Honestly, I thought the pilot was dull. Don't get me wrong, Tim Van Patten made it look gorgeous and the production is stunning (sets and costumes). Not to mention the big cast, but Ron Fitzgerald and Rolin Jones just didn't do their part with the story to make me say "Fuck the reviews, I'm gonna watch!" It's Boardwalk Empire meets True Detective, which sounds awesome if you're in high school. I just needed more.
Perry Mason is an established character. Either through Erle Stanley Gardner's books or Raymond Burr's turn as the character on TV, people know this character as a lawyer. So when it was announced this would be an origin story where the character would be a Sam Spade/Philip Marlowe gumshoe PI in the 1930s with war flashbacks, I was bummed. There was no reason for Fitzgerald and Jones to use the character if they had their own intentions and probably should've asked for the rights to one of the latter characters but then again, they were hired guns. But watching Mason be a drunk PI with a troubled past is rough because it's been done to often and to make an iconic TV character turn into that is just a waste of time and rather insulting to Gardner's character being unique from those other heroes.
Matthew Rhys is really great and I loved seeing Juliet Rylance as Della Street. And Shea Whigham. But, it's just not enough to commit me to it and like Yellowstone, it looks great but it isn't. Depending on how long it will take me to finish HBO titles I've been putting off (Treme, Luck, and Girls) I'll probably quit my subscription until Lovecraft Country comes out (and hopefully will get praise).
I also only watched the pilot for Penny Dreadful: City of Angels and it's also a noir tale set in the '30s with a female evangelist (who both don't appear in the pilot but are referenced). Perhaps TV shows just shouldn't do this setting or noir genre since neither impressed me enough to keep watching.
