This year will certainly be remembered as the year of the Covid virus. It’s the year that the world came to a halt, people were confined to the home for months at a time, and everyone desperately sought some form of escape to break up the monotony and boredom. I think back to the simpler days of my childhood when black-and-white television shows such as The Roy Rogers Show and Perry Mason showed the world in terms of black-and-white problems and simple solutions. Today, though, the black-and-white vision of the 1950s has been replaced by one in which all is grey and desolate.
In recent days, I’ve been thinking a lot about one of my favorite Elton John/Bernie Taupin songs, Roy Rogers, from the 1973 Good-bye Yellow Brick Road album. If you’re not familiar with the song, it’s about a workaday everyman stuck in his miserable existence without any hope for change.
Sometimes you dream, sometimes it seems
There’s nothing there at all;
You just seem older than yesterday,
And you’re waiting for tomorrow to call
The only respite he has from the relentless monotony of his life is watching old re-runs of the Roy Rogers Show. I suppose it’s a sad song, but the listener can’t help but share in the protagonist’s anticipation in the chorus when Roy comes riding his horse, Trigger, into the living room every night, bringing him a little escapist relief.
Oh, and Roy Rogers is riding tonight,
Returning to our silver screens.
Comic book characters never grow old,
Ever-green heroes whose stories were told.
Oh, the great sequined cowboy who sings of the plains,
Of roundups, and rustlers, and home on the range.
Turn on the TV, shut out the lights:
Roy Rogers is riding tonight.
One verse in particular, resonates with me lately and encapsulates the world in which we live.
Nine o’clock mornings, five o’clock evenings
I’d liven the pace if I could
Oh I’d rather have ham in my sandwich than cheese
But complaining wouldn’t do any good
While The Roy Rogers Show is a bit simplistic for Kathleen and I, we can understand the appeal. After all, in each episode, bad guys do something bad, and Roy comes to the rescue and sets things right again. Good triumphs over evil, and justice is restored to the world. For us, The West Wing is more to our taste and provides escape from the bleak reality of the Covid world. The series, which aired from 1999 to 2006, still crackles with excellent writing, good humor, and crisp dialogue. More than that, though, it presents a fictional White House team that battles foreign and domestic issues with intelligence and compassion while trying to provide strong, moral leadership and do the best they can for the American people. You can see what I mean by escaping reality. After almost every episode, Kathleen and I turn to each other and say, “Don’t you wish it were like that in the real world?”
A new series that we just finished is the 1st season (8 episodes) of the HBO prequel to another 1950s series, Perry Mason. It’s an excellent long-form series starring Matthew Rhys (of The Americans). In this update, Mason is more like the hard-boiled detectives of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett than the Raymond Burr interpretation that people my age will remember. In each of the original hour-long episodes that ran from 1957-66, Mason, the strapping lawyer, buttoned down in a Brooks Brother’s suit, defends a client accused of murder. With the help of his assistant, Della Street, and his investigator, Paul Drake, they uncover evidence that proves the innocence of their client. Mason then spars with prosecutor Hamilton Burger in court before eliciting a confession from a key witness, the actual murderer, often while on the stand. Every episode was tied up neatly, and, as in the Roy Rogers Show, justice was served and order restored. The simplistic formula appealed to Americans of the 1950s, and the show created the model on which most lawyer shows have been based since then.
The original novels and radio shows on which the character of Mason was based were written in the 1930s and ‘40s by a former lawyer named Erle Stanley Gardner. This prequel is set in the gritty streets of LA at the height of the depression in the early 1930s, and is, in many ways, the opposite of the original. While the Raymond Burr, 1950s version fit the celebratory national mood after WWII, when we believed that right would always triumph in the end, this new one is set in a dark, atmospheric world, filled with corruption that runs from the police to the DA to the churches. In the current series, Mason is not yet a lawyer. He is a seedy private investigator who suffers from PTSD due to his experience in the trenches of WWI; he drinks heavily, and has a moral compass that fluctuates by the day. Moreover, Della is a lesbian, Drake is a Black cop who deals with discrimination on a daily basis, and Burger is an ambitious, homosexual lawyer. While these changes may seem designed to fit current, politically correct sensibilities, they all work and make the series much more realistic than the 1950s version.
This first season’s case involves the kidnapping and murder of a small child, including the horrific sewing of its dead eyes wide open. The cynical and damaged Mason is the investigator who follows clues that expose a wide-spread conspiracy to conceal the truth and convict the child’s mother of this heinous crime. When the lawyer for whom he works dies, Mason becomes dedicated to proving her innocent, passes the bar exam, and steps into the role as defense attorney. The deck is stacked against him and the small team that coalesces around him, and he is warned, in a nod to the original series, “No one ever confesses on the stand.” (Spoiler alert—stop reading this paragraph if you don’t want the ending revealed) In the end, unlike the original show, there is no witness-stand confession, and the trial ends with a hung jury.
I suppose the ending might be unsatisfying to those seeking pleasant, Hollywood conclusions to their escapist viewing. It struck me, however, that this version of Perry Mason is much more a reflection of our current times than the original could possibly be. Over the past four years, the bad guys, and one in particular, have repeatedly managed to escape justice despite a mountain of evidence proving their guilt. Trump sneers at attempts to bring him to justice, knowing that the spineless Republicans in the Senatorial jury box have been bought and paid for and will never convict him. On a daily basis, he admits his guilt from his witness-box podium, but still walks away. The vision of 2020, unlike that of the 1950s, is decidedly bleak. We are confronted with both an enemy we cannot see, an invisible virus, and one we see all too often, our lying, corrupt, and unapologetic president.
So, in the grim situation in which we find ourselves today, escapist TV is all we have for solace. The last verse of the Elton John song captures that feeling perfectly:
Lay back in my armchair, close eyes and think clear
I can hear hoofbeats ahead;
Roy and Trigger have just hit the hilltop
While the wife and the kids are in bed
I’m not sure what Roy Rogers would look like today if he were around and fighting against injustice. Perhaps he would be like the new Perry Mason, with a beaten demeanor and a three-day growth of beard, but determined to continue the fight against all odds. All I know for certain, is that he would not have an orange face, dyed hair, and a neck-tie that hangs between his knees.