Binge Much?

I’ve probably mentioned somewhere in my ramblings how much I love to binge watch TV series, especially older dramas. People inevitably experience some level of culture shock when watching a show set in a timeframe or location other than their own. For your reading pleasure, I’ve collected a of few of my own culture shocks experienced while binge watching the 1957 Perry Mason detective and court procedural series:

Smoking cigarettes: In the US, cigarette smoking in most places is nearly a thing of the past, so it was a discordant note to see that everyone smoked cigarettes, all the time, everywhere they went. They smoked in cars and elevators. They smoked in the office and in restaurants during meals. They routinely smoked in bed, with nary a smoke alarm in sight. Smoking was even permitted on airplanes back in the day.

Guns: I’m not kidding here, everyone was packing heat. People had guns in handbags and coat pockets. Every desk had a gun in one of the drawers. Husbands made sure their wives had a gun for protection – from what, coyotes in Los Angeles? These people never walked anywhere, and they were never seen in questionable areas like back alleys or pool halls, unless they were committing the murder du jour. In one episode a guy on the witness stand was asked if he had a gun, and with a surprised expression exclaimed, “Well, sure! I keep it loaded, under my pillow at night!” And there I was thinking that not having smoke alarms was risky.

Manner of death: As you might expect, the first choice of murder weapon was a gun. The second most popular murder weapon, oddly enough, was a car. Cars regularly went over the Southern California cliffs and were subsequently found to be either in neutral (meaning the car was pushed over the cliff) or with the accelerator wired down (here the car was raced over the cliff). In either case, there was somebody crunched up in the car. Getting bashed on the head was also on the most-favored murder weapon list. Poison was a distant fourth place.

Due process: There was an episode where the key piece of evidence was a fur wrap. The woman on trial had been diagnosed as having two separate personalities: the “bad girl” who knew about the other personality; and the “good girl” who was clueless that she had someone else in her head. The defense was that she couldn’t possibly be the culprit because she was allergic to fur! A psychiatrist hypnotized the woman right there on the witness stand and got the bad girl personality to come out first. It was pretty clear that the bad girl had committed the murder. The psychiatrist then got the good girl personality to come out, at which point Perry threw the fur wrap at the woman and she nearly collapsed sneezing and choking. Chaos ensued! Lawyers eventually left the courtroom tsking together over the moral question of how the bad girl personality could be sentenced for the crime without harming the good girl personality. Heads were shaken.

There were so many more, but you get the picture.