Warning: This post contains spoilers for Sunday Perry Mason season finale.
We have a judgment in Perry Masonis a big season-long affair, and that judgment is … not a statement at all.
After an emotional upheaval on Emily Dodson’s testimony and an outrageous closing statement by Perry, Emily’s murder case ended in a mishandling when the jury could not reach a verdict. (Pete paid one of the jurors to vote “not guilty”, but two others voted that way anyway.) Emily was free to ride the road with Birdy and preach that her baby was resurrected – even though she knew the new baby was not Charlie – while Pete left to work for Hamilton Burger, Ennis got his usual desserts when his partner Holcomb drowned him in a fountain, and Perry and Della started their own business, with Paul Drake as their researcher . Oh, and Perry found that Sister Alice worked at a dinner on the coast, and they talked about how life did not pack things into a neat arc. (Kind of like this show.)
TVLine spoke with makers / executive producers Rolin Jones and Ron Fitzgerald, who co-wrote the finale with Kevin J. Hynes, to get a glimpse of why Emily’s trial ended the way it did, the very real chemistry between Perry and Sister Alice (you saw it too, right?) and the process of overcoming skeptical fans from the original series – and plus, they respond to what we might see in season 2.
TVLINE | Emily’s case eventually ends in a mishandling. Have you run into different scenarios before the finals, maybe even a “not guilty” judgment?
RON FITZGERALD | Nope. [Laughs]
ROLIN JONES | We were not quite ready to think that one man could drill through so much institutional power. The hong jury seemed to like the one bit where we thought, “Oh yeah, well, that’s a big win.” And kind of suggesting that they would never try them again … that was about as much popcorn as we could wander, I think.
TVLINE | Emily ends up in the country with Birdy, telling people that the baby is hers when we all know it is not. Is that the closest thing to a happy ending we can expect for her?
JONES | Guys, if you put it that way, we sound like real big a-holes, right? [Laughs]
FITZGERALD | It’s just sad. The poor girl was just so cherished by the system … I think there is a measure of happiness, but at what cost? The cost of rationality? She is so lost that she is so badly needed to believe in something, and someone gave her a chance to believe that this was her child, so she jumped on it. I think it’s a little more tied to the theme of the faith we ran: the sister of Alice, the faith of Nathan, and where you put your faith.
JONES | What we thought was that each viewer would have a radically different opinion about where she ends up in the story, and I think we kind of wanted … happy ending or no happy ending, we wanted an ending that would haunt and that would stay with you a little. Whether you feel overwhelmed about that ending or OK about that ending, it seemed like it wanted to live in some double, ambiguous soup. [Laughs]
TVLINE | Now, speaking of ‘dry, ambiguous soup’, you have left us with a number of unanswered questions, such as what just happened to Charlie’s grave and body …
JONES | Oh, life. [Laughs] However, is that not so? I do not know if it was done deliberately, but the Perry Mason that was so wildly successful – and we have a lot of admiration for that – at the end delivered a very lovely piece to the audience, in Minute 59 every week. And I think from the beginning, in our conversations with everyone involved with HBO, no one wanted that. That what can stay with you and stay with you helps a little bit, because you have not given all the answers to go, “OK, what’s next?” It was a dramatic strategy, at least.
FITZGERALD | And all the good that happened over the last few months, it’s been a crazy time in history … a pat end would just seem like a lie. The truth is that people’s religious beliefs are monetized. They are armed and monetized, and the same with racial ties of people. It seems just like the world we are in today, a pat-end could just as well be so unbearable.
TVLINE | Perry picks up Sister Alice at that dinner on the coast, and they have that great conversation about faith versus proof. Did I find a romantic spark between those two? It made me want to see more scenes in between.
FITZGERALD | Boy, you know, that was something I personally really wanted to do. It’s just kind of like no landing place has been found yet this season. But it always felt like it wanted to happen, you know? And if we had three more episodes, it probably would have been.
JONES | Yes, that’s the danger of putting two very charismatic, attractive people together in scenes. They could talk about a damn phone book or a shoe, and that chemistry would be there.
TVLINE | You made some big, bold choices with this reboot, and some fans of the original were eventually eliminated in the first place. How do you balance honor of the Perry Mason legacy with making something fresh and new?
FITZGERALD | Yeah, well, once HBO does it, you can throw “crime of the week” out the window, right? Not one of their shows does that. Sure, we never intend to destroy the love for someone Perry Mason with Raymond Burr. Those things are still there. Everyone is free to look after them. I don’t think any of us saw a point in trying to do this just yet. That was it: How do you do a 1932 noir for a modern world? How do you try to make it relevant? And at the same time, if you read it early Perry Mason books, he does a lot of detective work and not at all a lot of fair stuff, as one. He was a very investigative lawyer.
JONES | Yes, I think one of the first tips on doing an origin story was, “Boy, this guy does a lot of f-king detective work for a lawyer!” [Laughs] And we were like, ‘Oh, I wonder, did he go to law school first? Or maybe he had another job? ‘There were many things in those books that led us to some very simple and very obvious choices. And when we signed up for the show, we knew there would be nothing we could do to not alienate the hardcore fans. It’s your favorite show, you go to bed on it, it’s been this beautiful thing. I think what’s encouraging is that for those who stick with it, once we started tackling it lawyer-wise, I think you could see we’re winning some of these people. You might start to see some conversations about, “Oh, maybe it’s way more respectable than it seems at first.” And that’s gratifying.
TVLINE | Congratulations on the renewal of season 2. But you went into this thinking that it would be a limited series, right? Did you have to adjust that to set more seasons?
JONES | I mean, we built the story where we have the Super Friends together, you know what I mean? That we place the three core members as far as possible and bring them together, who can work satisfactorily for a limited series or something ahead. But the more you go forward and ride story, the more things you’ve denied, “Oh, that wouldn ‘t be cool if …?” That’s just some of the stuff that happens when you build a story, and then after the second half you start writing relationships and small plot points, or it’s one of the two cops who does not get his death or Hamilton Burger… you start to suggest that there are tentacles to the front.
FITZGERALD | We wrote deliberately at the beginning of the first book, so it was there. The door is right there. All you have to do is open it.
JONES | Yes, that second-to-last scene is literally the first two pages of the first novel. We have truly bowed before the throne of [book author] Erle Stanley [Gardner] from the beginning, and want you to be incredibly respectful. And Erle Stanley, he was an aggressive boy. He wrote aggressively, at least plot-wise, and I like to think that, seeing the parameters and the HBO and all that, we were doing something like the kind of thing he would have done if he had been here and now.
TVLINE | Can we expect Season 2 to follow one long affair again? Will it be that customer who ran to the end of the final?
FITZGERALD | We usually look at the novels to use those as leaps and bounds … We did not know for sure that there would be a second season or something, but we knew we wanted to start in those books. That it will come out of the books. We look at using some of the books in different ways. I think I would kind of compare it to it [Benedict] Cumberbatch Sherlock thing, where you can see the DNA of Arthur Conan Doyle there. It’s not Basil Rathbone! [Laughs]
TVLINE | Shea Whigham is as great as Pete Strickland, but he ends up working for Hamilton Burger. Will we still see him in Season 2, right on the other side of the aisle?
FITZGERALD | Oh yes, Strickland will be back. He’s on the other side of the aisle, but he and Mason have that bond, you know. There will be things to chew on.
TVLINE | Any more hints you can drop?
FITZGERALD | I’ll tell you this: John Lithgow asked if there would be the ghost of EB in season 2. There will not be. [Laughs] No ghost of EB That will not happen.
JONES | When you die Perry MasonYou’re going to die.
Okay, now it’s time to cast your vote: Give it a go Perry Mason final – and Season 1 as a whole – a rank in our interviews, and then click on the comments to share your judgment.
