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Pushing the Old Guys Aside: HBO’s Perry Mason Season 1
I finally finished Season 1 of the updated and reimagined Perry Mason TV series on HBO Ma. Yeah, I know: I’m two years behind. There’s just too much good content to watch and not enough time. Here’s a funny thing: when I pulled it up on HBO Max late last week, my time stamp was halfway through episode three. I asked my wife if she’d be up for watching. She was and, without going back to re-watch the opening two installments, we forged ahead. The cheeky summation I’ve heard about this show is that it is not your grandfather’s Perry Mason. That’s certainly true, both in the language and the…
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Poker Face and the Spiritual Reboot
Poker Face had me at Rian Johnson. But had I not known it was his brainchild, the show would have had me at the title font. That yellow font on the title card, the year represented by Roman numerals. What decade are we in? Well, the headspace of creator Rian Johnson was the 1970s and 1980s with shows like Colombo and The Rockford Files. I suspect he gets nostalgically triggered when he sees the title cards of those shows and others and wanted to bring sensibility forward to the 2020s. What sensibility is that? A traditional crime-of-the-week series. But not just that: a new crime every week with a whole…
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The End of New Amsterdam and the Twilight of Network TV for a Gen Xer
One of my favorite TV shows ended its five-year run on Tuesday and I’m wondering if it’ll be the last great network show I watch. New Amsterdam Like Castle, New Amsterdam had me at the trailer. The show starred Ryan Eggold (whom I knew from The Blacklist) as Max Goodwin, the new medical director at New Amsterdam, the oldest public hospital in America (based on the real Bellevue hospital). Eggold’s performance on The Blacklist stood out, especially when he was in the same show as series star James Spader, but with Max, Eggold had a role to which he could bring his considerable charm and humanity. It didn’t hurt that…