Despite the near-constant claims of “Hollywood is running out of ideas,” remakes have been part of Hollywood tradition for more than a century now. One of the greatest remakes celebrates its ninetieth anniversary this year, for example—the James Whale Frankenstein was the fourth filmed version. If you’re doing it well, that’s fine. However, what has started happening lately is rebooting intellectual properties in the sense of “yes, this has an extremely famous adaptation, but have you considered if it’s all like this instead?” I’ve watched all of She-Ra and half of Perry Mason, and a whole lot of other stuff, and I have Feelings.
Probably the easiest method is to start with something bad. However, the outcry over She-Ra is evidence that people will choose to defend ridiculous things as Not Actually Bad. (I was a devotee of the original show as a child and have watched it as an adult. Reader, it is bad.) Though I think in the She-Ra case, it’s more that the art style isn’t geared toward young straight men who want to find the characters sexy, and how very dare. Still, there are some ways you can take your reboot of an intellectual property in the right direction, even if the IP is good and you just have new things to say about it.
So let’s look at Perry Mason for a minute. This is an IP that I happen to know a lot about—I’ve read many of the novels, if not all of them. I admit I haven’t read the first one, because it’s out of print and shockingly expensive. On the other hand, I own a copy of The Case of the Sulky Girl, the second one, and while it’s a reprint and might have undergone editing, it is strongly in the tradition of all the others. Therefore, I can tell that, when people say the new series is “like the novels,” they haven’t read the novels.
What the new Perry Mason gives off is an aura of having had an idea for a story and latching onto an intellectual property to attach it to so people would watch it. Sometimes, that works. Sometimes, you get the Columbo I watched last night based on an Ed McBain novel that very much did not feel like the character of Columbo. And that’s what we have here—the characters were interesting and well established, but they do not feel like the characters we’ve known since 1933. This isn’t just “he isn’t Raymond Burr.” This is very much “he isn’t Perry Mason.”
Why not? The new show is set a year before this book came out. In the book, Perry is an established lawyer with “thousands” of clients. He’s financially well set up—maybe not wealthy, which he’s implied to be in later books where he can get a loan of thousands of dollars on his word alone, but possessed of a comfortable office, a nice car, and so forth. Paul has an agency. All these characters are established, and they’re definitely not Scrappy Underdogs. Perry is well enough known so that “counsel is well known for his courtroom histrionics” is a rallying cry for prosecutors.
In the new show, Perry is a failing investigator. He’s got an ex-wife and a son who will never be mentioned in any of the books I’ve read. Paul, who has quite an eye for the ladies in the books, is married with a pregnant wife. Della has been working for someone else entirely; she is in a relationship with a woman in her boarding house, as opposed to being in love with Perry and living in her own apartment. (Yes, it’s possible she’s bisexual, but so far the word has not been mentioned on the show.) There’s a bunch of shady goings-on with a Detective Holcomb, who is probably intended to be the slightly unpleasant Sergeant Holcomb from the books, but that doesn’t work.
It’s not just that the characters are different. It’s that there is no way to get from the characters being established here to the characters we know, and claiming they’re closer to the book characters is, again, simply not true—and even if the first book is more like the characters here, the change was fairly rapid. The important details are there as part of the plot and can’t have been retconned in so readers of the reprint aren’t confused. Yes, okay, the show comes up with a way to make Perry a lawyer, and it’s legal under California law, but that doesn’t explain much of anything else, and it means I’m watching the show and waiting for Mrs. Drake to die in childbirth.
So that’s how I feel they’re doing it wrong. How do you do it right? I feel the first step is having an affinity for the original property. Not just a liking but an understanding. With Perry, it would make a lot more sense for him to be a poor lawyer who gets a lot of attention for helping a railroaded client in a high-profile case no one else will take, and we kind of stumble into that midway through the show, but you start there. You don’t need the specter of war crimes in his past; that’s just weird. Also, it’s repeatedly implied that Perry was in the Navy, not the Army, and while that might have been more on the old TV show, it’s still something worth actually knowing.
If you’re rebooting a property that’s famous in adaptation but based on books, really read the books. I’ve been saying for years that I’d love a faithful, probably animated, adaptation of the Oz books. One of my favourite bits of the Robert Downey, Jr., Sherlock Holmes movies is that Guy Ritchie brings back in a lot of things from the books that have been dropped in adaptations for a century, like the punching and the drug use. Many adaptations leave behind bits of plot and characterization that you can hang a good remake on.
And if you’re going to twist, twist in a way that makes sense. A period piece Perry Mason with colourblind casting would be fascinating, if missing a lot of the tension of Los Angeles, but I’m not sure a black former police officer would have been able to get a private investigator’s license in 1932, and I certainly don’t believe he would’ve been able to build a large firm with contacts all over the country. Black LAPD officers did exist at the time, but the show does accurately portray how little they were taken seriously. Likewise, I can believe a three-way relationship between Paul, Perry, and Della, but how are we going to go from “sleeping with another woman and not really liking Perry” to “devoted secretary” in a year?
She-Ra does well by taking a show that didn’t really care about plot or characterization and giving it that. The original was planned to sell toys. The remake barely has any toys made of it. (Come on, get on that, Netflix!) That’s a solid way to reboot. (I haven’t watched He-Man yet.) Put more thought into it than the original creators. A Jem and the Holograms reboot that updated the computer tech but kept the characters’ relationships and inner lives and agency could be fun, though my understanding is that it’s not what we got.
It can also help to choose one that no one cares all that much about. There are several from Camera Obscura that would be fun to reboot—a Jane of Lantern Hill miniseries would work, as I observed in my article about it. There’s a radio show called Candy Matson that would be a cracking movie, if someone wanted to do that. You should still get into the original enough to know what you’re doing, but are you going to invite that much comparison doing a gritty reboot of Gallegher? Or pick something that can only go up—we’ve talked about She-Ra, but also The Black Hole is ripe for improvement.
I don’t want to discourage people from watching the new Perry Mason. It’s a well-made show. The cast is incredible, and the production design is exquisite. The plot is intriguing. The characterization is detailed, and there is that undercurrent of bad race relations in ’30s Los Angeles that you kind of need if you’re setting a work in ’30s Los Angeles. The show goes from Hollywood opulence to Hooverville, and it’s really well made in general. It has a strong sense of Los Angeles history behind it, too. But it isn’t Perry Mason, and its biggest problem is that it’s pretending to be.
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