Review: 'Perry Mason' Is A Brilliant Origin Story that Returns the Beloved Character to His 1930s Roots

"Perry Mason" just might be the best series of the year.

In their new adaptation of the beloved character for HBO, creators Ron Fitzgerald and Rolin Jones return Eric Stanley Gardner's iconoclastic defense attorney – and many of the characters that surrounded him – to his early 1930s roots, providing an origin story and a lot of background along the way.

This eight-episode series introduces us to an embittered, alcoholic divorcee and disgraced veteran of World War I. At this point, Mason isn't a defense lawyer, or a lawyer of any sort; he's a private detective and, like any good noir gumshoe, he's perpetually between cases, short of money, and living in the middle of dire circumstances. He also gets beaten up a lot.

Mason is brilliantly played by Welsh actor Matthew Rhys, who shows us a man struggling with guilt, failure, and regret – some of it stemming from his actions during the war, but much of it running deeper than that. Mason has inherited his family's dairy farm and just about run it into the ground; it doesn't help that an aviation sightseeing company has set up shop within a stone's throw of his house. Less distant than that is the prospect of losing his home, thanks to his perpetual money problems – woes that are exacerbated by his wife having left him and taken their son with her.

For work, Mason takes on assignments that have him taking intimate photos of prominent people – the sorts of photos that come up in divorce trials or blackmail schemes. In his less sordid moments he relies on the good offices of longtime friend and fading lawyer E.B. Johnathan (John Lithgow), a man whose glory days are long past and whose health is swiftly failing. Luckily, Jonathan has whip-smart Della Street (Juliet Rylance) running his tiny firm; while Della keeps everything in good working order, Mason goes out to stir up the mud and see what trouble pops out, all in service to their latest clients: Matthew and Emily Dodson (Nate Corddry and Gayle Rankin), a husband and wife whose infant son was kidnapped but then, in a grotesque and sensational twist, delivered back to them dead... aboard a funicular streetcar in the heart of Los Angeles, no less.

Jonathan has been retained by a millionaire named Herman Baggerly (Robert Patrick), who belongs to the same charismatic church as the Dodsons, to track down the guilty parties, together with the $100,000 ransom they somehow scraped together. But it's not long before the ambitious district attorney has caught the scent of opportunity on the wind, a pair of corrupt police detectives come into play, and an African American beat cop with the skills of a good investigator all enter the fray, along with Sister Alice (Tatiana Maslany), the leader of Baggerly's church, her stage mother (Liv Tyler), and a trio of corpses that have a direct bearing on the case.

Ever the underdog, Mason isn't afraid of the power players and goons that start coming out of the woodwork – some of them barrelling straight at him – as he begins digging around. Using a hired assistant – a tough guy named Pete Strickland (Shea Whigham) – as both an investigative asset and an all-around fixer, Mason gradually begins peeling back the layers of the case, even as it blows up into a cause c�l�bre that consumes what seems like half the city – many of them either outraged or inspired by Sister Alice's stunning revelations, which Alice claims are the Word of God.

The story is so complex, so convoluted, and so driving that this series needs eight episodes to tell it; there's little padding here. "Perry Mason" may be the year's most intensely gripping drama, and the writers are clever about how they introduce familiar characters (Mason's arch-nemesis Harry Burger makes his entrance in an especially clever way) and flesh them out (there's a little same-sex romance going on around the edges).

The series is also huge fun: The production in itself is an adrenaline shot of nostalgic design, while the cast is uniformly gifted at striking notes that border on caricature and yet remain within the boundaries of credibility. Whigham's hard-bitten Strickland is a perfect foil for Mason's passionate, self-destructive tendencies, while Rylance's read on Della is spot-on: This is a competent woman living and working at a time when men didn't realize that both things could come in the same package, and when she sees the toll the kidnapping and murder takes on the infant's mother – who ends up being vilified in the most malicious way possible by media and legal system alike – she rises to the occasion with a fury that matches Mason's own, and an intelligence that outshines him.

Maslany's Sister Alice (and Tyler's character with her) forges a parallel story that's no less compelling. If there's a Season Two, many of these characters are well positioned to return and generate more sparks, but Maslany's almost ethereal, highly ambiguous holy woman is perhaps the greatest of all the mysteries that this series presents to us.