Lawyer up

Perry Mason takes place in Fincherland where rooms are dark and exteriors are digitally scrubbed of any distracting details. Season two jumps to 1932. Matthew Rhys' Mason holds the storyline together by falling apart; Juliet Rylance's Della Street (is there a better noir name?) is his better-than-Watson narrator. Chris Chalk and Shea Whigham return as the straightest arrow and the greatest moustache respectively. In some ways the series' actors all do just one thing, very well, all the time but you could say the same of the world's greatest musicians. 

Between the tumblers (tumblers!) of rye and choking and smoking the new series has plenty of edge. Because it's TV there is a firm hand on things: flashbacks and framing dialogue sometimes break the mood. But overall the 2020-22 remake of Perry Mason offers some of the better discomforting comfort-viewing in a while.

Speaking of Fincher it's a fun game to imagine what he could have done with the 1940s-set The Black Dahlia instead of weaving that novel's multiple storylines into Zodiac; more fun still to imagine if De Palma had done Zodiac instead of Fincher. Period movies set even in the recent past are permitted all manner of entertaining stylisations. You can't do that anymore except when it's Olden Times.

It seems to me that more and more period drama stands not for a genre so much as a division between here and now: a clear signal to the audience to please switch off their mobile phones. I know I did this in my last novel. The S&M in Blue Hotel isn't a theme – it's a date stamp.