# Was Perry Mason unique for the era? Showing Police and Prosecutors as incompetent **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [April 20, 2024, 12:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-perry-mason-unique-for-the-era-showing-police-and-prosecutors-as-incompetent/1000526 "2024-04-20T00:23:05Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Midtown](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e99b99/32.png) [@Midtown](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Midtown)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2024, 12:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-perry-mason-unique-for-the-era-showing-police-and-prosecutors-as-incompetent/1000526/1 "2024-04-20T00:23:05Z")
I’ve been watching a lot of Perry Mason on one of those old TV stations. I think he pretty much always wins. Usually cuz the cops didn’t do a good job finding the real killer. While I am sure there were isolated movies or Tv show episodes that might show the legal system in a poor light, generally the police were portrayed as hard working honest investigators. On Alfred Hitchcock Presents, even when it seemed like the bad guy got away with it, Hitchcock would come on for his epilogue and inform the viewer that the cops eventually caught him and sent him to jail. Kinda a “crime doesn’t pay” rule Hollywood had. Perry Mason always did represent innocent people. Still seems odd though that the cops were often portrayed as jerks who couldn’t solve anything and would always charge the wrong person. Noble defense attorney shows are common these days but Perry Mason seems unique to me for the era. And it was a popular show. ---
**Author:** ![carrps](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carrps/32/2957_2.png) [@carrps](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/carrps)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2024, 12:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-perry-mason-unique-for-the-era-showing-police-and-prosecutors-as-incompetent/1000526/2 "2024-04-20T00:33:12Z")
I think it’s more that the police went for the obvious suspect and didn’t look further. ---
**Author:** ![RealityChuck](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/realitychuck/32/195_2.png) [@RealityChuck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RealityChuck)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2024, 12:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-perry-mason-unique-for-the-era-showing-police-and-prosecutors-as-incompetent/1000526/3 "2024-04-20T00:41:40Z")
The police aren’t incompetent; it’s just that the evidence clearly points toward Perry’s client. It’s just that there is an alternate explanation that fits even better. But it goes back almost to the beginning of detective stories. Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” had the cops doing an extensive search without finding what they were looking for, and Dupin finds it easily. Most classic private detective stores have the detective finding things the police overlooked. You can see it in “The Thin Man” for example. If the cops can solve the crime, the detective would be out of a job. ---
**Author:** ![Andy\_L](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c67d28/32.png) [@Andy\_L](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Andy_L)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2024, 12:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-perry-mason-unique-for-the-era-showing-police-and-prosecutors-as-incompetent/1000526/4 "2024-04-20T00:51:47Z")
Erle Stanley Gardner worked very hard on clearing wrongly convicted people - a project called _The Court of Last Resort_ - this real work was dramatized on a 1950s TV seriea of the same name, which talked about real cases where police and prosecutors were corrupt and/or incompetent ([The Court of Last Resort - Wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Court_of_Last_Resort)) ---
**Author:** ![flurb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/51bf81/32.png) [@flurb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/flurb)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2024, 1:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-perry-mason-unique-for-the-era-showing-police-and-prosecutors-as-incompetent/1000526/5 "2024-04-20T01:26:11Z")
> [@RealityChuck](#): > > But it goes back almost to the beginning of detective stories. Poe’s “The Purloined Letter” had the cops doing an extensive search without finding what they were looking for, and Dupin finds it easily. Likewise, Lestrade in the Sherlock Holmes stories is shown to be a competent enough investigator, but too conventional in his thinking for the sort of cases that Holmes worked. ---
**Author:** ![Midtown](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e99b99/32.png) [@Midtown](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Midtown)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2024, 1:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-perry-mason-unique-for-the-era-showing-police-and-prosecutors-as-incompetent/1000526/6 "2024-04-20T01:47:00Z")
To clarify, my question was in regard to the uniqueness of Perry Mason for the era. Edgar Allen Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle weren’t active 1957-1966 and subject to Hollywood rules. “The court of last resort” seems more like a more valid reply. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2024, 1:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-perry-mason-unique-for-the-era-showing-police-and-prosecutors-as-incompetent/1000526/7 "2024-04-20T01:50:53Z")
Los Angeles, where Gardner and Mason were based, was notorious even among other large cities for the utter corruption and brutality of their police force. Given that their competition included Chicago and New York, that’s quite the feat. As said above, most amateur detectives in mid-century detective novels couldn’t exist if police forces were competent, although nobody in the real world could ever solve most puzzle murder mysteries. Some worked with the police, mostly there to gather facts through their superior numbers, and then astounded them with their feats of deductive genius. Then they’d hand the least-likely suspect over to the police and the courts, who would usually have to throw out the case because no prosecutor could get a real jury to sit through fifty pages of insights that read like a conspiracy theory manifesto. The hardboiled crowd of private detectives tended to hate the police as much as the police hated PIs. Cops beat them senseless regularly - I read one in which the hero was tortured unconscious twice inside a police station - and assumed that justice was impossible within the system. Some noir movies after WWII captured this attitude, but television shows couldn’t show anything like that. Police had to be heroes. PIs existed but either palled with the cops or simply worked around them. Mason was an outlier, but the show didn’t show that cops were evil. For dramatic reasons, they were always wrong but Mason worked entirely within the system and depended on honest, unbiased judges for his side to prevail. That’s the complete opposite of the earlier system-is-corrupt crowd. ---
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2024, 2:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-perry-mason-unique-for-the-era-showing-police-and-prosecutors-as-incompetent/1000526/8 "2024-04-20T02:15:00Z")
AFAIK Perry Mason never simply got a “not guilty” verdict; he actively proved that someone else did the crime. Needless to say that doesn’t happen in 99+% of trials. Mason got a pass because he was a genius enough to present the police and prosecutors with a replacement case. As said upthread the authorities weren’t incompetent, just that the prima facie evidence pointed to an innocent. ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2024, 2:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-perry-mason-unique-for-the-era-showing-police-and-prosecutors-as-incompetent/1000526/9 "2024-04-20T02:22:43Z")
> [@Midtown](#): > > To clarify, my question was in regard to the uniqueness of Perry Mason for the era. Edgar Allen Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle weren’t active 1957-1966 and subject to Hollywood rules. > > “The court of last resort” seems more like a more valid reply. The first Perry Mason novel was published in 1933 and the first movie made in 1934. 1957-1966 was a small part of that era. ---
**Author:** ![Midtown](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e99b99/32.png) [@Midtown](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Midtown)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2024, 2:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-perry-mason-unique-for-the-era-showing-police-and-prosecutors-as-incompetent/1000526/10 "2024-04-20T02:24:10Z")
I am referring to the TV show. And the Hollywood sensibility of the era. ---
**Author:** ![Jamasta1976](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/b487fb/32.png) [@Jamasta1976](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jamasta1976)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2024, 2:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-perry-mason-unique-for-the-era-showing-police-and-prosecutors-as-incompetent/1000526/11 "2024-04-20T02:32:12Z")
I always thought it was odd that Perry Mason practiced law in the same place where Joe Friday enforced it. Yet the shows couldn’t be more different. I do think the show did much to make criminal defense attorneys positive figures in the media - something that helped influence public perception of high-profile trials. ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2024, 3:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-perry-mason-unique-for-the-era-showing-police-and-prosecutors-as-incompetent/1000526/12 "2024-04-20T03:30:03Z")
> [@Midtown](#): > > I am referring to the TV show. And the Hollywood sensibility of the era. Speaking of the TV show, most of Perry’s “trials” in the original show are pre-trial hearings. IIRC, it was done to avoid having to pay 12 actors to play in a trial recreation. Of course, that showed how good Perry Mason was, most of his cases never reached the trial stage! ---
**Author:** ![Roderick\_Femm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/roderick_femm/32/14875_2.png) [@Roderick\_Femm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Roderick_Femm)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2024, 4:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-perry-mason-unique-for-the-era-showing-police-and-prosecutors-as-incompetent/1000526/13 "2024-04-20T04:27:39Z")
> [@Jamasta1976](#): > > I always thought it was odd that Perry Mason practiced law in the same place where Joe Friday enforced it. Now _that_ would be a crossover I would pay to see. Dang, what a missed opportunity. The dialog practically writes itself. ---
**Author:** ![Maserschmidt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/maserschmidt/32/18829_2.png) [@Maserschmidt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Maserschmidt)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2024, 9:51am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-perry-mason-unique-for-the-era-showing-police-and-prosecutors-as-incompetent/1000526/14 "2024-04-20T09:51:13Z")
Just missing your era is “The Bold Ones: The Lawyers”, which ran 1968–1972, ed which featured the lawyers defending/investigating clients whom the police had arrested as the obvious culprits. While it started only two years after Perry Mason ended, 1968 is culturally a very different year from 1966, so I don’t think it counts,… But close! > **[The Bold Ones: The Lawyers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bold_Ones:_The_Lawyers)** > > The Bold Ones: The Lawyers (or The Lawyers) is an American legal drama that aired for three seasons on NBC from September 1968 through February 1972. > The series starred Burl Ives as Walter Nichols, a respected attorney who hires two brothers (Joseph Campanella and James Farentino) who are lawyers to help him with his case load. > The Lawyers was part of The Bold Ones, a rotating series of dramas that also included The New Doctors (with E.G. Marshall), The Protectors (with Leslie Nielsen) and The ... ---
**Author:** ![Just\_Asking\_Questions](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/ba9def/32.png) [@Just\_Asking\_Questions](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Just_Asking_Questions)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2024, 2:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-perry-mason-unique-for-the-era-showing-police-and-prosecutors-as-incompetent/1000526/15 "2024-04-20T14:57:37Z")
Don’t forget “Arrest and Trial”, which was the Law and Order of it’s day. Except that the Law part was the defense lawyers! > **[Arrest and Trial](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_and_Trial)** > > Arrest and Trial is a 90-minute American crime/legal drama series that ran during the 1963-1964 season on ABC, airing Sundays from 8:30-10 pm Eastern. > The majority of episodes consists of two segments. Set in Los Angeles, the first part ("The Arrest") followed Detective Sergeants Nick Anderson (Ben Gazzara) and Dan Kirby (Roger Perry) of the Los Angeles Police Department as they tracked down and captured a criminal. The apprehended suspect was then defended in the second part ("The Trial") by cr... ---
**Author:** ![Sherrerd](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sherrerd/32/8_2.png) [@Sherrerd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sherrerd)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2024, 9:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-perry-mason-unique-for-the-era-showing-police-and-prosecutors-as-incompetent/1000526/16 "2024-04-20T21:26:03Z")
> [@Midtown](#): > > Perry Mason always did represent innocent people. Still seems odd though that the cops were often portrayed as jerks who couldn’t solve anything and would always charge the wrong person. > > Noble defense attorney shows are common these days but Perry Mason seems unique to me for the era. > [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > Some noir movies after WWII captured this attitude, but television shows couldn’t show anything like that. Police had to be heroes. As has been mentioned, one solid reason for the trope ‘Perry Mason solves the case the police could not’ is the elevation of the hero–in this case a defense attorney basically acting as a private detective–to the status of being the Smartest Guy. People traditionally enjoy stories about the Smartest Guy showing up others. But another reason for this PM trope’s popularity–from the 1930s, as mentioned above, to the TV show’s fifties and sixties–is that there was an assumption that _audiences prefer to identify with a good guy helping other good people._ Until _Law & Order_ made prosecutors popular, there were few show premised on the idea that the prosecutor is the Good Guy. It’s not so much that the PM premise is left-wing or is based on the idea of ‘cops, and the policing system in general, often fail’–which **would** be a subversive concept. The _Perry Mason_ purveyors were not going for subversion. They were going for that combo of the popular themes ‘smartest guy figures it out’ and ‘good guy helps good people.’ ---
**Author:** ![Thudlow\_Boink](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thudlow_boink/32/320_2.png) [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2024, 9:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-perry-mason-unique-for-the-era-showing-police-and-prosecutors-as-incompetent/1000526/17 "2024-04-20T21:44:31Z")
I found the following interesting (which I ran across in Wikipedia’s article on Hamilton Burger): > [@](#): > > In her [confirmation hearings](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonia_Sotomayor_Supreme_Court_nomination) before the [Senate Judiciary Committee](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senate_Judiciary_Committee) in July 2009, [Supreme Court](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Court_of_the_United_States) nominee [Sonia Sotomayor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonia_Sotomayor) prefaced her remarks on the role of the prosecutor by claiming that she was inspired by watching _Perry Mason_ as a child, explaining, "I was influenced so greatly by a television show in igniting the passion that I had as being a prosecutor, and it was _[Perry Mason](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_Mason_(1957_TV_series))_ .[[21]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton_Burger#cite_note-21) In her 2013 memoir, Sotomayor, now a [Supreme Court justice](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associate_Justice_of_the_Supreme_Court_of_the_United_States), wrote of the show’s influence on her while she was growing up in a Bronx housing project.[[22]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton_Burger#cite_note-22)[[a]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton_Burger#cite_note-23) Sotomayor granted that the defense attorney was the show’s hero, “but my sympathies were not entirely monopolized by Perry Mason. I was fond of Burger, the prosecutor, too. I liked that he was a good loser, that he was more committed to finding the truth than to winning his case. If the defendant was truly innocent, he once explained, and the case was dismissed, then he had done his job because justice had been served.”[[23]](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton_Burger#cite_note-24) ---
**Author:** ![Sherrerd](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sherrerd/32/8_2.png) [@Sherrerd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sherrerd)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2024, 10:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-perry-mason-unique-for-the-era-showing-police-and-prosecutors-as-incompetent/1000526/18 "2024-04-20T22:00:07Z")
> [@Thudlow\_Boink](#): > > …“Sotomayor granted that the defense attorney was the show’s hero, “but my sympathies were not entirely monopolized by Perry Mason. I was fond of Burger, the prosecutor, too. I liked that he was a good loser, that he was more committed to finding the truth than to winning his case.” … Maybe so, but I bet she couldn’t have sold a show based on that premise back in the 1950s. (If she’d been in that business, of course.) ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2024, 10:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-perry-mason-unique-for-the-era-showing-police-and-prosecutors-as-incompetent/1000526/19 "2024-04-20T22:07:59Z")
> [@Sherrerd](#): > > there were few show premised on the idea that the prosecutor is the Good Guy. There were some that were very successful, probably led by _Mr. District Attorney_ which ran on radio for a decade, spawned three movies, and moved over to television in the 1950s. Tons of comic books in the 30s and 40s used crusading district attorneys as heroes, probably pinging off of pulp stories that featured them. And ironically, another top series were the books starring crusading D.A. Doug Selby, which happened to be written by Erle Stanley Gardner. ---
**Author:** ![Sherrerd](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sherrerd/32/8_2.png) [@Sherrerd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sherrerd)\ **Post date:** [April 20, 2024, 10:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-perry-mason-unique-for-the-era-showing-police-and-prosecutors-as-incompetent/1000526/20 "2024-04-20T22:13:45Z")
> [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > There were some that were very successful, probably led by _Mr. District Attorney_ which ran on radio for a decade, spawned three movies, and moved over to television in the 1950s. > > Tons of comic books in the 30s and 40s used crusading district attorneys as heroes, probably pinging off of pulp stories that featured them. > > And ironically, another top series were the books starring crusading D.A. Doug Selby, which happened to be written by Erle Stanley Gardner. And you’re saying that any of those reached the level of popularity and enshrinement in pop-culture of _Perry Mason_? Obviously they did not. Also, your reply seemed to be to someone saying ‘there were **no** shows premised on the idea that the prosecutor is the Good Guy.’ Again, obviously, I hadn’t posted that. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-perry-mason-unique-for-the-era-showing-police-and-prosecutors-as-incompetent/1000526.md?page=2)