That Seventies Cop

I like the idea of turning the ups and downs of a nerd’s paradise into a quirky ensemble serial — and with solid character actors like Joe Morton as your friendly, brilliant garage mechanic and Ally McBeal alum Greg Germann as a neurotic think-tank head, there’s lots that’s appealing here. But as the pilot’s plot unfolds, the convergence of save-the-day action and oddball humor starts to feel forced, and a certain charm is lost. By the time the special effects take over, we’ve moved out of the realm of the human and into the arena of ho-hum race-against-time stuff. And because creators/writers Andrew Cosby and Jaime Paglia are less adept with suspense plotting than with geek humor, you’ll figure out how to prevent the doomsday scenario from happening in the final crisis moments before even common-sense Jack. And really, I’d rather not be the smartest one when I’m watching a show about a town filled with brainiacs.

Who's Starsky? Who's Hutch? By-the-book Sam Tyler, right, finds himself back in the '70s with maverick Gene Hunt. (Photo by Kerry Brown)

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More About

• Perry Mason (TV Show)
• Hamilton Burger
• Eureka (TV Show)
• John Simm
• Philip Glenister

EUREKA| Sci Fi | Tuesdays, 9 p.m.

Hamilton Burger’s Groundhog Day

We all grew up learning that Perry Mason was smarter than everyone else. That’s the way readers and audiences liked it. He was the defense lawyer who cared enough about keeping his clients out of jail that he went so far as to do the other side’s job too. And when he’d unveil the real killers in the courtroom, they’d cave instantly. Over countless Erle Stanley Gardner books and then the legendary TV series from 1957 to 1966 — the first season of which came out on DVD this month — Mason (the role of a lifetime for that sonorously voiced actor with the Tasmanian Devil build, Raymond Burr) humiliated District Attorney Hamilton Burger (crusty-faced William Talman) so many times you wonder how Burger ever kept his job. But as much as I’ve enjoyed the fantasy justice world of Perry Mason since I was a kid, it’s also fun to occasionally view the series as a hellish continuum in a prosecutor’s anguished mind. Perhaps Mason only ever pulled his courtroom-confession theatrics a few times, but they were debilitating enough to give his nemesis the predictable nightmares of a never-wrong defense lawyer the rest of his professional life. And that’s what we’re watching: Groundhog Day starring Hamilton Burger. Just a thought.

PERRY MASON: Season 1, Volume 1 (1957) | $49.99