Perry Mason

Rerun Junkie Confession–I Love a Woman Who Takes Care of Business

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I was initially inspired to write this post by Miss Simpson in the Season 5 Hawaii Five-O episode “Death Is a Company Policy”, and what I was actually going to confess was that I liked ruthless women. Miss Simpson was a representative of a criminal enterprise so vast it oversaw the work of numerous smaller scale criminal bosses. It’s at first thought that Miss Simpson is nothing more than an accountant sent to audit the criminal books of one of their branch managers, Piro Manoa. However, as the episode progresses, we come to understand that Miss Simpson is more than just an accountant. She’s an important part of their organization and makes the tough, crucial decisions when she has to.

And then just two episodes later came Joyce Hensley in “You Don’t Have To Kill To Get Rich, But It Helps”. The only female exec in a blackmail insurance business, she has a keen eye for good insurance prospects. She also reads Sam Tolliver for filth after only a five minute chat. Cool, calculating, and, well, ruthless.

But in that same episode is a character named Dollie. She’s a madam with amazing fashion sense who takes no shit from Ben. You get the sense that she’s good at her job and she takes care of her girls, but she’s no soft touch. She’s not ruthless. She’s just takes care of business.

And that’s what I really like. A woman who can take care of business. Miss Simpson and Joyce Hensley both displayed that even though their business is on the criminal side of the tracks.

So, let’s flip the script. What about Callie Duquense on CSI: Miami? Here is a woman who brings down the bad guys with same sort of efficiency and ruthlessness as her criminal counterparts I just mentioned. She’s not intimidated when challenged and she has remarkable emotional control even in the most stressful situations. She gets shit done.

Della Street on Perry Mason also comes to mind when it comes to efficient women on the right side of the law. To the untrained eye, she’s just a secretary. But Perry wouldn’t be able to vex Hamilton Burger by beating him in court if Della wasn’t on top of her game. She even keeps Paul Drake in check and that’s no easy task.

Women don’t have to be in law enforcement -or on the opposite side of it- to take care of business. When I was thinking of all of the women I admire, two nurses immediately popped into my mind: Major Margaret Houlihan on M*A*S*H and Dixie McCall on Emergency!.

Dixie is the head ER nurse. There were actually episodes that showed how things went to shit without Dixie in charge. She’s the one choreographing intricate dances of life or death with her staff. Doctors might be running the show, but it’s the nurses who have to anticipate their needs. Dixie got shit done because lives depended on it. And she was good at it.

The same can be said for Major Margaret Houlihan. A career army nurse. She’s in charge of a group of nurses in a war zone. She’s orchestrating order in devastating chaos. Even when taking into consideration her early season shenanigans, Margaret never messed around when it came to nursing. Taking care of those soldiers was her job and she took care of business.

What’s interesting about most of the women I’ve listed in this post (as guest stars we didn’t really see enough of Miss Simpson, Dollie, and Joyce Hensley) is that even though they could be considered strong women because of how effectively they got their shit done, it didn’t preclude them from having emotions. Sometimes the stress or the situations got to them, but they handled it, just like they handle everything. And they handled it in such a way that it didn’t stop them from taking care of business.

And I unabashedly love women like that.

Heteronormativity Is a Helluva Drug

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I didn’t expect to like the reboot of Magnum PI. I only gave the pilot a shot because I’d been watching the 1980 series and decided to compare and contrast. I already knew that Magnum was now Latino and Higgins was now a woman. I went into it thinking it’d be fine, but not for me, like most reboots.

The pilot was a fun ride. I gave it the three episode test (pilot establishes the show; second ep is the adjustments; third ep is the vibe) and ended up hooked.

My one hope for the show was that they wouldn’t default to hooking up Magnum and Higgins.

Well, it was good while it lasted and it lasted until early in the 2nd season. Once it became clear that the endgame is Magnum and Higgins are omg-meant-to-be (and that it’s apparently going to be played out in poorly executed fanfic tropes), it then became a countdown until I got fed up and quit watching. That lasted until half-way through the 4th season. I haven’t given up entirely but I am absolutely half-assing it and I don’t care about the show like I once did.

It’s a shame, but thems the breaks.

And there’s plenty of history behind the continuation of the heteronormative narrative that defaults opposite sex leads or lead/supporting into a romantic tension leading to a relationship.

Obviously, the most known example of this is Dave and Maddie on Moonlighting, a show that so depended on the will-they-or-won’t-they, that when they did, it pretty much cancelled the show (to be fair there were other behind-the-scenes issues that contributed to the show’s demise, too). Also, Agnes and Herb had the much better relationship.

Scarecrow and Mrs. King and Remington Steele drew from the same playbook. On Barney Miller, it played out over five episodes between Wojo and Wentworth before Linda Lavin left to be Alice.

In the case of shows like Tales of the Gold Monkey, it’s less of a will-they-or-won’t-they and more of a when-will-he-commit. Because there’s obviously something going on between Jake and Sarah (hell, they kiss in the pilot), but it’s a situationship that allows Jake to kiss other ladies depending on the plot. There’s a similar sort of set-up happening with Walter and Roxanne on Automan. Are they dating? Kinda, maybe, it depends.

Emergency! actually began with Dr. Kelly Brackett and Nurse Dixie McCall in a romantic relationship, which was dropped in later episodes without explanation (read: break-up). From that point on, Brackett and Dixie were friends and colleagues, caring for and respecting each other in both professional and platonic ways, showing that, hey, it could be done.

I’m not saying that it wasn’t. There were series that didn’t necessarily default to the romantic relationship. Della Street didn’t get involved with Perry Mason or Paul Drake (though Paul did nickname Della “Beautiful” and there was some joking that might be considered flirting). Likewise Britt Reid clearly cared about Miss Case and vice-versa, but there was nothing but boss-secretary friendship happening with The Green Hornet. Clearly, it could be done.

But there’s no denying that it could be a struggle. For most of Hunter‘s seven season run, Rick Hunter and Dee Dee McCall were partners and friends, a caring and satisfying platonic relationship that Fred Dryer and Stepfanie Kramer were happy with. But as the story goes, the network and the fans wanted more. As a result, a Season 6 episode informed the audience that Hunter and McCall had once slept together, but it caused an issue with their work relationship.

It’s the default aspect of the hetereonormative narrative, the well-worn path of it, the perpetuation of the idea that the only chemistry that exists between opposite sexes is sexual and the only important relationships are romantic that really grates. Worse, it’s dull. And it’s dull because it’s expected. No other options are presented or considered.

Magnum PI had an opportunity to explore something beyond the default, to establish a couple of opposite sex platonic soulmates without some sort of caveat or exemption (like one or both of them being queer), to really dig into that kind of relationship and do something different.

Instead, it fell for the same quick and easy high that’s been dulling senses for decades.

It really is a helluva drug.

They Didn’t Have Native Americans Back Then

/ Kiki Writes / 1 Comment

As I discussed in a previous post, all of your favorites are problematic. All of my favorites, too.

One problematic aspect of reruns that’s probably the most glaring is the racist casting. White actors playing non-white roles has been common place for decades and was probably at its most popular in the Westerns of the ’50s, ’60s, and early ’70s. That’s right. Those Native Americans were not actual Native Americans. Those Mexicans? If they had a speaking role, they were most likely not actually Mexican.

John Saxon played a Native American on Bonanza and a Mexican on Gunsmoke. Martin Landau played a Mexican on both The Rifleman and The Big Valley. Michael Ansara not only played a Mexican in a couple of episodes of Rawhide, but he was frequently cast as a Native American, including starring in his own short-lived series called Law of the Plainsman playing Deputy Marshal Sam Buckheart, a character he originally played on The Rifleman.

Sadly, one of my favorites, F-Troop, was notorious for casting white actors as their Hekawi tribe members. Frank DeKova, Don Diamond, Edward Everett Horton (who also played a Native American chief on an episode of Batman), J. Pat O’Malley, Jamie Farr, hell even Don Rickles all played Native Americans. It seemed comedic timing was more important than racial accuracy. Not that there aren’t funny Native Americans; but back then, they didn’t even bother to look for them.

Of course, Native Americans and Latinos/Latinas weren’t the only ones having white actors step in for them. Boris Karloff played an Indian Maharaja on an episode of The Wild Wild West. Wende Wagner played a native Hawaiian on an episode of Perry Mason, and her aunt in that same episode was Miriam Goldina, a native Russian. Jim Backus’s wife, Henny, played a native mother on an episode of Gilligan’s Island. Spoiler alert! Russ Grieve, who played her native husband, and Mary Foran, who played her native daughter, weren’t natives either.

Two of the most curious examples of racist casting I have ever seen happened on two of my favorite reruns, both of which I’ve mentioned before, but I’m going to mention again because they are worth mentioning at every opportunity.

In an episode of Hawaii Five-O called “Samurai”, Ricardo Montalban played a Japanese criminal. Yes, you read that correctly and aren’t you glad that you did. In the second oddest case of yellow face I’ve ever seen (we’ll get to the first one very soon), a very Mexican Ricardo Montalban had his eyes artificially slanted to play a Japanese man. Like, his accent didn’t change at all. And whatever they did to his eyes made him look less Japanese and more like an eye lift gone wrong. The entire effect is very disconcerting and I highly recommend you try to catch that episode because descriptions and pictures don’t do it any justice.

To make an already confusing casting decision even more curious, Hawaii Five-O was typically good at casting Asians, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders to play Asians, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders in smaller roles, making things like this even more glaring.

The truly oddest case of racist casting I’ve ever seen, however, belongs to the pilot episode of The Wild Wild West called “The Night of the Inferno”. In this episode Victor Buono played Juan Manolo aka Wing Fat.

Yes, let me break that down for you.

White actor Victor Buono played a Mexican man in disguise as a Chinese man. It’s basically a turducken of racist casting and I can’t help but gawk at it because I have no idea how to even begin to process it. I suppose if you’ve ever watched the series, then you can agree that at the very least, it sets you up nicely for some of the more bonzo episodes of the show.

Thankfully, this sort of whatthefuckery is largely in the past and though racist casting does still happen (whitewashing Asians and Pacific Islanders is still unnervingly common), the backlash is swift and loud. A new normal has been and is being established and even if I don’t watch current shows all that much, I’m still all for it.

After all, one day those shows will be reruns.

Rerun Junkie Show– Perry Mason

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The opening strains of the theme song are immediately recognizable even if you’ve never seen an episode of the show. And if you haven’t, you should. Perry Mason is classic TV, quite literally. The show ran for nine seasons, starting in 1957.

The show centered around title character Perry Mason (Raymond Burr), defense attorney, his always dependable assistant Della Street (Barbara Hale), and private detective Paul Drake (William Hopper). The law side of things was often represented by state’s attorney Hamilton Burger (William Talman), Lt. Tragg (Ray Collins), and Lt. Anderson (Wesley Lau).

Our heroes in classic black and white.

Each episode revolved around an innocent person being accused of a crime they didn’t commit. Perry would take their case and with the help of Della and Paul, he’d prove their innocence, usually in dramatic courtroom fashion.

Most of the cases involved a murder and some of them were quite over the top. Several faked deaths and lots of rich people doing horrible things. And Perry seemed to know a whole lot of people quite conveniently. It was how he got involved and/or how he solved the case.

With so many suspects, bad guys, and innocents, there was plenty of opportunity for guest stars. Bette Davis, Jerry Van Dyke, Alan Hale, Keye Luke, Adam West, Lee Merriweather, Victor Buono, James Hong, Denver Pyle, David McCallum, Jackie Coogan, Elisha Cook Jr, Gavin McCleod, Gary Collins, Louise Fletcher, James Best, and James Coburn all made appearances. Don’t recognize some of the names? Look them up. Most of them guested on the show before they landed the roles that you might know them from.

No matter the guest star or the storyline, Perry always came out on top. It made you almost feel bad for Hamilton Burger. I’d like to think that he won every case that didn’t feature Perry Mason on the defense.

Watching the episodes now, the black and white isn’t the only sign that it’s an old show. Back in the late 50’s/early 60’s people smoked freely, could easily board planes, were restricted by landlines, still sent telegrams, had to research by going through papers and files by hand, and social security numbers, birth certificates, and adoption records were more easily forged. There’s at least one thing (usually more) in each episode that could not be done today. Times have definitely changed and it’s fun to compare while trying to solve the case.

And that’s where you can find me most afternoons. Helping Perry, Della, and Paul solve a murder.

 

Where I Watch It

Rerun Junkie

/ Kiki Writes / 2 Comments

I am a rerun junkie. I always have been and I feel like I always will be. If a show has been off the air for ten years or more, there’s a good chance I will find it and watch the hell out of it.

The 70’s are my favorite era, I think, particularly 70’s cop shows. Oh! Starsky and Hutch, CHiPs, Hawaii 5-0, Barney Miller, Banacek, Barretta, Charlie’s Angels, Rockford Files, I watched them all. I didn’t miss out on out on other hits, either. I enjoyed many episodes of Sanford and Son, All in the Family, and, of course, M*A*S*H. I can quote so many of those episodes word for word.

The old Nick-at-Nite was a great supply of reruns. Without it, I never would have been able to watch Laugh-In, Lancelot Linc Secret Chimp, Get Smart, or The Monkees. In FX’s infancy, I got to watch a lot of The Incredible Hulk, Batman, Green Hornet, and The Greatest American Hero. WGN was my go to place for The Addam’s Family and The Munsters, while on TBS I started many school mornings with Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, Happy Days, and Laverne and Shirley.

I get to continue my rerun junkie ways today as shows I watched first run when I was younger are now old reruns. Murder, She Wrote, In the Heat of the Night, Matlock, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Golden Girls, and Unsolved Mysteries. In the past I’ve got to relive the A-Team, MacGyver, Knight Rider, and Air Wolf.

The biggest bummer about this new day job is that I’m forced to give up three of my current favorite reruns: Perry Mason, Hawaii 5-0, and Unsolved Mysteries. I’ll also be missing some Golden Girls reruns because I won’t be able to stay up as late to watch them.

The best part about reruns is that the older I get, the better they get. I don’t know how it happens, but it does.

I think it has something to do with my sense of humor.