After 21 years, Law and Order is going off the air.
I haven’t watched LandO Prime in close to ten years – since Angie Harmon left, maybe Elisabeth Roehm’s first season, if memory serves. The show had some left-of-center sympathies back in its early years – which didn’t seem all that out of place during its first decade. You’d expect a show about NASCAR drivers not to be conservative?
There are those who paint the show with broad brush based entirely on the past ten years or so of over-the-top lefty sympathies…:
Does anybody really care that Law & Order is finally going off the air after 21 years? I don’t sense the pangs of nostalgia that usually accompany such an announcement. News that Mary Tyler Moore, Cheers or M*A*S*H were going dark prompted lots of Essays About The Show’s Enormous Cultural Impact. Law & Order? Not so much.
The show squandered a pretty powerful legacy; had it left the air after 12 years, it might have gotten a bigger send-off. The show is the father of the police procedural drama; the success of LandO helped launch a slew of other near-clones (CSI) and derivatives (House), and, indirectly, a cable network (TruTV and its real-life procedural fare).
And for all the show’s definite liberal bias this past ten years or so – which was getting unbearable even then – the show did have its moments of powerful balance. Its episode on the death penalty, done about the time New York reinstated capital punishment early in Sam Watterson’s tenure on the show, was an excellent, balanced piece on the ambivalence about the practice. It even did a show, during Angie Harmon’s hitch, that may have been one of the very few I’ve ever seen on network television on portraying the case for the right to keep and bear arms.
Of course, that was over a decade ago. I’ve seen maybe three episodes of LandO since then; the show ran out of gas about the time the opening credits started displaying “INSERT NAME HERE” in the “Junior DA” and “Younger Cop” slots. And as the creative fumes sputtered out, the show turned to a constant diet of conservaitve boogypeople – Ann Coulter standins and “militias” and crazed Christians stacking up abortion doctors like cordwood. I’d imagine that someone learning about America from Law and Order would think the right wing in America is dangerous.
First suspect: Someone of a liberal protected group. But he/she not only turns out to be innocent, but is kind of a hero.
Real criminal: White christian businessman (or something similiar).
yes and yes. I too used to be a big fan of the show, never missed it. I especially like the first half, the police procedurals. They seemed so realistic. You have this dead body in the middle of a huge city, at first you have no idea who they are or what happened, and just by pounding the pavement you get closer to the truth.
I stopped watching when it to the point it seemed like the script was simply reading from Daily Kos posts.
Too bad Angie Harmon wasn’t here for the Repub Convention. I asked my wife if Angie need a place to stay could she stay at our house and she said “yes”. Damn.
a slew of other near-clones (CSI)
Another one I just recently got sucked into is Criminal Minds – a show about an FBI profiling unit that gets called all over the country to hunt and catch serial killers. Holy crap, does that show have some good writing. Granted, you have to set aside the “criminal investigations don’t work this quickly or smoothly” reality much like you do with CSI and all their lab testing (or for that matter, anything having to do with computers/internet/technology on 24). If you can do that, each episode is a great ride.
You could bet the rent money that whenever a white, straight, right-of-center character appeared in the first five minutes of L and O, that they were the guilty party. It was just like the being able to predict that a non-recurring character on Star Trek was going to buy it when ever they were part of a landing party that left the Enterprise. I saw it pointed out earlier today, that many, many more abortion providers were killed on twenty years of L and O than were killed in real life. So much for ‘ripped from the headlines’.
The one thing that was realistic, that Progressives found inspiring, I found chilling. ADA Watterson’s character was prone to prosecuting people not for what they’d done, but for how he felt about it.
The prosecuting attorney’s duty is not merely to convict, but to do justice. It damned sure isn’t to advance societal change by bring “creative” criminal charges against disfavored individuals.
The one thing that was realistic, that Progressives found inspiring, I found chilling. ADA Watterson’s character was prone to prosecuting people not for what they’d done, but for how he felt about it.
Or where he’d twist the language of a statute in order to bring the Greedy Executive from Evil Company, Inc. TM up on murder charges because a patient who used their product killed someone or a crazed killer claims his insanity was caused by pollution or lack of health care. I once flirted with the idea of creating a podcast or vcast called “Law & Order: On Appeal” after each episode where Jack McCoy got a questionable conviction showing how some of the more questionable convictions would likely get overturned on appeal.
Another one I just recently got sucked into is Criminal Minds – a show about an FBI profiling unit that gets called all over the country to hunt and catch serial killers.
Sounds a little bit like The Profiler from the 1990s.