Perry Mason: The Case of the Telltale Talk Show Host

Mariette Hartley is being pestered by someone, so she calls in old friend Raymond Burr for advice, legal and personal. When Regis Philbin, her boss at the talk radio channel she works at, is killed, she's on trial for hiring the hitman. Good thing Perry Mason is her friend and lawyer. That means it's only until the end of the show until someone confesses on the witness stand.

This one has more humor than usual, with Barbara Hale, playing Della Street, plying Burr with various tisanes. By this point, the role of William Moses as Ken Malansky, Perry's investigator, is overtly humorous. Of course he gets knocked around. Of course he teams up with a beautiful woman to investigate. This is in hilarious contrast to his boss' dealing with witnesses, all of whom he hits.... with a subpoena.

It's the next to last time Burr would play Erle Stanley Gardner's lawyer-investigator. Despite Miss Hale's healthful concoctions, he would die before this TV movie aired.

Radio talk show host Dr Judith Jansen feels she is being stalked by someone and calls her friend Della Street for help. Perry and Ken come to see her and arrange to meet the staff at her radio station in order to find out who might be doing it. Dr Jansen sets up Perry to have an interview on one of the shows but during his visit a staff meeting is called by the station's boss, Winslow Keene. At the meeting Keene announces that the staff are all being moved to night shifts to make way for music shows. Later that night Keene is killed and Dr Jansen's car is seen driving away from the scene. She is charged and Perry steps in to defend her while Malansky sets out to track down the man who bought the gun and acted as a hitman.

The Perry Mason formula continues with this entry in the series that meets the normal level for this series but fails to stand out. The plot is the usual fare although the reason for Mason's involvement is very weak here. Dr Jansen is being stalked which brings Mason into picture, however this element is totally lost and not followed through - I had assumed there would be a link to the murder mystery but there wasn't - it was just simply dropped! The use of a hitman is starting to tire me a little bit because I have seen it so many times and it is simply to give Malansky something to do while Perry goes after the person who hired him. It's not bad bit it is an element of the formula that I hadn't noticed before.

The usual element of Malansky's strand is the side kick and it is present here. I enjoyed it more than the usual bland female that is put with him to flirt with and this time he has a black cop who is sassy (although a little bit of an ethnic stereotype is in there). The investigation is to the norm and the climax is not a surprise so much as an inevitability.

Burr helps the climax by being his usual self. My only problem with him is that he wears a hat during this film that doesn't really suit him. Hale is OK as Della and has a repeat joke to make - however the kiss that occurs between them is not very good as it fouls the platonic relationship that they have, nothing else comes of it in later films and it just felt that they had nothing else to do with the film to spice it up a bit. Moses is OK as normal without trying too hard. Datcher is pretty hot as Paxman and her sassiness helped the film feel more energetic that it actually is, maybe I'm a little biased as I found her quite sexy and ignored her clichéd black character. The support cast are all pretty bland and the `oh look, it's ...' faces this time are chat show host Montel Williams and `Millionaire's' Regis Philbin.

Overall this is a reasonable entry in the series that is OK is you like the formula but to be honest it is not as good as some of the other ones. Big bits of the plot go AWOL and the story feels like a formula rather than adding anything fresh to it. Fans will enjoy it (as I did) but it is unlikely to win over those demanding more than the basic formula wheeled out again.

This TV movie about a fictional talk radio station owner's murder has location shots in Denver. (It is not about the assassination of radio host Alan Berg there by the Aryan Brotherhood in 1984).

Filmed in 1992, the cast includes some notable names from the decade.

The facial expressions Mason directs toward G. Gordon Liddy are priceless. Better yet, Liddy stoically inhabits his own political/media personality with dialogue and body language- the original right-wing firebrand.

Also interesting to see Mariett Hartley and Montel Williams cast early on in their careers.

Burr delivers some astute subpoena-serving and courtroom dialogue, even if plot credulity is a stretch.

Raymond Burr and the team are called in to defend Mariette Hartley, a friend of Barbara Hale's who is a psychologist with call in talk show on a talk radio station run by Regis Philbin. When Philbin is shot to death, Hartley is arrested for his murder.

One big problem with Perry Mason: The Case Of The Telltale Talk Show Host is the casting of Regis Philbin as the victim. Of course as they go in Perry Mason movies there are loads of alternative suspects. Philbin was going to revamp his whole station format and that got all of his stars very upset. Now Regis is a great host of a talk show himself, but as a no good slime bag of a station owner, well let's face it, the man is not an actor.

In this episode we see who murders Philbin, it's a contract killing and Hartley is rather elaborately framed for the crime. The hit-man however can't get to his money right away and as it turns out he's one unstable fellow. I would think you would need better nerves for that line of work. Anyway his instability gives away the individual who hires him. In fact the very elaborateness of the crime should give you some idea of the murderer if you look down the cast list.

Still it's a good entry in the Mason series, but I really would not have cast someone with that big a reputation as a nice guy as the mean victim, especially not someone who couldn't be mean on screen if he tried.

6/10 - Perry and the gang are back for an entertaining whodunnit