Sharper and more confident, the second season of Perry Mason has gone from excellence to brilliance

The first season of Perry Mason (Sky Atlantic, Tuesday) back in 2020 used the name of prolific novelist Erle Stanley Gardner’s unbeatable criminal defence lawyer, previously played by Raymond Burr in a long-running series (1957-66) and, much later, in some 26 TV movies, but threw away almost everything else.

The only other elements of the original retained were Perry’s loyal sidekicks, secretary Della Street and investigator Paul Drake, and District Attorney Hamilton Burger.

Gardner, a former lawyer, was uninterested in depth or character development; his stories were all about the mystery, the legal detail, the courtroom drama, the denouement — which regularly featured Perry sweating the killer into breaking down and confessing in the witness box, something the first season gently mocked.

​The new Perry, played by the marvellous Matthew Rhys, wasn’t even a lawyer at first. He was a scruffy, down-at-heel private eye in 1930s Los Angeles, a traumatised war veteran who drank too much, scraped a living from low-rent cases, lived alone on his family’s failing dairy farm and had just emerged from a messy divorce.

Della (Juliet Rylance), little more than eye candy in the old series, became an independent woman with a naturally sharp legal brain. She’s gay, as is Burger (Justin Kirk), and the two act as one another’s “beard” at swanky social functions.

Paul (Chris Chalk) was changed from a stiff white dude to a young black cop and family man who, sickened by the racism and corruption rife inside the LAPD, turned in his badge and threw his lot in with Perry and Della.

Much of the first run focused on Perry’s gradual transformation from grubby gumshoe to brilliant lawyer. While thrilling to watch, it also meant the core mystery, pivoting on the botched kidnap and gruesome murder of an infant, could sometimes be a little woolly.

Judging from the brace of season two episodes I’ve watched (all eight are available from today), this time Perry Mason has got the balance between character and plot exhilaratingly right. It’s taken a step up from excellence to brilliance.

Everything feels sharper and more confident from the off. The pacing is tighter, the mystery this time denser and more gripping.

The depiction of the rapidly expanding City of Angels, glamorous on the surface but rotting underneath, is even richer than before as the series leans even more into the noirishness of Chinatown and LA Confidential.

Picking up several months after the first season, we find Perry only marginally less unhappy than before. He’s troubled by the aftermath of his last big case and still drinking heavily. But at least he’s doing it in a bachelor apartment, albeit one strewn with boxes full of his clothes, rather than on his crumbling old farm. At the behest of Della, who’s studying law and holding him to his promise to make her a partner, Perry has given up criminal cases in favour of civil ones, which are better for paying bills.

They hate the work, though, and especially their latest client Sunny Gryce (Sean Astin), a supermarket owner who rips off a talented former employee’s ideas, claims he’sthe one being ripped off and insists on a legal settlement he knows will put the other man’s store out of business.

Meanwhile, Paul, who’s not getting the work Perry promised him, feels betrayed and takes on a job for Perry’s old private eye partner Pete Strickland (Shea Whigham). It’s a decision he soon comes to regret.

You know it’s only a matter of time before Perry’s burning sense of justice wins out.

That time comes when, using the money he’s earning from Gryce, he agrees to defend poor Mexican-American brothers Rafael and Mateo Gallardo (Fabrizio Guido and Peter Mendoza).

They are clearly being set up for the murder of Brooks McCutcheon (Tommy Dewey), the sleazy son of businessman Lydell McCutcheon (Paul Raci), a powerful, ruthless figure with his fingers in many pies.

It’s great to have Perry and the team back on the case.