, and naturally as viewers most of us would like to think that, if we lived in 1932 fuck yeah we'd be like that guy (perhaps a little less 'troubled' though). But I bet there were straight white males even in Perry Mason's lower middle(?) class milieu who would never talk to a black person and would be barely even aware that gays existed. Hmm. Having said it doesn't matter, I guess I should shut up about it. Don't even start me wondering again whether people said 'having sex' in 1932, particularly in courts of law. 

In other news, I finally finished the graphic novel (at least, all the drawings - I still have to scan them and mess with them in photoshop, but I think this will be less onerous, and I could probably watch more crap on my new best friend Binge while I'm doing it...).