Fri, Nov 27 2009
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Published March 05, 2009 11:31 pm - I have never visited Portland, Ore., but I suspect it is a typical American city. If life were like a Perry Mason episode ROBERT LEBZELTER column for March 8, 2009 Star Beacon I have never visited Portland, Ore., but I suspect it is a typical American city. I ran across a story on OregonLive.com (yeah, I don't know how I got there either) about the Fox affiliate there, KPTV. The station got a new manager last year, Patrick McCreery. It seems the folks that hired him gave him only one absolute when it comes to running the station: Don't mess with the noon hour. You see, the station has been airing episodes of the old Perry Mason series at that time spot since 1970. OK, for a brief time in the mid 70s it aired at 12:30 p.m. "Perry Mason," for the uninitiated, was the courtroom drama for which all courtroom dramas are based. Raymond Burr is best remembered for the role, although there were a series of actors playing the part in movies back in the 1930s. The character of Perry Mason was developed by Earl Stanley Gardner, himself an attorney in the 1920s who by the end of the decade decided to use his legal skills in the realm of fiction. So he started writing mystery novels about Mason, a detective who frequently worked for him, Paul Drake, his trusty secretary, Della Street, and others. From the books to the movies, the character moved to daily radio. Unfortunately it turned into a soap opera rather than the film noir Gardner originally intended it to be. In fact, the radio show spun off into another series, "The Edge of Night," which later became a TV soap opera. In the 1950s, CBS decided to revive Mason as a TV show. A young man best known then as the villain in Alfred Hitchcock's "Rear Window" tried out for the part of Paul Drake. But Gardner and others saw him more as Mason himself and in September 1957, the TV series took off. It continued for nine years and 271 episodes before ending in September 1966, a victim of the popularity of "Bonanza." The formula for those nine years was pretty basic. A story and characters were introduced. Often, one of the people was pretty slimy and nasty. That person invariably would be murdered and the most obvious suspect would be arrested. But Mason would take on the case and in the final moments would reveal the true killer, usually in the courtroom. After the series ended, it regained new life in syndicated reruns. The Salem TV station picked up the series 15 days after it left the network and has played it continually ever since. For the first few years, it was in primetime, until it settled at noon. Mason has been reborn twice since, once as a new series in 1973 with Monte Markham playing the role. While described as closer to what Gardner had in mind when he developed the Mason character, it only lasted until January 1974. Raymond Burr returned to the character in 1985 for a series of popular TV movies that continued even after his death in 1993. The series has proved so popular in Portland that a pre-emption for a news report on President Barack Obama's signing of the economic stimulus package brought howls of protest when 12:05 rolled around and Perry still wasn't on. The Mason series was broadcast in black and white. It isn't in high definition and its storyline might be described as, well, creaky. Even if you don't live in Portland, episodes are available online at hulu.com and you can buy and rent half seasons on DVD. So why does it remain popular? Maybe because it reminds us of a simpler time, when the world was literally in black and white. Men always wore suits. They referred to each other as "Mr., Mrs. or Miss." 
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