I posted about this before. A local channel has started showing really bad episodes of Perry Mason and The Twilight Zone. I've seen those shows for years on TV and thought I had seen every episode. But it turns out that, all these years, they only had the good episodes in syndication. Now they're showing the dregs.
You know how Perry Mason would always get the real murderer to admit it in court? "That's right! It was me! They said I was too dumb! Well who's dumb now!" It turns out that in a lot of episodes he would entrap people outside the courtroom. He would bring up some piece of evidence and when the real killer returned to the scene to destroy it, Perry Mason and police would come walking out of the back room. "Ah ha!" Columbo did the same thing now and then.
Saw the worst episode the other night.
A wealthy eccentric was murdered. Perry is defending his elderly housekeeper who was accused of the crime. The man was killed by a gorilla he had caged in the basement of the mansion. Someone had let it out.
So, before the murder is discovered, Perry Mason enters the house. He walks upstairs. And there's a massive gorilla in the hallway. Seemed sort of terrifying in the context of a serious drama. Perry slips into a bedroom and locks the door, like that's going to help.
The gorilla breaks through the door.
The man is dead and the housekeeper is lying on the floor. She tells Mason not to look at the gorilla and give him his car keys to play with.
They kept showing close-ups of the gorilla. The gorilla mask was only lined up with one eye of the guy in the gorilla suit. I wondered if it was supposed to be a guy in a costume.
I don't think there ever was any golden age of television.
"And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't that meddling attorney!"
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