Spoilers below.
Matlock, the long-running criminal lawyer show featuring Andy Griffith in the title role, has enjoyed a popularity in first-run and re-runs that I cannot understand. It is frequently (and favorably) compared to "Perry Mason", the archetypal criminal drama that sets the gold standard for courtroom television to this day. It's remarkable that the two shows are mentioned in the same breath.
Griffith is Ben Matlock, a Harvard graduate who, we are told in the early years, never takes a case for less than $250,000. Earth to writers: criminal defendants do not have $250,000. Like Mason, Matlock's office sees a stream of innocent people charged with murder. Like Mason, Matlock winds up getting most of them acquitted.
And there, the similarities end. Mason, the creation of detective story writer Erle Stanley Gardner, had an abiding respect for the courts, the police, and the rule of law (more so in the series than the novels that preceded them). Everyone on the Perry Mason show was smart; Mason was just smarter. In contrast, Matlock is perhaps the least dumb character on his show. One mystery involved a murder with a candlestick that was found in Matlock's client's house, wrapped in a newspaper. While Matlock was cross-examining the real killer, he discovers that the date on the newspaper was one day after his client was in jail. This is astonishing: no one on the police force or the district attorney's office has noticed that their most damning evidence provides the defendant with an iron-clad alibi? And Matlock, unlike Mason, cares little for the rules of evidence. Almost every show, when the prosecutor makes an objection based on hearsay or speculation, Matlock screams to the judge that his question is "absolutely vital to his case" and the judge lets it in. When I was in law school, we referred to this as the "Matlock rule". He passes photographs to the jury while the judge is considering whether they are admissible, and gives long soliloquies about surprise witnesses who are "prepared to testify", all while the prosecutor sits mute.
You've guessed by now that I'm an attorney. I don't mind suspending disbelief to enjoy a television series (surely Perry Mason's nemesis Hamilton Burger would not have been a district attorney for a decade if he could never indict the real killer). But there's a difference between suspending disbelief and suspending intelligence.
Matlock, the long-running criminal lawyer show featuring Andy Griffith in the title role, has enjoyed a popularity in first-run and re-runs that I cannot understand. It is frequently (and favorably) compared to "Perry Mason", the archetypal criminal drama that sets the gold standard for courtroom television to this day. It's remarkable that the two shows are mentioned in the same breath.
Griffith is Ben Matlock, a Harvard graduate who, we are told in the early years, never takes a case for less than $250,000. Earth to writers: criminal defendants do not have $250,000. Like Mason, Matlock's office sees a stream of innocent people charged with murder. Like Mason, Matlock winds up getting most of them acquitted.
And there, the similarities end. Mason, the creation of detective story writer Erle Stanley Gardner, had an abiding respect for the courts, the police, and the rule of law (more so in the series than the novels that preceded them). Everyone on the Perry Mason show was smart; Mason was just smarter. In contrast, Matlock is perhaps the least dumb character on his show. One mystery involved a murder with a candlestick that was found in Matlock's client's house, wrapped in a newspaper. While Matlock was cross-examining the real killer, he discovers that the date on the newspaper was one day after his client was in jail. This is astonishing: no one on the police force or the district attorney's office has noticed that their most damning evidence provides the defendant with an iron-clad alibi? And Matlock, unlike Mason, cares little for the rules of evidence. Almost every show, when the prosecutor makes an objection based on hearsay or speculation, Matlock screams to the judge that his question is "absolutely vital to his case" and the judge lets it in. When I was in law school, we referred to this as the "Matlock rule". He passes photographs to the jury while the judge is considering whether they are admissible, and gives long soliloquies about surprise witnesses who are "prepared to testify", all while the prosecutor sits mute.
You've guessed by now that I'm an attorney. I don't mind suspending disbelief to enjoy a television series (surely Perry Mason's nemesis Hamilton Burger would not have been a district attorney for a decade if he could never indict the real killer). But there's a difference between suspending disbelief and suspending intelligence.