{"id":10975,"date":"2010-05-19T07:36:04","date_gmt":"2010-05-19T12:36:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=10975"},"modified":"2010-05-19T07:36:04","modified_gmt":"2010-05-19T12:36:04","slug":"dung-dung","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=10975","title":{"rendered":"Dung DUNG"},"content":{"rendered":"

After 21 years, Law and Order <\/em>is going off the air.<\/p>\n

I haven’t watched LandO Prime<\/em> in close to ten years – since Angie Harmon left, maybe Elisabeth Roehm’s first season, if memory serves.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 You’d expect a show about NASCAR drivers not to be conservative?<\/p>\n

There are those who paint the show with broad brush based entirely on the past ten years or so<\/a> of over-the-top lefty sympathies…:<\/p>\n

Does anybody really care that Law & Order is finally going off the air after 21 years? I don\u2019t 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\u2019s Enormous Cultural Impact. Law & Order? Not so much.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The show squandered a pretty powerful legacy; had it left the air after 12 years, it might have gotten a bigger send-off.\u00a0 The show is the father of the police procedural drama; the success of LandO<\/em> helped launch a slew of other near-clones (CSI<\/em>) and derivatives (House<\/em>), and, indirectly, a cable network (TruTV and its real-life procedural fare).<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Of course, that was <\/em>over a decade ago.\u00a0 I’ve seen maybe three episodes of LandO<\/em> 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I’d imagine that someone learning about America from Law and Order<\/em> would think the right wing in America is dangerous.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.\u00a0 The show had some left-of-center sympathies back in its early years – which didn’t seem all that out of place during […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10975","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-n-e"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10975","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10975"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10975\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10976,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10975\/revisions\/10976"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10975"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10975"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10975"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}