“Our job is to fight for the show,” reveals executive producer Susan Downey on the goal for any good producer on series like their period drama “Perry Mason” and fantasy “Sweet Tooth.” For our recent webchat alongside her Team Downey partner Amanda Burrell, she adds, “We’re trying to be critical and trying to make sure we’re keeping the true north and supporting the vision of our showrunners and our filmmakers, and if you’re taking risks along the way and you’re doing things that you know make you a little bit nervous, then that’s certainly what we strive for. But you really hope that they work. So, it is nice to finally get Season 2 of both shows out into the world and see that people have been responding favorably.” Watch our exclusive video interview above.
“Perry Mason” was created by Rolin Jones (“Friday Night Lights,” “Interview with the Vampire”) and Ron Fitzgerald (“Friday Night Lights”) under the Team Downey banner, shepherded by co-founder Downey (with her husband Robert Downey Jr.) and Burrell who serves as production company president. The period drama just concluded its second season, with Jack Amiel and Michael Begler coming on-board as new showrunners. It is based on the novels by Erle Stanley Gardner, which were most famously adapted in the classic CBS television series (1957–1966) starring Emmy winner Raymond Burr and stars Emmy winner Matthew Rhys (“The Americans”) as the titular criminal defense lawyer, with Juliet Rylance, Chris Chalk, Shea Whigham and Justin Kirk co-starring. Its neo-noir first season traced the origins of the famed defense lawyer over its freshman season, as a down-and-out and divorced private investigator struggles with his trauma from The Great War. Season 2 opens in the wake of the high profile trial involving a kidnapped child, as Mason begins to establish himself professionally, while a dark cloud of crime and conspiracy begins to loom over a bustling Los Angeles.
“We had an opportunity with Season 2 to evolve the world of ‘Perry Mason.’ Season 1 was a lot of setup. We had to get Perry to even be a lawyer by the end of the season, he had found a version of victory for his first case,” Downey explains. “We really looked at it through what we wanted to do with our characters this season. We also had this incredible opportunity with these new showrunners coming on with Jack and Michael, and they were massive fans of Season 1. However, they felt that there was an opportunity to bring in the sunshine, and that is in a lot of different areas. That’s in the visual look, that’s in the tone of leaning into the kind of wit and humor that we used to balance some of the harder hitting topics that we play around with, and we got to expand the world of the ‘haves and the have nots’ of 1933, the worst year of the Depression.”
Along with its flagship HBO prestige drama, Team Downey boasts a full slate of projects, including the upcoming “The Sympathizer” (from Korean auteur Park Chan-wook) and “Helltown” (with director Edward Berger, starring Emmy nominee Oscar Isaac) and their Children’s and Family Emmy-winning post-apocalyptic fantasy series “Sweet Tooth,” which just premiered its second season on Netflix. Set in a fictional world in which a virus has killed a majority of the world’s human population leading to the emergence of hybrid babies that are born part human and part animal, the series was created by Jim Mickle, based on the DC comic book of the same name by Jeff Lemire, starring Nonso Anozie, Christian Convery, Adeel Akhtar, Stefania LaVie Owen and Dania Ramirez. “It’s such a wild dream because it really is a bold show. I don’t think there’s any other ‘dear boy’ shows out there. It was a bold swing for us at every turn,” Burrell admits. “Being able to do a second season was just a dream and we couldn’t be more thrilled that there’s a Season 2.”
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