Perry Mason Season 2 Showrunner Opens Up About The HBO Show’s Latest Twists, And Giving The Main Characters A ‘Learning Curve’
Warning: SPOILERS for PerryMason Season 2 Episode 4 aka Chapter Twelve is coming!
PerryMason Season 1 followed the titular character and his allies trying to find out who really killed the child Charlie Dodson, a crime his mother Emily was set to commit. Season 2 takes a different direction with its crime fiction as tonight’s episode confirms that brothers Rafael and Matro Gallardo, played by Fabrizio Guido and Peter Mendoza, actually killed Tommy Dewey’s Brooks McCutcheon. While the exact circumstances behind this have yet to be revealed, Michael Begler, one of PerryMason Season 2 showrunners opened up to CinemaBlend about the latest twists on the HBO show, giving the main characters a “learning curve” this season.
Already before PerryMason Season 1 ended back in Summer 2020, HBO decided to renew it for a second season, and through April 2021, Michael Begler and Jack Amiel were selected to replace outgoing showrunner/creators Rolin Jones and Ron Fitzgerald. We are now halfway through season two and prior to the airing of this latest episode I spoke to Begler, my first question being why he and Amiel decided to do a sharp 180 with this season’s crime thriller compared to what happened in Season 1. He replied:
I think we like the idea of the defender defending the innocent, as we’ve seen over and over again. And we said, ‘Well, what if they’re not? How does an icon like Perry Mason deal with that?’ And again the idea that the starting point of “What is justice and what does justice look like for the haves and the have-nots?” all shaped this idea of the game with expectation and surprise.
As if Paul Drake’s life wasn’t complicated enough in these first episodes of Season 2, Chris Chalk’s character has been drawn into Brooks McCutcheon’s investigation and he has made the biggest discovery yet. Not only was Paul able to track down the gun that killed Brooks McCutcheon, but he also learned that the Gallardos had rented that very gun from a member of their shantytown community. While Rafael and Mateo initially maintained their innocence, there is now no denying that they committed the crime.
However, Brooks McCutcheon didn’t die because things went wrong when Rafael and Mateo robbed him, or because the brothers just didn’t like him. At the end of that night’s “Chapter Twelve,” Sofia, Mateo’s wife, found an envelope full of money, which she only found because he tipped her off. So now we know that Brooks’ murder was instigated by someone else, and here’s what Michael Begler had to say about that development:
Knowing there’s money says this wasn’t just a simple robbery gone wrong. These guys got paid. We point to that. As you saw in the end credits of the episode, we’ve got all this footage of all this money, and now we’re going to follow the money. We’re going to take that right out of All the President’s Men.
But wait, there’s another problem this episode delivered! After Paul Drake delivered the gun to Matthew Rhys’ Perry Mason and Juliet Rylance’s Della Street, the two decided to lock it in the law firm’s safe while Paul looked on. Needless to say, hiding such an important piece of evidence is a big no-no, and after suspecting to Michael Begler that the gun will likely come back to anger Perry and Della’s defense of the Gallardos, I asked his train of thought behind including this particular complication. Here Begler addressed the “learning curve” for our core trio of protagonists, saying:
Without giving anything away, maybe it will come back, I don’t want to say. But as Jack [Amiel] and I’ve always said that if you put a gun on the table, you know it’s going to be used in some way… I liken it to, in a way, these are all new lawyers. Della is a law student, Perry didn’t even go to law school, and Paul is a detective. Yes, they got the trial of Emily Dodson, but they’re still rookies and they’re going to make rookie mistakes. You’re not slick Perry Mason [characters] from the 1950s series. That’s the learning curve they have, and in this case, when they hit something that unexpected, I think it’s going to make them not necessarily think everything through.
There’s no denying that these versions of Perry, Della, and Paul are competent adults with unique abilities, but Michael Begler points out that they’re far from becoming the pros that previous versions of these characters more than were half a century ago, and not just because those events took place in the early 1930s rather than the 1950s. We may never see them reach that level of experience in this series, but as for the near future, they have enough to worry about with this case as we get into the latter half of Season 2. Meanwhile, Eric Lange’s Gene Holcomb, the corrupt LAPD detective involved in the Charlie Dodson case and in a business partnership with Brooks McCutcheon before his death, has been trying to get to the bottom of Brooks’ other business relationships, particularly the Agreement he had with the now deceased head of Goldstein’s Finest Produce.
New episodes of PerryMason Premieres Mondays at 9 p.m. ET on HBO as part of the 2023 TV guide. There’s no word yet on whether the series will return for Season 3, but you can revisit previous episodes with an HBO Max subscription.