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Welcome to Big Dave Brockman's
Perry Mason TV Series Wiki

This is a Wiki.

That means you can edit and add content. Our topic is the Perry Mason TV series of the 50s and 60s. There is a page for each episode. With your help, these pages can be filled with interesting and useful information about the shows. We'll be adding material as time permits. You're invited to contribute as well. For information on how, please see the About This Wiki page. Visit the Wiki Sandbox, to practice posting, and then browse through the Basic Editing and Documentation Index pages. There are also many closed pages here on a variety of topics. If you would like to contribute material for these pages, please send it to us at acrodave2@gmail.com.

Wiki Recent Changes:

To help build a Wiki community, please enter your name or a handle in the [Author box] and a very brief [Summary] when posting. We have many international members here on PMTVS, so we suggest posting ambiguous dates in this format: 05 March 2022. When using the specialized text editing functions be sure to click on the [Highlight] switch (found in the upper right above the text edit box). Also, don't overlook using the [Preview] button before posting!

Thanks to the Database, every episode page has an actor picture beside the credits. The picture is randomly chosen from characters available in the episode. Click Show Pictures for the Episode Actor Pictures section. There are over 1000 actors and 1300 characters available.

If you have a question about the series . . .
try the search box (below), and it will scan several web sites for clues.

Multiple Perry Mason site search

Search (A) this site, (B) The Perry Mason TV Show Book and (C) Bill Storrer's PMESG site. But for searching just this PMTVS site alone, you may get better results using the Wiki Search box that is found in the upper right corner or see search in the footer area, below.

The Backstory

"Big Dave" Brockman

was a fan of the original black-and-white (and one color episode) Perry Mason TV series since the show first appeared in the fifties. There was a lapse of many years whilst Big Dave toiled in various salt mines, but, after escaping to freedom, he was able to reconnect with the show in 1985 via the TBS cable superstation. Alas, they stopped running the show in 1996. The last national airing was on The Hallmark Channel. Read about it in the Hallmark Log.

The original

Perry Mason TV Series PMTVS website began in the fall of 1996. You can view some early pages from the site at the Internet Archive here. My, how things have changed!

Where to watch.

The show is still available on some local stations including MeTV and FETV. Check your listings. Also Hulu and DailyMotion and Paramount+ and Reelgood and Freevee have episodes online.

What else to watch. In June 2020 a reboot of the show, set in the 1930s, started on HBO.

Perry Mason on DVD . . .
In 2008 a special 50th anniversary collection seven disc set was released. In 2016 Paramount bundled the individual seasons as Perry Mason: The Complete Series. It was then repackaged and re-released in 2020. Also in 2016 Perry Mason: The Complete Movie Collection was released. CAN & USA are Region 1 and NTSC. EUR is Region 2 and PAL

Many famous people

have appeared in Perry Mason episodes, some before they were famous. It's fun to try and spot these people and then check the credits to see if you were right. Using the Show Finder might be fun and helpful in doing this. This game eventually led to Big Dave's self-professed, obsessive habit of collecting cast lists from the credits for several years and we now have the casts from all 271 episodes in the database featured here. All the cast lists were taken from the trailing credits except for episode #218, The Case of the Bullied Bowler, which has only partial credits. The cast list for this episode has been recreated from other sources.

One reason the show holds up

is because it's often set in the familiar territory of Southern California. It's like time travel. The very first episode, The Case of the Restless Redhead, featured a character who was living in Big Dave's hometown, Riverside, California. There are no actual scenes in Riverside but there are lots of references. In one scene, Perry comments to famous movie star Helene Chaney (Gloria Henry) that Riverside is a very interesting place. The Media Page has an audio clip. This scene is missing in cut episodes of the show.

In it's heyday,

Perry Mason was shown in many countries. It was quite popular in Germany but, as you might expect, was a little different. The biggest change is that everybody speaks German. Leah, a fan from Germany, explains that German actors were used to dub the voices. She says this leads to interesting situations when an actor's voice is familiar from other roles. For example, Perry Mason sounds like Bill Cosby and Fred Flintstone! Engelbert von Nordhausen is the dubber, and you can "meet" him here (site in German, use Google Translate). To add to the situation, German words tend to be longer than English ones. The lips say "Goodbye" as the voice says "Auf wiedersehen." Finally, the episodes are renamed in German. Leah has provided this list. It's fun to see how the titles changed. Google Translate is recommended.