Fans of HBO’s Perry Mason waited a long time for Season 2 to arrive, as Season 1 premiered back in June 2020, and the renewal announcement came a month later. Well, after over two and a half years, Perry Mason Season 2 finally debuted, reuniting audiences with Matthew Rhys’ title character and allies like Juliet Rylance’s Della Street and Chris Chalk’s Paul Drake. Season 2 also saw Jack Amiel and Michael Begler taking over as the showrunners following the departure of creators Rolin Jones and Ron Fitzgerald. While speaking with CinemaBlend, Chalk explained how the long wait for Season 2 and the big behind-the-scenes change, plus real world tragedies that have happened during Perry Mason’s run, affected how he handled his character.
First off, given that the wait between Perry Mason Seasons 1 and 2 was fairly lengthy by TV standards, I asked Chris Chalk (who’s also know for playing Lucius Fox on Gotham) if the hiatus affected his ability to get back into the character of Paul Drake when it came time to return to the show, or if that didn’t factor in. Chalk shared that not only was it the former for him on a personal level, but for everyone who worked on the show, saying:
No, I think it factored in, it gave me time to marinate on things that I personally wanted to work on in the second season, and it gave us all time to slow down and really be intentional about what we’re putting into this season. Because the parallels of the first season running along the pandemic and Black Lives Matter and the assassination of Black bodies, it really resonated with us that our show was important and we wanted to keep it important since we’re dealing with the exact same things almost 100 years later, which is crazy to think about… I feel like the first time we came together, myself, Matthew [Rhys] and Juliet [Rylance], we really were like, ‘Ok, purpose. How can we infuse purpose into this season, as well as give them a good show and good entertainment, because we could be really of value.’ So I think it only informed us and gave us time to marinate.
When we left off with Paul Drake at the end of Perry Mason Season 1, he’d resigned from the Los Angeles Police Department and agreed to work as the private investigator for the law firm Perry inherited from the late E.B. Jonathan. However, in the Season 2 premiere, it was revealed that because Perry and Della are now focusing on civil cases, there hasn’t been much of a need for Paul’s services, requiring him to look elsewhere for work. Following the murder of Brooks McCutcheon though, Perry has agreed to take on the suspects, brothers Rafael and Mateo Gallardo, as his clients, and Paul has been brought in to investigate what exactly went down.
As Chris Chalk detailed, though Perry Mason is a period piece, it’s important that the show still felt relevant to the present, particularly because of how many issues from the early 1930s are, unfortunately, still present today. That extra wait time between two seasons gave Chalk and the cast and crew to infuse Season 2 with the right kind of “purpose,” while still keeping the show entertaining. Regarding the change of Perry Mason showrunners, Chalk started off by saying the following about how this behind-the-scenes shift affected the dynamic on set:
We’re making a very intimate cake together. You add new pieces, you gotta learn how to hold hands again, you know what I mean? I have an awful analogy, but it takes a minute to find the same language, especially when the new people who come in are essentially the bosses, and they’re trying to capture a language of a show that is not their show. They didn’t start the show, they were given it, and they’re trying to match their skillset to what’s already created, while still amplifying the voice while we’re trying to put on whatever that new dress is, and that’s challenging. No way, I’m not gonna pretend that was easy. No, no, no, that was very challenging… Then you got new personalities and you got new energy and you got new drives.
In addition to re-teaming with Perry Mason and Della Street in Perry Mason Season 2, Paul Drake finds his latest journey complicated by the fact that he unwittingly provided information that led to Melvin Perkins, a businessman who pours money from his illegal activities on the side back into Los Angeles’ African American community, being arrested by the District Attorney’s office. So between that, no longer being a police officer and being looped into yet another high-profile murder case in the city, Paul has a lot on his plate right now. Going back to Chris Chalk, although he recalled a moment when he had to question some dialogue choices for Paul in Perry Mason Season 2, he felt that by the time they hit the third episode, everyone had gotten into a good groove working with each other. In his words:
I remember there was a moment where I was like, ‘Hey, look, I’m not telling you what to do, but Paul don’t talk that much. You got Paul with a two-page monologue, I don’t know that. That would have to take so much justification for Paul, the master listener and the one who’s almost paralyzed from talking, to do a two-page monologue. I’m not opposed to it, but are we earning it?’ So it was all of us getting to know each other, which took time and we all were very conscious and we put that time in, and… for me, I felt like Episode 3 is when we all kind of clicked, and that’s fair, you know? After a two-year hiatus, coming to meet new people, it takes a second. But I think what we did know the whole season is everyone’s working for the same goal, and even though some of us are going left, usually me, and everybody else is going right, we were all trying to make it as full as possible for ourselves and for the audience.
New episodes of Perry Mason premiere Mondays at 9 pm ET on HBO, and you can learn what other shows are currently airing/streaming with our 2023 TV schedule. If you haven’t had the chance to start Perry Mason Season 2 yet, make sure you look over the big things to remember from Season 1 before you start watching the new episodes with your HBO Max subscription.
