Law & Order, s8 (1997-1998)

The Law & Order franchise continues its twisty ways in the eighth season. There is some increasingly ongoing misbegotten attempt to humanize the principals. Detective Curtis’s wife is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and begins to deteriorate. Lt. Van Buren files a lawsuit alleging discrimination when she was passed over for a promotion. Lennie’s daughter is in trouble with the law over drugs. These threads are random, sideline themes advanced even as single throwaway lines in an episode. They feel mechanical but they can be affecting—or I am a ridiculous softy. On the other hand, we are explicitly left hanging on all of them. Interested to see whether and if so how they are resolved in the next season. There’s a two-part tie-in episode here with Homicide—the first part is a Law & Order episode and the second a Homicide, with all the orange-filtered jittery japing style of a show I never cared much for. Some of the Law & Order episodes in this season I could recognize from the very first scenes and sometimes even knew the line on which the plot turned, such as one where Lt. Van Buren turns to a key suspect in a murder and says, “Hello, my brother.” Another, starting in a rooftop parking lot, involves clitoridectomies—surgical removal of the clitoris, an ancient barbaric practice in some cultures. It’s feeling ripped from the headlines, as usual. You can tell because, in the more sensitive ones, the disclaimer is the first thing you see. Other episodes I was not even sure I had seen before. They must not have appeared as much in reruns, because I faithfully watched them for years. Dr. Emil Skoda (J.K. Simmons) is introduced as the new forensic psychologist, a hard-ass replacing the more touchy-feely Elizabeth Olivet. Trump gets name-checked occasionally. In one case involving real estate shenanigans, Curtis says, “If the other owners jump on the bandwagon, Donald Trump Jr. goes right down the tube.” For the record, Lennie, as usual, bites off the best and most bitter observations about the human condition. “I guess the macarena wasn’t exciting enough for them,” he says one time, reminding us this series arguably had its heyday in the ‘90s. But the formula stands up—about 20 minutes of police procedure and 20 minutes of a trial, with lots of variation involving plea bargains and other legal maneuvering. It stands up and would keep me loyal to the show for years. But I would never be as happy again with the casting decisions and other developments. From now on Jack McCoy is a fixture and all of his assistants will be beautiful babes he may or may not bed. I think Claire Kincaid is the only we’re sure of? He’s still losing (a minority of) his cases. As the show went on he would tend to win them all. We have probably reached the ceiling of Law & Order by this point in the franchise, but it also has a surprisingly durable, high floor. It may be starting to feel somewhat stale, but the scripts remain zippy and the cases complex and interesting. You could do worse with a 20th-century crime show—say, Homicide.

Law & Order, s7 (1996-1997)

Law & Order was well-primed for the mid-'90s surge of interest in true-crime, with the OJ Simpson and JonBenet Ramsey cases occurring bang-bang even as DNA and other forensic technology burgeoned. All of a sudden cases were being solved that had never been solved, innocents freed from prison, and everyone seemed to have detailed opinions about any given case. The show played to the interest simply by sticking resolutely to the formula that got it there, focusing on police and court roles in complicated cases more than characters, willy-nilly removing another mainstay the previous season in ADA Claire Kincaid (Jill Hennessy)—killing her off, in fact, which ended her tenure absolutely as this is one show that does not do flashbacks. She was replaced by ADA Jamie Ross (Carey Lowell), unfortunately introducing a bad habit of making that role a series of highly attractive women. ADA Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston) annoyingly beds them all, or so we may surmise because at least the show tends to be reasonably subtle about it. To be sure, there are character arcs happening all over the peripheries: Detective Rey Curtis (Benjamin Bratt) is a self-righteous religious conservative going through a separation from his wife. Detective Lennie Briscoe (Jerry Orbach) had an alcoholic relapse at the end of the previous season and now there's concern about his sobriety. Ross is divorced from her former law partner, a high-flying defense attorney who plays head games with her over custody of their daughter. One of the best episodes in this season is the finale, in which DA Adam Schiff (Steven Hill) has to decide whether to pull the plug on his dying wife. But the primary focus remains the twisting, turning cases that confront the principals and viewers with each episode. There's usually a murder in the first scene before the titles but it can go anywhere from there. A number of episodes are more about legal principles than guilt or innocence in the specific cases at hand. I thought the prosecutors seemed to lose more often, or at best come up with mixed results, more so than I think would be the case later in the series, when they were regular winners, the New York Yankees of New York City jurisprudence. It's actually nice to see McCoy lose a few. This season does have perhaps the nadir of the whole franchise in a three-part arc that takes the crew to Los Angeles—not a very interesting case, and little point forcing in the West Coast setting, especially across the interminable, padded-out three episodes. To be scrupulously fair, as nadirs go it's still better than the high points of many other series. As always, the show attracted a good many obvious but unfamiliar talents from within the New York theatrical world, one of its great secrets. Various up-and-comers with later careers can also be spotted here, such as Edie Falco as a defense attorney, but there didn't seem to be as many in this season. The most tantalizing who-is-that-anyway for me was Reiko Aylesworth, whose face kept bothering me for a whole episode until I later recalled through the miracle of IMDb that she was Michelle Dessler on 24. In its seventh season Law & Order is all product, a juggernaut coming into its own ratings-wise with the dread spinoffs not many years away now. As product, it is A-1.

Law & Order, s6 (1995-1996)

Earlier this year the first Law & Order spinoff, Special Victims Unit, was renewed for its 21st season and also broadcast a 457th episode, thus overtaking the 20 seasons and 456 episodes of the original for third place on the list of longest-running TV shows, behind The Simpsons (30/662 and counting) and Gunsmoke (20/535). No doubt producer Dick Wolf ("awhoooo!") is proud and happy to have two titles in that top 5 but I'm less sure we as viewers can count it as a good thing overall. On the other hand, like The Simpsons (and unlike Gunsmoke, Special Victims Unit, or Lassie), Law & Order at least can still stake claim to genuine TV innovation, so there's that.

Yet the one thing readily apparent from the sixth season of Law & Order is a willingness to play it safe and fall back on tried and true strategies of ensemble 'n' episode TV. Even the signature wrinkle of focusing on institutional roles rather than individual characters is starting to feel a little humdrum. The show's original junior detective, Mike Logan (Chris Noth), is suddenly gone, disappeared for an incident briefly shown in the last five minutes of the previous season. He's replaced by Reynaldo Curtis (Benjamin Bratt) and predictably a bunch of episodes track the awkwardness of his jelling with senior detective Lenny Briscoe (Jerry Orbach).

Law & Order, s5 (1994-1995)

In 1994, before cable and then streaming sent it all sprawling (disruption, baby, it's a virtue now), it was still critically important for any TV series to reach a fifth season because that opened the door to rerun syndication Valhalla, extending into perpetuity (The Simpsons, for example, is still going and so is its rerun industry, post-10th-season naysayers notwithstanding). That year, 1994, was also important in the annals of broadcast crime and true-crime because in June O.J. Simpson allegedly committed the double homicide for which he was acquitted, and the whole riveting debacle—from the slow-motion police chase on live TV to the reading of the verdict 16 months later—radically changed lots of things about crime and broadcast and celebrity. The coming of DNA evidence as indisputable arbiter was another big part of the change, resulting in a resurgence in the popular appetite for crime fare, especially true-crime fare, propelled on a daily basis in large part by the ongoing O.J. case (and then into the maw of the JonBenet Ramsey mystery, where it appears to have consumed itself in a way, though leaving an entire true-crime industry behind still visible on multiple cable channels). Law & Order was well positioned to take advantage of these currents, even as it receded some next to the flood of documentaries in the Bill Kurtis style. But that didn't matter much because now Law & Order reruns were always there waiting for you on the A&E channel when you were done with the cold-case files or whatnot.

With the arrival of Sam Waterston as ADA Jack McCoy, who would never leave the show from that point on, Law & Order took more of a cautious running-in-place kind of approach. There are still episodes in the "ripped from the headlines" mode (and always would be, at varying degrees of intensity season to season), but a couple of other themes are starting to creep more into prominence. One is a familiar conventional safe approach to a TV series, focusing on the ensemble nature of the cast and devoting time to personal character development. For example, there's an episode this season where Captain Anita Van Buren (S. Epatha Merkerson) shoots and kills an assailant off-hours and finds herself in deep dutch when the evidence doesn't match her story. Or, almost immediately, McCoy begins an affair with his assistant Claire Kincaid (Jill Hennessy). This affair is particularly weak sauce in the flagship show (though stuff like it would be more like the staple in the spinoffs), but at least it never dominates. In fact, the affair between McCoy and Kincaid was virtually invisible to me as I first encountered the show and watched it for years mostly in reruns, and it was only when I was going through this season systematically that I saw the subtle hints of chumminess between them for what they are. So lawyerly, so professional, so icky now.

Law & Order, s4 (1993-1994)

The fourth season of Law & Order—getting it across the finish line for rerun syndication, otherwise known as The Rest of Our Lives—was an active one in terms of the original strategy of focusing on specific justice system roles, occupied by shifting characters, rather than the other way round which most of TV did, at least as of the mid-'90s (Bob Newhart, Tom Selleck, William Shatner, etc.). So without preamble or explanation a white man and a black man (Dann Florek as chief of detectives Donald Cragen and Richard Brooks as second-chair ADA Paul Robinette, respectively) are replaced even before the start of the new season by a black woman and a white woman (S. Epatha Merkerson as chief of detectives Anita Van Buren and Jill Hennessy as second-chair ADA Claire Kincaid, respectively). Merkerson, of course, would turn out to be the most prolific player in the show, appearing in 391 episodes (counting one role in an episode from an earlier season as someone other than Van Buren—#3 Jerry Orbach has an earlier one-off like that too). There did not appear to be any hard feelings—Florek directed a few episodes in this season, and much later reappeared, again as Cragen, in 331 episodes of the spinoff Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (which this year will match the 20-season run of the flagship, and can pull ahead with one more renewal next spring). Mastermind Dick Wolf and crew get right to the backstory of Claire Kincaid and the clashes Van Buren faces with men who report to her. In terms of the staples of episode-based TV—stories, characters, production, and performances—Law & Order arrived practically hitting on all cylinders and the fourth season is no exception. One of the highlights is an epic confrontation, verging on super-heroic, between ADA Ben Stone (Michael Moriarty) and a rascally brilliant opponent in ex-con Phillip Swann (Zeljko Ivanek). Plus there are the usual intriguing if random markers of prescience, such as the Russian mafia operating in the background, or another oblique appearance by Donald Trump (I'm starting to understand the deep roots he holds in popular culture, even if he was never anything to me).

The biggest change of this season doesn't happen actually until the next—that is, the replacement of ADA Stone with Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston), who would go on to become #2 behind Merkerson for ubiquity in the show, appearing in 368 episodes. His domination / overstaying is an issue for later seasons, but because he essentially became the ADA associated with the show, inevitably it overshadowed Moriarty's work, which was every bit as good. In retrospect now it looks a little like some kind of mistake that was corrected, so I want to say something for Moriarty on his way out. I understand things look different on the inside of TV in terms of ratings considerations—what looks to us like "calling this rut a groove and going with it" too often misunderstands the rewarding commercial facts of a rut. It might well have hurt the show's popularity and even cut the run down earlier if they had swapped out Waterston for a third ADA sooner (and then exited him altogether from the show, please). I always wondered what Treat Williams would do with the role, for example. Moriarty and Waterston were both gifted theatrical actors leaning toward Method styles in approach. For players like that, a thundering righteous prosecutor is a dream horse of a role. Moriarty played his with a courtly grace and severity that felt like Ben Stone might have his origins in the South. Stone moved swiftly to use the justice system tools at his disposal, and when he was convinced he was right he sometimes strayed into gray areas of ethics and even law. Sometimes he just plain made mistakes. But he had compassion too and Law & Order screenplays often make ADAs more arbiters of justice, possessed of higher wisdom—or so they would like to think—than simply functioning bureaucrats (which may or may not be the reality, I wouldn't know). In many ways, Moriarty framed out the ADA role that would dominate the show and Waterston always worked within it. If anyone had known it would go 20 years, I wish they would have given Moriarty another one, brought in Waterston for only five, and then two others back of that (neither of them Linus Roache, please). But now I'm living in a dream world.

Law & Order, s3 (1992-1993)

The third season of Law & Order sees all its many potent strands continuing to come into sharp focus—it's practically at the top of its form now. The stories are fresh with news currents, and they are twisty, complicated, and satisfying—there's usually a dead person in the opening scene and always a court trial in the second half, but getting from here to there is never the same, nor are the results ever predictable. The casts and performances are great. It's not just the crimes and criminals that get attention. Sometimes they are dealt with perfunctorily while larger issues of justice and procedure are at stake. Notably, some of the hardest fought ones are still lost, a tendency that would fade some over the years as the show more and more accommodated the necessities of managing long-term hit TV. (Producer Dick Wolf and crew have succeeded at that too, as the inferior spinoff Special Victims Unit will match the longevity of the original if it's renewed this year.) The most important development in this season is the coming of Lenny Briscoe (Jerry Orbach), as the detective partner of Mike Logan (Chris Noth). After S. Epatha Merkerson and Sam Waterston, neither of whom has shown up yet (except Merkerson as someone other than her later character ... which happened with Orbach too for that matter) ... Lenny Briscoe would become the series' third most ubiquitous character, appearing across some 14 seasons. It's not hard to see the appeal. He just clicks in like he belongs. He is more recognizably New York City in his attitude and manner, with a memorable hangdog face, a bent for cynical quips, hints of a sad backstory, and something that is simply likable. Orbach was actually more of a Broadway song and dance man by trade but his aging face carried the new persona well, already used effectively for example by Woody Allen in Crimes and Misdemeanors a few years earlier. Neither Paul Sorvino nor George Dzundza had been happy as Logan's earlier partners. The show didn't suit their styles, for different reasons (and though they were both fine), but Orbach owns the role of Lenny Briscoe from the first scenes.

More telling for the natural strengths of the show, perhaps, is the use made of Dr. Elizabeth Olivet (Carolyn McCormick), a forensic psychologist and regular character introduced in the previous season, which offered a sophisticated wrinkle to the police procedural, a skillful binding element to tie the two sides of the premise—"the police who investigate crime, and the district attorneys who prosecute the offenders"—even more tightly together. This closing of this dramatic loop of the justice system was the single greatest innovation of Law & Order. Yet in many ways, here in the third season, the fine points are still being figured out. Olivet sheds a lot of light on the procedures, consulting with detectives and prosecutors alike, offering many interesting angles around insanity, competence, social welfare, and other legal matters. But, in perhaps the single most famous episode in the 20-year run of the show, which occurs in this season (it certainly seemed to be shown all the time in reruns) they go pell-mell into a reckless place, making her a victim. The case involves a creepy gynecologist who amuses himself by molesting and raping his patients, under the cover of local anesthetics given ostensibly for procedures. No doubt it has antecedents in a real case or cases. It smacks of a certain flavor of '80s and '90s true crime. And it's an opportunity to air out issues of rape and the credibility of accusers, so with incidental acute relevance at the moment, notably in the way it resolves. I wouldn't say the show cheats on the gravity—in the last scene, Olivet is seen in therapy session beginning to deal with it. But it still seems a terrible abuse of a character, even if she is back in further episodes with minimal fallout. Perhaps because so. Sometimes, maybe, using the power to traumatize and even kill major characters in a continuing series might be a little oversold. See also Ed McBain and many of his women characters. Or maybe I've just seen that episode too often.

Law & Order, s2 (1991-1992)

If the first season of Law & Order was a little better than I expected, the second season was a little worse. I'm sure part of it is that these episodes are so well-worn now, replayed over and over in the earliest flush that dominated the rerun circuit for many years—the way I've seen most of Law & Order. They are still working to make the pieces fit in the second season. In the first episode, Max Greevey (George Dzundza) is summarily assassinated and it's hello to Phil Cerreta (Paul Sorvino) as the new partner for Mike Logan (Chris Noth). It's also hello to Dr. Elizabeth Olivet (Carolyn McCormick), who works with Logan on his grief issues and then sticks around for another 86 episodes as the resident forensic psychology consultant. There's still a lot of churn going on, casting adjustments and other trial and error shots (prosecutors Ben Stone and Paul Robinette have a vicious tennis rivalry in one episode), but the main departure from what I expected is that the themes have shifted from the explosively topical and more into clockwork studies of the procedures, especially on the legal side. Intricacies of plea bargaining and other deal-making to work the system to mutual advantages (among at least prosecutors, defendants, victims, and the press) are often on display in the episodes of this season. For the district attorney's office, the defense attorneys, and often the criminals too, the wheeling and dealing is all part of business as usual.

Again, using New York on location as the setting is pitch-perfect—so much rich character from so many different directions. Also again—and true for most of the run of the series—the incidental casting can make for entertaining rounds of face spotting, as you never know who will show up. Some people I saw (all making good): Lewis Black as a pornographer, Allison Janney, Jerry Orbach as a defense attorney, Sam Rockwell, and Eli Wallach. Both of George Costanza's parents show up, in separate episodes (Jerry Stiller and Estelle Harris). Other parts of the formula are starting to lock in. The blackout-like sequence before the titles, usually the reveal of a crime, usually ending on a snappy hard-bitten line, e.g., "Education. It's a wonderful thing." Cragen (Dann Florek), who supervises the detectives, gets lots of great lines too. Or the ritual arrest and reading of the rights at the midway point, followed by an arraignment after the break. The plots are starting to get more twisty. You're not always sure where a case is headed, or what crime the trial will end up being about, as investigations develop. They're already unafraid to go to some wild places. The topicality may be toned down, but it's still there, if not yet as crisp and sharp as it will become—or was, in the first season. The show is still in a process of becoming in this season, and has a ways to go. It's still solid TV with its ultimate strengths already self-evident: classic police procedural extending the form by wedding it to its natural mate, the courtroom drama. This season includes the first episode I ever happened to see, or the last 20 minutes of it (I had tuned in way late, flipping around the channels). It's about a serial killer (creepy James Rebhorn), with Barbara Barrie, Allen Garfield, and an outstanding performance by Rutanya Alda (The Deer Hunter, Mommie Dearest). The plot is a bit convoluted, I can see now, but with a typically riveting way of plodding forward. Strewn with great lines, as they all are. Ben Stone: "He wants a slap on the wrist." Adam Schiff (Steven Hill, yet another of the show's trademark players): "So start slapping."

Law & Order, s1 (1990-1991)

USA, TV series (NBC)
Creator: Dick Wolf
Cast: George Dzundza, Chris Noth, Dann Florek, Michael Moriarty, Richard Brooks, Steven Hill

I've been meaning to make a project of the original Law & Order TV show, a daunting task, not least because it's one of the longest-running shows ever, after only The Simpsons (still going) and tied with Gunsmoke. Interestingly, or not, its longevity is currently being stalked by one of its own spinoffs, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, which has now gone 18 seasons, compared with the original's (and Gunsmoke's) 20. The Simpsons, by comparison, has now gone 28. I say "or not" because, to be clear, I don't consider the spinoffs, any of them, in the same league. Law & Order, the flagship, had a purity of abstraction the others ultimately never came close to—really never tried, as they were intended as more conventional TV drama in their conception. Indeed, even the flagship series eventually succumbed to TV's institutional pressures, most notably in its prolonged unlovely affair with Sam Waterston.

But all that is far in the future for this first season, which brings me to my other reason for putting it off so long. When I first discovered Law & Order, in syndicated reruns in the mid-'90s, it was easy to spot the earliest episodes. No, it was not just the presence of George Dzundza as detective Max Greevey, who appeared only in this first season, as partner to Mike Logan (Chris Noth, still with baby fat). Many episodes in the first season are qualitatively different. The characters are slightly out of key, their interrelations have not jelled yet. There's even one District Attorney who is not Adam Schiff (let alone Arthur Branch).

Law and Order (1981)

The only way Lindsey Buckingham's first solo album and self-produced one-man-band studio overdub extravaganza surprised anyone, or anyway me, was in how good it was. And it's awfully good, at least when it is. Sounding for all the world like approximately one-third of every Fleetwood Mac album since 1975, it also isolates a few key facts that might have been taken too much for granted previously: Buckingham is a careful, melodic songwriter who gets his emotional points across with surprising arrangement, economy, and effectiveness and a disarming penchant for letting the big swooning gambit just rip (cf., the stark, plaintive, and insanely endearing chorus, "I think I'm in trouble"). He will get his head around some crazy idea or other and go off all quirky (see also Tusk, which even so has plenty of pleasures to call its own, and we'll be getting to them soon enough). But that keeps things interesting. There's usually something memorable to take away humming. His stuff works—nor does he have to prove it to anyone, though I must say, given his track record these past decades, it's nice enough when he does. Everything I've heard of his solo albums is pretty much all the way there consistently, and of course that's not even to mention the Fleetwood Mac oeuvre. He's a pretty good guitar player too, though there's less of that on display here. Sure, yeah, you have to forgive the occasional excesses, often notably misplaced—here it's the opening track, "Bwana" (see also "Tusk," which someone thought would make a good single) (and in a way it was). He does a lovely job with the cover of the Kurt Weill standard, "September Song." He's a sheer delight on the aforementioned "Trouble," "I'll Tell You Now," "It Was I," and "Johnny Stew." He's even willing to make fun of hot tub culture in "That's How We Do it in L.A."—although, honestly, I wouldn't be surprised to find out he'd written it in one. In L.A., no less. But I guess just because you have perspective doesn't mean you can't take your share of the pleasure.