y all accounts, the new Perry Mason is vastly different from the old Perry Mason. The Perry Mason we all know was a cool-headed attorney, rarely wrong in his convictions, who could chase down the truth without so much as breaking sweat. Played by Raymond Burr, Mason solved 271 mysteries on TV and a further 26 in television movies. The man was an unbeatable instrument of virtue. But things are different now. HBO has reimagined Perry Mason in classic Prestige TV style. There is no episodic slickness to be found here. This is a younger, scrappier, Depression-era Mason – more Chinatown than CBS – played by a version of Matthew Rhys who looks as if he has just been thrown down the world’s most ostentatiously dangerous concrete staircase. It spreads a single case across eight episodes. It is both darker and grittier than its predecessor. With early reviews raving about the new Perry Mason, it is only a matter of time before more detective shows are given prestigious cable prequels. I have five suggestions of where to go next. Quincy, ME When Quincy began in 1976, he was played by a then 54-year-old Jack Klugman. Over the course of the series, it is revealed that he – a forensic pathologist who lives on a boat and has the ability to solve murders on his own without any assistance from the police department – was once as a captain in the US navy. Surely this deserves a series of its own. Set it in 1950 during the Korean war. Some of his crew are bumped off by an unseen murderer, forcing Quincy into the world of forensic pathology for the first time. It would be paranoid. It would be tense. It would be gory. And don’t forget that Quincy’s wife died of cancer before the first episode, too. Maybe she could be stranded at home alone during her treatment. It would be so bleak. Everyone would love it. Bergerac Forget the cuddly version of the Channel Islands detective series you remember, because Bergerac’s real origin was much bleaker. Don’t forget, he only ended up moving to Jersey after a catastrophically tragic period of his life. He had succumbed to alcoholism after a harrowing divorce, and badly injured his leg chasing a suspect while drunk. Now, that’s a 2020 prequel if ever I heard one. Let’s have a whole series where Bergerac is a raging drunk, forcing everyone out of his life with his horrible, out-of-control behaviour. Let’s have him vomit three times an episode, and include plenty of scenes where he wordlessly rages at an uncaring God in a rainstorm. It would be the hit of the year. Monk There is no way you could make a detective series where the protagonist’s depression and obsessive compulsive disorder was played largely for laughs – “The defective detective” ran the tagline – now. It would be seen as flippant and tone deaf by today’s standards. But that is not to say you can’t make a prequel. Don’t forget, Monk was forced into retirement when the murder of his wife exacerbated his conditions. That should be the new show. No crimes to solve. No suspects to interrogate. Just one man, in the immediate aftermath of the worst trauma of his life, battling against a terrifying tidal wave of mental illness that overwhelms him to the point of suffocation on a permanent basis. It would win every Emmy going. Diagnosis: Murder Now, sure, Dick Van Dyke’s cheery doctor character might seem like the picture of carefree breeziness, but dig a little further back and you will find nothing but non-stop misery. A decade before the series opens, his wife died of cancer, in so much pain that he considered euthanising her. Before that, he served in the Korean war. Before that, when he was 10 years old, his policeman father was murdered by his partner. This is where we should set the prequel. The year is 1935. America is gripped by the Great Depression, ravaged by lawlessness following prohibition and struggling to distance itself from growing unrest in Europe. One small town’s last shot at redemption is obliterated when its one good cop is murdered by a colleague. Against this nightmarish whirlwind, newly orphaned 10-year-old Mark Sloan finds catharsis in the bareknuckle world of vigilante justice. HBO: make this now. Murder, She Wrote Apart from a dead husband, who died after a long and loving life surrounded by an army of caring family, Jessica Fletcher has no dark history to excavate. She has a family who love her. She had a successful career as a mystery novelist. She was briefly a congresswoman. She makes friends easily and even the suspects she tracks down treat her genially. But television demands a prequel, so let’s rewrite her history. In the new Murder, She Wrote, Fletcher is a 45-year-old heroin-addicted member of the Manson Family who sells poetry written in her own blood to the counter culture in the vain hope that she will raise enough money to pay for her cancer treatment. She also lives in an abattoir, is plagued with visions of dead children and has to eat broken glass for sustenance. Truly, this is the show that 2020 deserves. Perry Mason available on Sky Atlantic and streaming service NOW TV from 22 June