Origin stories are usually reserved for superheroes, and author Erle Stanley Gardner’s popular protagonist lacks any special powers, but he hasn’t yet become a defense attorney at the outset of HBO’s Depression-set prequel. In the CBS series of 1957-1966, Raymond Burr's neatly-dressed counselor arrived fully formed. Matthew Rhys's rumpled Perry, on the other hand, has been working as a low-rent private eye for Los Angeles attorney E.B. Jonathan (John Lithgow) for two and a half years. E.B.'s memory is failing, so he's lucky he has Perry, senior investigator Strickland (Agent Carter’s Shea Whigham), and assistant Della (The Knick's Juliet Rylance), to help keep the struggling practice afloat.
Perry, a World War I veteran psychologically scarred by battlefront experience, is just happy to have a job. A divorced dad, he lives on his family's run-down farm. His occasional lover, Lupe (Veronica Falcón), who owns the adjoining property, has been trying to get him to sell, but it's all he has. By contrast, Della has been carrying on a covert relationship with her housemate, Hazel (Molly Ephraim). Perry's journey into lawyering begins when a young couple finds that their kidnapped baby, Charlie, has been murdered. At first, Matthew (Nate Corddry), a grocery store clerk, looks like the guilty party, but after his wealthy father, Baggerly (Robert Patrick), hires devious district attorney Barnes (Barry's Stephen Root) to represent him, focus shifts to Emily (GLOW’s Gayle Rankin), not least when love letters come to light exposing her affair with missing accountant George from the Radiant Assembly of God, a church built around charismatic evangelist Alice McKeegan (Orphan Black's Tatiana Maslany). Barnes argues that Emily killed her son to be with him. Perry’s team believes she's innocent, especially once he and Strickland establish a connection between Baggerly and the financially-strapped church. There’s a difference, though, between illegally-obtained evidence and the admissible, if more elusive kind, and when Jonathan exits the picture, their task becomes more difficult. That’s when Della convinces Perry to take his place, and the transformation is complete.
In the meantime, other characters come into play, like Ennis (Andrew Howard), a white cop willing to do anything to get ahead, and Drake (Gotham's Chris Chalk), a Black cop constrained by a racist system from sharing what he knows. If Terrence Blanchard’s noirish score and the shadowy look of the show recall HBO's Prohibition-era Boardwalk Empire, for which Tim Van Patten also served as director, the convoluted storyline plays like a James Ellroy novel in which everyone is guilty of something. The entire cast delivers, though it's hard not to miss the subtlety of Rhys's work on The Americans as a Russian spy disguised as an American travel agent, since he’s encouraged to blow a gasket in almost every one of these eight episodes. Still, Perry Mason offers an engaging look at the early life of a classic character. Notably, Iron Man's Robert Downey, Jr., who knows his way around an origin story, coproduced the series with his wife, Susan. Recommended.