Hacker Cinema
Perry Mason
2020 · TV series · 2 seasons
Created by Rolin Jones, Ron Fitzgerald
Set in 1932 Los Angeles, the series focuses on the origin story of famed defense lawyer Perry Mason. Living check-to-check as a low-rent private investigator, Mason is 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 recovers 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.
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7 comments on Hacker News
HBO cancelled Perry Mason, one of the better done noir detective series. That was kind of the nail in the coffin for me. I still get it free because of my AT&T subscription, but I can't argue that Netflix has really come out with anything really worth watching either - Department Q and Mindhunter are only two that I think of that were decent.
I agree that the majority of stuff on streaming services is complete garbage and nothing is really "binge worthy" like it used to be. The one thing I used to love about Netlfix was going back and watching old movies like Chinatown or To Live and Die in LA. Those are all gone now, replaced with its own produced content that I just think isn't in the same league.
I’ve been thinking the exact opposite. I recently finished Last of Us and Perry Mason (season 2) and am now in the middle of Beef and I think all three are great.
my first exposure to mobile phones was through a Perry Mason episode, and I was flummoxed. I was so enamored that I held my first mobile phone that I had purchased in the early 90's with glee.
but, I was in no way the first, and it turns out there were over a million mobile phones in cars in the 1960's, with a little more pedigree to what we now have than the biplanes: https://weburbanist.com/2012/09/18/remember-millions-of-mobile-phones-in-the-1960s-you-should/
We don't take calomel anymore, but it was used for over a century more, including in "teething powders" until 1954. There's a 1965 "Perry Mason" episode in which an attempted murder victim is given lemonade laced with mercuric chloride, with the dubious idea that this will be written off by investigators as a product of a reaction between his habitual calomel and a very weak acid.
What a load of drivel.
There is a set of writers who will always (always) take the contrarian view, just to drive clicks.
She spends the first 4 paragraphs talking about Perry Mason. And then just a couple, talking about Avery.
Here's the problem with the case, as I saw it (I watched the entire 10 episodes over a week). The only physical evidence tying Avery to the murder was collected by the pair of detectives who least of everyone else were supposed to be there. How convenient!
Secondly, to the evidence itself: if Avery did all the throat-slashing and raping, where is the evidence?? Surely they should find ONE speck of blood, or hair or skin cells or something??? Avery is such a genius that he can wipe all evidence of this massacre from a carpeted, cluttered bedroom (so badly cluttered that they couldn't find the key, sitting in plain sight, in 4 previous tries!), while leaving his own DNA around everywhere?? Same for the garage, where apparently she was shot: no blood, nothing. But there was blood from various deer carcasses of the past!
And don't even get me started on the key! His DNA is on it ... but not hers, even though she drove it?!? And why is it the valet key? And how come the two suspect detectives immediately recognized it was the "right" key, even though they were in a f'in junkyard with a 1000 vehicles around?
And his blood in the vehicle: even if you accept that it's his blood, where are the fingerprints?? Oh right: when it came to fingerprints, he was wearing a glove. Which, conveniently once again, allowed the blood to seep through in the right places.
The author uses Brendan's statement that he helped his uncle put the body in the RAV4, hence the "sweat DNA", AFTER admitting that the confession was fake! Anyone who has watched the "confession" would be left with boiling rage at the interrogators.
And she doesn't mention Len Kachinsky, the public "defender" who effectively railroaded Brendan?
I could go on and on, but this article is pure drivel.
> I think something like Alfred Hitchcock Presents is very watchable today and I often do. You get a little mystery and murder and all within an hour. There were other watchable programs, like Perry Mason or something.
Those tend to be pretty good, I agree. I watch them on Me TV sometimes. (Digital subchannels are what UHF and cable were Back In The Day: Cheap timeslots filled with whatever someone has to hand.) However, they're good writing one episode at a time. These days, you get good writing a season at a time; it allows more characterization, more complex plots, and more flavor. Breaking Bad is a novel-length plot, something TV only did in soap opera form back then. And soap operas have never been accused of having good writing.
Theories:
1) Assuming there's some clustering algorithm in use, it could just be some tradeoff edge case that isn't worth optimizing away.
2) It could be that one of their reviewers had an overly-aggresive and non-standard genre-tagging approach for Perry Mason and classified a bunch of shows in such a way that the source data was polluted. This could be something stupid like most other movies having many reviewers giving higher confidence, while a large number of Perry Mason shows and DVDs only had a single reviewer who was either through a bug or through overweighting, given too much influence. This seems to be the most likely cause of the bug--some skew or amplification in the source data.
3) Intentional poisoning of the results, like cartographers putting in bogus features, or data sellers seeding their data with watermarks, etc.