The “‘Perry Mason’ moment”—the climactic “j’accuse!” in which a witness collapses on the stand, confesses to the crime and clears the actual defendant—has become such standard stuff of courtroom drama that many viewers think it happens all the time. It doesn’t.
But as a pop-culture trope, it has probably helped sustain the legacy of author Erle Stanley Gardner’s 1933 creation, the subject of a perennially successful series of quasi-pulp novels and, most famously, the ’50s-’60s series starring Raymond Burr. There have been other adaptations, too, of course. In each one, shockingly, Mason was actually a lawyer.
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