Matthew Rhys and His Fedora Team Up With John Lithgow and His Mustache in New Perry Mason Trailer

Now look here, see. We’ve got ourselves a new trailer from the dark and dusky world of HBO’s new Perry Mason series, and this time, there’s a first look at John Lithgow’s character Elias Birchard “E.B.” Jonathan, a candidate for best-named fictional man 2020. In the new trailer, we see that Mason is working as a down-and-out gumshoe looking to get to the bottom of a high-profile “kidnapping gone way wrong,” as coroner Jefferson Mays puts it. Maslany takes to the preacher’s pulpit, the Angel’s Flight inclined trolley takes to the rails, and a gun is used in a way you would never think to use a gun.

If you want a better sense of what the show is about, how do you like these apples from an HBO press release about their upcoming Perry Mason series:

1931, Los Angeles. While the rest of the country struggles through the Great Depression, this city is booming! Oil! Olympic Games! Talking Pictures! Evangelical Fervor! And a child kidnapping gone very, very wrong.  

Now you’re speakin’ our language. The series stars Matthew Rhys as the iconic criminal defense attorney Perry Mason, alongside Tatiana Maslany and John Lithgow. Author Erle Stanley Gardner’s character Perry Mason is best known from his eponymous TV series that ran in the 1950s and ’60s, so it’s well past time for a reboot, what with the invention of color TV and all. This new series will “follow the origins” of the character, and the trailer gives us a taste of its lush 1930s L.A. gumshoe setting, a sort of Chinatown meets the “Dreamland” season of Archer meets Matthew Rhys in a fedora. There are car chases. There are cops and robbers. There are shafts of golden light drifting through slats in a window to enshroud half of Matthew Rhys’s face in a hazy California glow while leaving the rest cast in shadow. What more could ya want, buster? Robert Downey Jr. is executive producing. The series premieres on Sunday, June 21 at 9 p.m. ET on HBO. If Perry Mason is a success, who knows? Maybe RDJ will do Dragnet next. Ooh, ooh, or Petticoat Junction.