Perry Mason vs Law & Order on an emotional level

While preparing for my move, I have added to my Perry Mason repertoire having a Law & Order marathon playing in the background. Obviously, there are a lot of differences between the shows - the main one being that Mason is on the side of the defendants, while L&O shows us the perspective of law enforcement and the prosecution, but the one that stood out to me this time was thematic.

I would laugh when an episode of PM ends on a light note when the subject matter is usually so dire: murder, of course, but also abuse, exploitation, jealousy, family conflict, and all that. L&O also handles these, as well as racism, homophobia, and rape, but it, perhaps more appropriately, usually ends on a dire note, even if the protagonists "win". Emotionally, that takes its toll.

I've found myself missing the light-heartedness of the PM "happy ending". It brings levity to a dour semi-fictional reality. Add to that that we usually see more gruesome dead bodies and other evidence of violent crime, as well as less stylized responses to those, and I feel like maybe my long-term PM marathon has scraped away my defenses - defenses that perhaps I should not have built up in the first place.

True crimes

I just finished reading a collection criminal cases titled The Pinkerton Case Book, by Alan Hynd. Hynd was apparently given significant access to the archive of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, the book is a paean to the efficacy of the agency in fighting crime. Missing from the book's foreword and cases are anything to do with the union busting for which the agency is most notorious.

It seems like this book is indicative of one historically popular subgenre of True Crime - ones where the investigators are the heroes, and were able to catch the criminal. The more common subgenre I hear about recently is is more critical of past investigations, or attempts to conduct its own investigation - for example the podcast Serial, or the TV documentary The Jinx. A forbearer of these would be Erle Stanley Gardner's Argosy column, The Court of Last Resort (dramatized in the TV show of the same name), which tried to re-investigate for people who were convicted of a crime and have exhausted their chances at appeal.

It's interesting to look Gardner's Perry Mason, the character and TV series, from this perspective. While the district attorneys and police detectives in the series (whether or not they are the iconic Hamilton Burger and Lt. Arthur Tragg) are shown as ultimately motivated by a sense of justice (more-so than in the novels that I have read so far), they are also repeatedly shown to target the wrong person, in a way that would convince a jury of their peers. It makes you wonder how many people in this fictional universe have been imprisoned and even executed wrongfully, because they didn't happen to have a Perry Mason at their side. 

Perry Mason repeatedly jumped the shark

Early this year I presented early Perry Mason episodes as the epitome of the episodic. Since then I have watched several more seasons of the show. In the following I will be spoiling a few episodes and some diversions from the purely episodic.

The Two Cases of the Sun Bather's Diary

As a follow-up to my general discussion of the various forms of Perry Mason and his colleagues and foes in various forms of media, I've recently finished Erle Stanley Gardner's the 1955 novel The Case of the Sun Bather's Diary, which got me to rewatching Season 1, Episode 17 of the 1957 Perry Mason series, which adapts this same novel, and a direct comparison could be illuminating. Obviously this post will have spoilers for both.

A few Perries Mason

WARNING: The following post contains some general outline and character spoilers for the Perry Mason television series, specifically the first two seasons of the 1957 CBS series, and all of the 2020 HBO series, as well as serious spoilers for the first, 1933 novel, The Case of the Velvet Claws (see bibliography). I also refer to an important scene in the 2002 film Minority Report.

Apocalypse City - an urban variation on Apocalypse World

I've wanted to play and/or run Apocalypse World for a very long time. There were several challenges, however. First, it's not really a game made for one-shots, which is my usual way of experimenting with new systems. Then, there were the Special Moves/Sex Moves which gave me pause. Finally, I found the implied setting difficult to relate to. I've engaged with some of the related media, but something about it just didn't click. I especially couldn't get my head around what the Psychic Maelstrom meant.

Thankfully, several things changed for me. First, Vincent Baker, the co-creator of the system, shared how he ran the game in convention one-shot slots. That gave me some confidence that such an experiment will go better than my attempt at Sorcerer. Second, I kind of understood the purpose of the Sex Moves - to express how having sex can change relationships between people, and this is an attempt to express mechanically how any given playbook's character relates to this kind of intimacy - and also took to heart that it's possible to simply not engage with that subsystem, especially in a one-shot. Finally, I watched cult classic The Warriors. The striking starting premise, the almost absurd theming of the various gangs, and the repeated intervention by the mysterious radio announcer providing a kind of Greek chorus to the events, all in the decrepit landscape of 1980s New York, came together into a premise I thought I could work with. So I took the time to read the rulebook through, spent a few years regaining my courage, and finally, last Wednesday, set up a successful one-shot, although one that has given me a lot of food for thought about how to run the next one better. I will probably go into the details further when I've run it a few more times, but I do want to explain the basic concept now.

The implied setting of AW is a wasteland with a few points of interest. The wasteland is arid, sometimes diseased or mutated. There's some kind of weirdness at the edge of thought and also at the geographical border that is mystical and/or psionic.

In Apocalypse City, I replaced these with the wreckage of a City, a barely concealed stand-in for New York City, specifically how it looked in some media: The Warriors, especially, as well as Streets of Fire, and Escape from New York. I feel like in quite a few films in the 1970s and '80s, cities like New York and Los Angeles were presented not just as victims of an economic downturn and white flight, but as downright post-apocalyptic. The Warriors in their namesake film walk around a ruined urban landscape sparsely populated by gangs. Remnants of the past are shown, and sometimes used, like public buildings, the subways, etc, but will clearly never be rebuilt as they once where. Street of Fire provides a similar perspective. Escape from New York is supposedly futuristic (for the time - 1997 is in the past for us, of course), but the issues and characters who appear in this Big Apple are very much creatures of the 1980s. The Terminator's LA also bears these themes, even if we ignore the more literal apocalypse of the future that the protagonists are trying to avert.

As for replacing the Maelstrom: the radio DJ in The Warriors knows too much, and puts everyone on edge. The idea of spooky radio appeals to me, especially since I've sampled old-time radio dramas teeming with horror and mystery - see, for example, my October 2022 project centering on The Weird Circle. It felt like a much more approachable weirdness than the Psychic Maelstrom. Spooky television could also be a good fit, especially as presented in Stay Tuned. My rationale was that the people who fled to the suburbs, and to whom media in the 70s and 80s often catered, effectively left the City entirely behind, and the radio and television broadcasts they generate are so surreal and disconnected from urban reality that they might as well be some kind of Psychic Maelstrom from beyond.

Of course, this change in setting would suggest some mechanical adjustments. So far I have not gone as far as to actually hack the game - I simply avoided playbooks that are not a good fit for this different type of weirdness, and made sure to have a starting situation and list of potential threats that were in line with this theme. But if it continues to work well, I might have no choice but to either change some playbooks or downright replace them with my own, and possibly add some more mechanical differences. I am also wondering whether I will manage to garner enough interest for a fully-fledge campaign, where AW is really supposed to shine. Regardless, I am happy to finally be back to running games, and putting some of my role-playing ideas to practice.

Is episodic television roguelike?

I recently finished the first season of the old Perry Mason show from the 50's and 60s. I haven't watched it before - instead, I came to it after having watched the new, short-lived HBO show with the same title and almost the same characters. That gave me the reverse perspective from people who have watched these chronologically.

The HBO show benefits and suffers from a pattern of prestige remakes of old shows. In the old show you see defense lawyer Mason, his secretary Della Street, and his trusty private investigator Paul Drake, save a client from a murder charge by extreme means as of the first episode. In the new show, the first episode introduces us to Mason as a private investigator, Paul Drake as a police officer being, and Della Street as legal secretary to a lawyer who is Mason's mentor. The season ends with Mason transforming into a defense attorney, Street becoming his secretary, and Drake somewhat more associated with him. Mason's court nemesis from the old show, Hamilton Berger, is much more ambiguous here, and is a mere assistant DA. Lt. Arthur Tragg, the homicide detective and the one usually more closely involved in making a case against Mason's client, is not significant here. Since the show was canceled before it could be completely finished, I don't know how far they would go in reproducing the dynamics of the original show. Since it's supposed to be more closely based on the books than the original, it may never have been planned to reach that status quo at all.

The original show in light of all this is fascinating. It's a truly episodic show. There is no reference to earlier episodes, no characters develop in writing. Each episode stands on its own. They also all have a very similar pattern: we are presented with a non-deadly conflict, having to do with finances, emotion, or both - maybe someone is being blackmailed, maybe someone's heart is broken, maybe someone is being cheated out of an inheritance - and someone involved contacts Mason, and becomes his client. Then someone that was in conflict with the client dies, and Mason is diverted from corporate and real estate law to criminal defense. Mason himself often finds the body, and his law-stretching attempts to balance his duties as an officer of the court and his duties to his client bring upon him the ire of Lt. Tragg, who is not far behind. As more evidence is uncovered, Mason's client looks more and more guilty, until he comes up with an insight that lets him not only avert his client's conviction, but help Tragg and the district attorney, Berger, find the real culprit. Usually this involves the guilty party blurting out a confession in open court.

I watched a full season of this. In fact, many people, from the early history of television, and to this very day, watch shows like this, for many, many seasons. Shows in which the episodes are connected by the characters and the circumstances, but don't explicitly build one episode on the other.

It used to be suggested by the medium: in the time before VCRs, and with reruns and syndication depending on popularity to begin with, you simply couldn't depend on your viewers to have watched several shows in a row in order to follow any kind of serial narrative. You had to make every episode stand on its own, but you also had to make it reproduce the brand you were marketing. So repeating the same episode premise with some variation was a pretty reasonable design decision. Once you knew you had an audience, you could start playing with the medium more. You could end episodes or seasons with cliffhangers, and use those to encourage people to watch next time. You could change the status quo. That being said, you didn't have to.

So I watched 40 episodes (39 from the first season and one from the second). What did I get out of this? The writers did not present me with character growth. If you mixed the episodes up I wouldn't have been able to see the difference. But I changed. My frame of mind about the show changed. As I watched episode after episode, I got to see more and more of these static characters. Instead of seeing how Mason grew into his position, how he formed the relationships he has with his allies and antagonists, I saw Mason in this position, I saw these relationships, under many variations of the same challenges. I saw Mason and Tragg maintaining an almost erotic tension, so delighted to one-up each other, but with a certain moral commonality that meant that when Mason really managed to find out who the real culprit was, Tragg would cooperate with him, waiting in the wings to make an arrest once he'd pressured the guilty party, if he couldn't do it in court. I saw the legal procedures, and possibly understood them better - when it does make sense to object, when it doesn't. I could start seeing patterns of when it's clear that Mason or Burger were going out of bounds intentionally, as a rhetorical point, and when they've clearly been stymied by the other party, or by the behavior of a witness. If an episode did go in a very unusual direction - so far only one got all the way to a jury reading a verdict for one of Mason's clients - it could be used to examine the others in sharper relief.

I think that the process of a viewer of such an episodic TV show is like that of a player of a roguelike video game. A roguelike usually has the same general premise from playthrough to playthrough. However, the details are procedurally generated. In the more strict versions, you don't get to keep anything, so you can't build up a mechanical narrative of change as you play. What you do is learn, from session to session, about the laws of the world, of the patterns of action of the enemies, of the power-ups, of the dynamics of difficulty as you move farther and farther in, or travel farther and farther out. You understand existing things - those which don't change from playthrough to playthrough - better, due to how they interact, or how they relate to each other, through what does change each time.

Arcade games are similar. You play Galaga over and over. The game starts over each time, regardless of how well or how poorly you did in your last run. However, these games usually have a certain progression that is repeatable, so that you end up learning that, more perhaps than anything more inherent about your avatar in the game, or the enemies, or your power-ups. Often you can memorize some of the specific patterns enemies take in specific levels - in fact, depending on difficulty, it might be a requirement to advance.

So I think that (strict) roguelikes might be the best gaming exemplars of what I'm talking about. Might be time for me to try looking at this genre anew.

Deep Space 9 vignettes

I've decided to collect a few thoughts I've had about Star Trek: Deep Space 9. There are some spoilers for particular episodes and the general thrust of the show.

Not just a Babylon 5 knock-off

When I was a teenager in Israel in the 1990s, there was a sense of rivalry between fans of Star Trek: Deep Space 9 and Babylon 5. Sure, I knew many of people who were fans of both, but since they were both in the same niche of a space station-centric longform science fiction drama, and since there were a lot of specific parallels, and even a story about how one stole the premise from the other, there was definitely tension.

For broadcast availability reasons, it was B5 which I ended up watching through, while I only watched DS9 sporadically. I was left with a sense that the former was superior to the latter. I was taken in by the attempt to make a mature piece of work: a TV novel, and avoiding kids and cute robots. But recently I have achieved a more nuanced perspective.

After an almost complete rewatch of B5 last year, I did a complete watch-through of DS9 earlier this year. And I feel I should have given the latter a fair shake earlier. No, it isn't a TV novel. There is a TV novel hiding there, maybe about 5 seasons of it, but it is also attempting to be a particle of the week Star Trek series, and manages to pull that off, as well. The characters are very well-written, engaging, and grow with the plot and the passage of time.

One thing that stands out is how the kids affect the story. The parental relationships add a depth and sense of stakes to the world that, with all of the dramatic development in B5, just wasn't there. Seeing the world through the eyes of Jake and Nog as they grow up, seeing the emotional toll that long parting has had on the O'Briens and the Siskos when those occurred, the fear for Jake and Molly's welfare when they were out of sight, were irreplaceable. Similar situations in B5 involved adults being concerned for their adult relatives, relationships which we were only introduced to remotely, so the impact was lessened. No children grew up on B5, either, instead just coming in for a plot point and leaving.

So I don't think JMS got more maturity out of the bargain. Cute robots were absent in both, though, and neither felt neglected as a result.

Vic Fontaine as an artificial gamemaster

As part of the transition from a paramilitary ship to an essentially civilian space station, the public holodeck became a set of private holosuites, run by everyone's favorite Ferengi bar-owner, Quark.

I didn't cover the holodeck or the holosuite in my talk about virtual reality in fiction and reality, because at that point it had been a while since I've watched The Next Generation or DS9, and frankly, it's a very weird entity, that benefits from thinking more in terms of role-playing games, and specifically, live action role-play. In the holo experience, a program creates artificial beings and an environment, which react to the real visitors naturally, and/or according to the program's dictates. The visitors are expected to dress for the occasion, and also play their parts - so this sits somewhere between augmented reality and larping. There is some interlock that prevents real people from being injured, which is occasionally deactivated to add more tension, but otherwise, the experience feels real. There is a finite room which can be seen when the program is shut down, but the visitors are able to feel like they are moving freely in an open-ended environment, when necesary.

In story terms, the holo experience seems to be a place for unrealistic crossovers to happen with in-fiction logic: TNG's Data can match wits with Moriarty, the crew can play Robin Hood's Merry Men, and, in DS9, a somewhat sanitized experience of 1960s Vegas is recreated, hosted by a lounge singer modeled after Frank Sinatra - Vic Fontaine. In time, the various crew members become his friends - he is very helpful and insightful, especially when it comes to their love lives.

One of these crew members is Quark's nephew, Nog. We have watched him succeed in achieving his dream of joining Starfleet, taking part in battle, and losing his leg. A few episodes later, in "It's Only a Paper Moon", he is back to the station, with leave to acclimate to a prosthetic and become rehabilitated. He visits the Fontaine program to cheer up, and then decides he wants to recover there.

This pushes the boundaries of the program as we have seen it so far: instead of watching a show and getting some advice from Vic, Nog is taken backstage. And an entirely novel part of the premise is revealed: the management of the casino and lounge, and particularly, its finances, which according to Vic, confound him. After an altercation with Jake, Vic tells Nog that he has to improve his attitude or he will not be allowed back to the lounge - until this episode - the only attraction of this program. Nog is finally convinced to have a look at the finances, and, in typical Ferengi fashion (the less said about a race of big-nosed aliens with a natural talent for money, the better), has an easy time sorting them out, and starts investing time in improving the profitability of the place, and even expanding it.

The fascinating thing about all this is how much this holo experience moves towards being an ideal role-playing game. Nog is able to be swept up by a part of the imaginary or simulated world that was only created to engage him, that wasn't planned in advance. This is something a good gamemaster would do; indeed, the framework, which does not require Nog to roll any dice or understand new behind-the-scene rules, much less reprogram anything, makes this closer to an ideal Blackmoor phenomenon, engaged with through pure larping. In our world, it would be very difficult to reproduce the freedom of this experience as a larp, because it would beg the question of how the new systems are designed and made to seem and sound and feel real, and where the new players required, or their clothes, would come from, and how they would be trained.

Odo as a literal referee

Earlier in the season, in "Take Me Out to the Holo-Suite", Captain Sisko manages to convince members of his crew to join him in playing Baseball against a team of Vulcans lead by an old nemesis of his. Since an actual Baseball court would be difficult to recreate on the station, it is reproduced in one of Quark's holosuites.

As we've discussed, holosuite programs are more than capable of creating people with complicated personalities, and a programmed umpire (Baseball referee) would have a perfect view and understanding of the situation in the field, but Sisko insists on having a person do it, specifically Odo. He wants a real person. He doesn't explain exactly why - it seems he mostly rejects a holosuite umpire on principle as what Solok, his nemesis, would do - but later something happens that is apparently not exactly according to the rules as, possibly, a holosuite umpire would do it: one of the Vulcans runs into the dugout without having touched base. Since he can't single out the Vulcan who had run in, he goes to them, one by one, touching them with the ball. It turns out that the one who had run in is the last in the seating order, and as soon as Nog gets to the player right before him, he runs and attempts to make home plate, but Jake is able to catch Nog's ball and tag him, anyway.

Had this been run by a holosuite umpire, maybe something like the MLB rules would have been used, and the runner would have been called out as soon as he entered the dugout. But instead, it was Odo who indicated that something was wrong, in his typical gruff manner, adding to the suspense and thrill of this small victory.

Sisko cheers and comments that it is this unpredictability of Baseball which he loves about the game. And having a living referee, one who can make mistakes, or idiosyncratic judgments, is part of what allows for this exciting unpredictability. Even in this, a competitive game with overall much stricter rules than any role-playing game.

Why was O'Brien self-conscious about his models?

As the series progresses, Bashir and O'Brien bond over holosuite experiences reproducing various desperate historical combat situations. The last one they repeatedly attempt is the Battle of the Alamo. In addition to playing at this scenario on the holosuite, O'Brien starts investing in recreating the Alamo Mission and the order of battle in miniature. And it is fascinating that he is repeatedly teased about it, with others constantly calling them toys, which he rebukes by stating that "it's not a toy - it's a model!" It's interesting because by the time DS9 was produced, actual model armies and miniature warfare were pretty well established as a grown-up hobby, particularly historicals.

This does remind me of a story suggesting why the author Robert Louis Stevenson gave up on miniature wargaming, which he enjoyed playing with his step son in Switzerland: apparently a friend mocked him so badly for playing a children's game that he never did much more with it, much less publish the rules he used, a loss to the history of wargaming.