Cool and Lam

Erle Stanley Gardner is famous for creating Perry Mason. Apparently, he also wanted to see a television version of two of his detective characters, Cool and Lam, and this pilot episode was all that ever became of that dream. It's interesting that Gardner himself introduces the show...and he does it on one of the sets for "Perry Mason"!

Bertha Cool and Donald Lam are the two title detectives...a more unusual pair of dicks I cannot recall having seen. Bertha is a big, rather told old broad and Donald is a pipsqueak...and he spends much of the episode being beaten up and threatened. Why would this be? After all, their case seems pretty ordinary...to find a missing lady. And, finding her seemed to be no trouble at all...so why all the goon tactics? Well, if you're really curious, it's on YouTube and you can see it for yourself.

I think the biggest reason this series never was made was that the show seemed very talky...though this could also be said for "Perry Mason" (1958). In addition, while the story had a few nice twists, it also wasn't super interesting and the characters seemed a bit limited. An interesting attempt....but not much more.

When they put this together, they were banking on Gardner's huge success with Perry Mason could be transferred to his other literary creations, private detectives Cool & Lam, they being the stars of a dozen or so successful books.

But the actual execution is problematic. Cool is a big wide matron with white hair who deals with clients and Lam is a very short man who does the detective work, and getting all the lumps. They look comical together, which runs against the overall material because you must take the crime solvers seriously for it to work. These two are more suitable for a burlesque routine. They have little charisma. It's as if they take it for granted you know these characters well already. She's supposed to be a cheapskate. okay, but she says a "cheap" thing, even when it's unnecessary-again and again, like an excuse for a personality.

But there isn't enough time to really develop any chemistry between the leads or for that matter, the story either. There's far too many clues and details to remember for a less than half hour story. If this had been in an hour format, it would flow better and been less confusing. Gardner himself (sitting in the Perry Mason office set on the sound stage at Paisano productions) makes the pitch for sponsors at the opening, but even he seems in a hurry.

Maybe this pair work out in reading their stories, but they're too cutsey and fake to be taken seriously enough here, even if the intention was to deliver a lightweight, Runyonesque farce.

This show is okay. Just okay. Worth watching and would probably have been better liked if it wasn't being compared to the writer's other, much more successful novels and TV/radio series, the Perry Mason mysteries. Worth watching though and better than most "failed" TV pilots of its age.