f you are starved of prestige television at the moment, you could do worse than catch up with Perry Mason (Monday, 9pm, Sky Atlantic), the HBO reboot of the 50s/60s-straddling defence attorney drama. Mason is a grizzled gumshoe now instead of a slick lawyer, and keeps staring into the middle distance and thinking intently about war instead of, I don’t know, filing the exact right paperwork. But the core propulsion is still there: a mysterious murder; an unnerving feeling Mason can’t shake that the wrong person has been fingered; twists on twists on twists. Matthew Rhys plays Mason. It’s … awful. Well, hmm. I understand that recommending something bad is a cardinal sin of a TV preview, but bear with me. Because Perry Mason is bad to the exact same extent that it is good, and that makes it incredibly interesting and curiously watchable as a result. First, the good: it’s possibly one of the most visually gorgeous TV series ever produced, a Kodachrome retelling of 1930s LA, with all the stars so beautiful that charisma sizzles off them like a steak, and sin, a constant undercurrent of sin, sin and dirtiness bubbling under the streets like hot lava. So that is good. Rhys – who takes Mason to a haunted, abstract un-place, always alert and noticing things until, with one crumple of the eyebrow, he’s away and thinking again, about his son or the horror of the trenches or the crushing, unshakeable debt of his family home – is excellent, as are most of the cast: John Lithgow plays man-who-likes-the-sound-of-his-own-voice like no one else on Earth; Tatiana Maslany (Orphan Black) steals every scene she’s in as a fervent radio evangelist; and Gayle Rankin (Glow) has a seriously unnerving turn as a grieving mother with a secret. All of this: very good. I want this to be good. I want to watch Matthew Rhys sneak around old LA with a long-lens camera, discovering human bones in fireplaces. This is what I want. Sadly, Perry Mason frequently clunks like a van dropped from a scrapyard magnet. There’s an evangelical-religion-is-bad subplot based round Maslany’s “Sister Alice” that exceeds the quota of earnestly scripted bombastic sermons I can sit through before completely tuning out. Mason keeps going to Mexico for some reason, though his relationship with Veronica Falcón’s Lupe Gibbs is just about intriguing enough to maintain it. (In the first episode, she shags him so hard he gets wedged between the bed and the wall, and that is what I want from a gritty noir reboot! Give me more of that!) John Lithgow’s EB starts losing his memory out of absolutely nowhere and it adds absolutely nothing to proceedings. Everyone is dressed so similarly it’s hard to tell who is who, and you always know something sinister is about to happen whenever a man with a boxer’s nose walks whistling into a scene. And it leans – still, in 2020 – on those old character tropes: Chris Chalk’s by-the-book cop pressured by corruption from up above; Juliet Rylance’s hypercompetent sidekick used as a secretary. We’ve been spoiled for good TV in recent years, and Perry Mason is fighting back hard against that. It has forged a new genre of its own – call it “prestige trash” – but is weirdly enjoyable for it.