Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Perry Mason’ Season 2 On HBO, Where The Downtrodden Lawyer Investigates A Murder In A Wealthy Family

People have likely been wondering where the second season of Perry Mason is after the first season ran on HBO in the summer of 2020. We’d imagine that COVID delays threw things off, but almost 3 years later Matthew Rhys is back as the gumshoe-turned-lawyer.

PERRY MASON SEASON 2: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A woman singing on stage. We pan back and see that she’s singing at a casino/dinner club.

The Gist: A man in a waiter uniform lights some linens on fire; he leaves as the fire causes a stampede of the wealthy bigwigs at the casino. From a distance, a man holding a coin watches the fire.

The next morning, Perry Mason (Matthew Rhys) rides his motorcycle to his law office, where he surprisingly finds that his paralegal, Della Street (Juliet Rylance) has hired a secretary. Since the Dobson case, which still haunts him, ended, he’s been pursuing civil cases in order to make ends meet, but the idea of litigating these cases bores the former P.I. to tears.

He’s especially disgusted by their current case, where supermarket chain owner Sunny Gryce (Sean Astin) sues a former employee for stealing the format of the employee’s new store. Mason does his job and makes the jury see that this small-timer may have come up with these ideas, but it was under the employ of Gryce. When the former employee wants to settle, though, Gryce tells Mason and Street to go for the jugular, even though the defendant doesn’t have the resources to pay.

Meanwhile, Brooks McCutcheon (Tommy Dewey), the scion of L.A. real estate developer Lydell McCutcheon (Paul Raci), is in business with crooked LAPD detective Holcomb (Eric Lange), whose guys are the ones who set that fire on the gambling boat. Holcomb has an interest in the major league baseball team Brooks wants to bring to Los Angeles, something that Brooks is sure will happen, despite the doubts of his father and pretty much everyone else.

Mason goes back to his old family farm, which he finally sold to Lupe Gibbs (Veronica Falcón), who turned the farmhouse into a brothel. Della, who is in a solid relationship, is still entranced by Anita St. Pierre (Jen Tullock), a woman she flirts with at a restaurant where Della is having a client meeting. Paul Drake (Chris Chalk), Mason’s investigator, isn’t getting a lot of work from Mason, but Mason ensures him that he’ll find Paul some work. It comes from Mason’s former investigating partner Pete Strickland (Shea Whigham), who wants Paul to take pictures of the Black owner of a local hotel to see who he’s been doing business with.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? This version of Perry Mason is less reminiscent of the Raymond Burr-starring TV series and films and more reminiscent of noir classics like The Big Sleep.

Our Take: Like we said when we reviewed the first season of Perry Mason way back in 2020, no one plays layered pathos like Matthew Rhys. Even though Perry Mason is now an attorney and not a P.I., he isn’t satisfied. His business is struggling, he has ruthless scumbags like Gryce as a client, he can’t shake the Dobson case, and he still bitches at district attorney Hamilton Burger (Justin Kirk) for not caring about justice, even though he no longer tries criminal cases.

The second season certainly feels less cohesive than the first, with creators Ron Fitzgerald and Rolin Jones seemingly settling into a routine where every major character has something to do in their personal and work lives, but nothing ties together particularly well in the first episode.

At the end of the episode, though, Brooks McCutcheon is dead, and how Mason and Street are pulled into this case is still to be determined. That might coalesce all the different story elements, as the various scandals brewing in the first episode might be all part of the same conspiracy. But the second season feels like less of an exercise of probing Mason’s psyche and more of just your standard noir, with a run-of-the-mill murder case taking up most of the oxygen.

Sex and Skin: Brooks McCutcheon gets dressed after having sex with a young woman who is not his wife, but other than that there’s nothing in the first episode.

Parting Shot: A girl in a mask playing on the beach sees the expensive car parked nearby. She walks up, sees the bloodied body of Brooks McCutcheon lying in the front seat, and screams.

Sleeper Star: We continue to enjoy Juliet Rylance as Della, and now in the second season she is out, proud, and openly flirting with women because she’s already bored with her current relationship.

Most Pilot-y Line: “Besides the excellent typeset of your card, nothing else about you made an impression on me at all,” Della says to Anita on the phone. We guess that’s Della’s way of flirting?

Our Call: STREAM IT. We hope that Season 2 of Perry Mason comes together in subsequent episodes, because the first episode was a bit all over the place trying to establish where all of the characters are this season.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.