Law and Order Probably Doesn’t Like You
August 3, 2010, 5:29 pm
Posted by Cathleen Kaveny
Stanley Fish’s entertaining and insightful take on the series that dominates the waves of cable tv.
I stopped watching long ago; at the beginning, the series was good about police/DA cooperation on ordinary crime.
More and more,, it focused on “high profile” cases -”ripped from today’s headlines” so of course, the powerful were villains.
But that’s not the usual of the CJ system -far from it – and it became kind of tedious to me.
Particularly in its earlier episodes (I suspect they’ve been through several generations of writrs as well as cast members), the church was sort of a constant presence – just about every episode worked a Catholic hospital or parish somewhere into the plot, frequently in a positive way. Whoever those writers were, they seemed to be admirers of the church’s social justice and outreach ministries.
You needed to switch on Boston Legal for some good old-fashioned hierarchy-skewering :-)
The plots may have been formulaic, but the casting of Law and Order was brilliant. Those New York stage actors who played the villains and the victims were often able to create memorable multi-dimensional characters from very spare material. And it didn’t even matter that some of them kept reappearing in different roles. They were so clever and worked so sensitively they never seemed the same twice. One thing I always regretted: the credits were run so fast they were almost unreadable. Those wonderful players deserved better.
I don’t think L&O ever regained the special flavor brought to it by Jerry Orbach once he left.
I thought S. Epatha Merkerson consistently played one of the best parts – and look at her credits: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S._Epatha_Merkerson
If you wanted a real life look at the courts, Alan Arkin in the first two years of “100 Centre St.” shows how power reaches into justice far better than Law and Order.
I am surprised that he did not discuss Michael Moriarty’s departure and accusation that Dick Wolfe had caved in to demands from then AG Janet Reno regarding the program’s “violence”.
This was denied, however, I did find Moriarty’s character to have an authentic moral centre. (and since he was originally from Canada the spelling is CENTRE not CENTER) :p