Sam Waterston hopes the new Law & Order gets you to throw your shoe at the TV
The longtime star promises the revived show will be part of the "general conversation."
Aux News Law & Order
A lot of the messaging around NBC’s revival of Law & Order has involved the idea that it’s a “great time” for the show to return, given all the grim shit happening in our country that pertains to the justice system. New showrunner Rick Eid said as much in a recent Variety piece on the revival, saying the murders and mysteries have always been secondary to Law & Order because it’s really “a show about society,” using murder as “a way into examining various political, social, and economic issues from several different perspectives.”
The question, then, is if Law & Order will actually go far enough into examining the political, social, and economic issues of the day by suggesting that… maybe cops are bad sometimes. Or most of the time. Or all of the time. There have been dirty cops in the decades of Law & Order shows, there have been murderer cops, there have been cops who do the “right” thing in the wrong way (cough Elliot Stabler cough), but it’s rare that the franchise has ever considered the fact that the policing system is just broken. (The same can’t really be said for the lawyer side of things, though, since there are often bad guy attorneys on the defense.)
Sam Waterston, who took some convincing to return to the show but is now fully on-board, seems confident that the new Law & Order is absolutely going to be starting some arguments—or, as he put it, it will be contributing to “the general conversation.” Waterston says the show isn’t “shying away” from “divisive issues,” and, in fact, he says the “goal” of the series hasl ways been to “get people throwing their shoes at the television.”
He teases that there are “issues that are going to infuriate people and frustrate people about how they turned out,” but he sees the show as providing a “useful service” in confronting issues and offering “a resolution of some kind that you can chew on.” He seems to be specifically thinking about a somewhat underrated trope of Law & Order storytelling, where the seemingly airtight and convenient conclusion is undone by some last-minute twist—some unforeseen tragedy that unfolds from the central mystery or a follow-up mystery that, due to the episodic nature of the show, is never resolved.
Confronting real-life police issues like that would be kind of an easy cheat for Law & Order, and while it would be nice to get anything else out of a show that—as much as it likes to think otherwise—has always been a major source of TV “copaganda,” it seems a little unlikely. Luckily, the new Law & Order isn’t too far off: It premieres on February 24.
151 Comments
Hasn’t it always been DA and Cops good scumbag defense attorneys bad. How can changing that work today and still attract all the white women
There’s been a ton of dirty cops on the show. District attorneys are rarer, since they very, very rarely had any other than the main three appear even in background cameos, but one of the first episodes with Jack as DA had him deal with a corrupt EADA. And while he isn’t corrupt (though he was brought up on corruption charges multiple times), there’s been lots of episodes that show Jack going way too far in trying to get the culprit prosecuted, most notably the episode where he conspires with a judge to get a drunk driver prosecuted to the max amount (which actually may have had influence in real life, as the issue plaguing Jack in that episode was a loophole closed a few years after the episode was made), another where he tried to literally outlaw gay marriage in order to convict a killer, and in a late series episode where one of the ADAs was gunned down, Jack sets up a fake trial in order to get them to confess. It actually became one of the main sticking points between Jack and Cutter, since Cutter bent the law as much as he could in order to get a conviction like Jack used to, but the more mature Jack had to reign him in.Also, not all the defense attorneys were scumbags. Yes, some were, such as recurring character Melnick, but most of the time Jack is extremely cordial with the defense attorney of the episode. There was even an episode where Rubirosa is forced to be the defense attorney for the trial and all the other ADAs began mocking her, forcing Jack to step in and tell them there’s nothing wrong with being a defense attorney and it’s a noble profession.
tried to literally outlaw gay marriage in order to convict a killer,Eh, not exactly. He wanted to invalidate a gay marriage from another state (before it was legal in New York) in order to allow testimony between the spouses. He wasn’t out to make same sex marriage illegal. But in the episode, gays and lesbians (understandably) didn’t see the difference.
Well, I do remember the episode where McCoy all but threatened to out a teenage lesbian unless she confessed to manslaughter (of her girlfriend who wanted to come out but she didn’t). Serena Southerlyn was surprisingly quiet about all this, though perhaps that’s because she didn’t know she was a lesbian.This plus putting Tom Berenger in jail despite an eye witness seeing him jogging at the time of the shooting and it being blindingly obvious his teenager did it on her own and he was covering after working it out (because he ‘couldn’t be sure’ and more obviously because he wanted to put someone in prison as opposed to letting it go and doing his job with more investigation to catch the actual killer) made me think McCoy (as opposed to Sam Waterston – as it is fiction, I’m aware) is a real scumbag.I’m sure there’s countless more examples but these two were enough to start with.
Serena being a lesbian was thought up literally during her departure episode. Any foreshadowing beforehand was purely coincidental.
Possibly one of the most WTF-ingly random lines in TV history. As I recall McCoy’s response was “um…what??”
That was also America’s response.
Branch. She said it in response to being fired. The really stupid part is that the episode had nothing to do with her being a lesbian, it was about a feud between rappers.
Yeah, knew I’d get some detail wrong – been a long time. IIRC it was because she wouldn’t bend some professional ethic to put away someone clearly guilty. Then in the middle of that debate, boom. Lesbian!
Branch was firing her for, essentially, being too optimistic and idealistic, and encouraged her to become a defense attorney.
One of the strengths of the show, in my opinion, was that you knew the characters almost solely on how they interacted with others on the job. Benjamin Bratt’s Detective Curtis seemed to be one of the only characters who even mentions having a family life with any regularity. Heck, almost every character on the show could have been gay, and you wouldn’t have known it unless they otherwise came out with a statement like Serena did right before she departed the cast.
Rey was the most blatant, but the show actually did employ it more than people think. Briscoe’s daughter shows up a couple times and ends up being murdered. Ross spends her final half-season in a custody battle with her ex over her child. Van Buren had a lot of scenes with her second husband after getting cancer. Granted, it doesn’t reach SVU levels, but it is still there. Though it certainly helps to downplay it when 80% of the cast is single and/or divorced.
That was a WTF has this been along moment?
Even Melnick got face turns in a couple of episodes where she put principle over winning at all costs.The worst the defense attorney hate got was when they first brought Robinette back as a defense attorney, and that was just shy of a full-on villain turn for a guy who was scrupulously ethical as an ADA. At least when they brought Ross back as a defense attorney, the conflicts mostly came out of her personal history with McCoy. With Paul it was just that he had a full personality transplant between episodes and was now evil…
Bringing Robinette back was awesome! Bringing bad Robinette in 100% not awesome.
One of the defence attorney storylines that always stuck with me was a legal-aid lawyer who’s representing a serial killer, and initially comes across as just an opportunist who wants to make his name with the case. However, as the episode goes on, it’s revealed that not only has the killer told his lawyer about the existence of other bodies, the lawyer has seen them. The killer refuses to identify any other victims, so McCoy has the lawyer charged as an accessory to the crimes (he argues that because the bodies, in the killer’s words, are under lock and key, the lawyer helped to cover up a crime by locking the bodies back up) to pressure the lawyer into breaking privilege. The lawyer refuses, even after being convicted, because he won’t violate the ethical underpinnings of his profession. Serena tells him that no bar association would disbar him for breaking privilege, to which the lawyer simply responds, “Then shame on them.”It was a great performance, and an interesting flip with the character, in the end, coming across as more ethical than the DA’s office.
I wouldn’t call Melnick a scumbag at all. She was interesting. There were far worse.
One of my clearest memories of the series was Ben Stone saying, “No more cops. It’s just too hard” after having to prosecute one… …and, tiptoeing around spoilers for those just catching up with the good old stuff (a human generation has come of age since its premiere), the reason why a cop was on trial are as unfortunately relevant now as in 1990 and could probably be dusted off for this reboot.
Exactly, thank you! Law and Order has always show the ugly side of the justice system. Maybe it’s not ugly enough, but it’s absolutely not the Republican propaganda people suggest it is.
That’s actually hilarious considering most of the early cast left because the show was considered too liberal-leaning.
Moriarty left, but I’m pretty sure Florek and Brooks were let go because of the mandate to add women to the cast (although, knowing the town Florek is from, it wouldn’t shock me if he was also conservative). So I guess that leaves Sorvino? Having met him, makes sense he’d be right of center.
My dad & I always say “Jack would give his own Grandmother the chair.” The show often paints Jack as excessively out for vengeance. Or lacking an idea of what real justice is.
He actually does tend to go lenient if the culprit had a justifiable reason or is truly sympathetic. He also tends to go super extra hard if the culprit is a bigot and/or harmed children. As well as drunk driving after Claire got killed.While we never knew his grandparents, we do know Jack is happy his dad is dead, so he probably would give his dad the death penalty.
Almost the entire run of the original series was the cops screwing up in the first 30 minutes then the ADAs having to clean up their messes.If anything, its ‘prosecution-ganda’, not ‘copaganda’.
PropaganDA.
Nah, I’d say about half the beat cops are portrayed as lazy, aloof, incompetent, mean or some combination thereof. Not to mention the detectives from surrounding jurisdictions. The core group always tried to do the right thing but the rest? Not so much.And plenty of the younger DAs were going for convictions to pad their stats, even when it became apparent the suspect may not have done it.
And plenty of the younger DAs were going for convictions to pad their stats, even when it became apparent the suspect may not have done it.As much as they stacked the deck pretty hard in favor of the main characters almost always being good guys (even when Chris Noth or Dennis Farina would cross the line and beat up a suspect, the reasons were these contrived “ticking clock to save a child’s life” scenarios) I liked that every once in a while they’d look at this sort of banality of evil scenario.
The early episodes are more interesting. They are honest about what the cops were like in the early ‘90s, and there isn’t a clear answer about whether you’re supposed to admire or hate them. They were cynical as hell, and Logan had a sharp temper and tried to pull confessions out of suspects in a way that didn’t come off as entirely a good guy. Stabler was *way* more set up as “you’re supposed to admire this guy for breaking the rules.” And ultimately, Logan gets real consequences.
“Exile” to Staten Island is truly a cop’s idea of consequences. He keeps his job, his rank, and even his position as a homicide detective. He just has to do it in an outer borough.
They’re also incredibly bigoted which is more or less accurate, especially at the time. Watching Season 1 particularly is a real eye-opener.
Repackaged Dick Wolf copoganda. Next.
The entire Law & Order series canon is likely to blame for the public distrust of law enforcement, especially amongst POC. People who digest these shows, end up with unrealistic expectations of how our justice system works. I honestly can’t wait for the Dick Wolf/Jerry Bruckheimer method of copaganda to die out altogether.
This is just a sense I got from the trailer, but I do think they are doing something with Jeffrey Donovan’s cop. Just the selection of scenes they showed with him made it clear that was something off with him.My biggest kind of issue with the show with what little we know is casting, actually the lead prosecutor being probably one of the whitest British guys I’ve seen and his backstory being a defense attorney who decided to switch sides.
We had that before though—Carey Lowell’s character was in a lucrative private practice before joining the DA’s office.
And then went back to defense again.
Maybe the lead prosecutor will have a homoerotic-but-adversarial relationship with Donovan’s cop. The first episode starting with someone discovering a totem pole made of human torsos (and Donovan being suspiciously quick to the crime scene) would be just the thing the L&O franchise needs to liven it up a bit.
White British guys? So following in the footsteps of Linus Roache.
Why not just bring back Linus??
I know he was the (relatively) straight arrow on Burn Notice, but in general having there NOT be something not quite right about him is a missed opportunity.
Dodd Gerhardt in uniform.
He was a corrupt cop in Changeling
Jeffrey Donovan has such a sleazy corrupt smile. I mean, I loved him in Burn Notice, but hot damn can he sell “You can absolutely not trust me with the briefcase of money you are handing me, Mister Crime Boss.”
but will the show finally dig into the robot scourge stealing pills from the elderly?
And The Nikita Khruschev Award For Lifetime Achievement In Television goes to…
Elvis
I mean, we might throw our shoes at the TV because it’s yet another retread/reboot that absolutely no one asked for, but apart from that, I’m guessing that the target audience – who all died 10 years ago – will be fine with whatever they do.
Incorrect. Me and the Mrs. are early 50s, and we love original recipe L&O, especially with Lenny.
Hot time in the Ol’ Rivendell tonight!
I hope they develop the main detectives like they did Lenny. Lenny was a pool shark, a drunk, he loved Langston Hughes, he had a million stories… the later detectives were basically just “Hey, I’m done with The Sopranos now!” or “This is Anthony Anderson being a police guy.” Also, I hope the bring back Elizabeth Rohm – I think we can all be excited about that opportunity to complain.
No Lenny No Watchy, that’s my rule.
The series is getting revived because the show has seen a huge resurgence in popularity, whether via YouTube or reruns on broadcast/cable TV or via Peacock. Especially for those irritated by SVU.
I believe you mean the Olivia Christ Benson Hour.
You throw shoes at the TV, of course they think you’re asking for a reboot.
Maybe you should tread more lightly. 😀
Hey, let me join in. I wouldn’t want you to be the sole person doing puns here.
This is the kind of thread a loafer like me enjoys — heavily laced with puns.
Still, maybe we shouldn’t clog up the thread with too many.
I appreciate the efforts of everyone who cobbled this pun thread together.
Hopefully this show doesn’t tiptoe around the major issues. The sole of our nation is in distress.
ok that’s enough
Yeah, these puns are starting to get a little Sketch(ers)-y.
Does anybody want a peanut?Hang on, that’s not right…
Nyuk nyuk nyuk!
What a croc! The show is 20 years past its prime.
bravo
No one ever asked for its removal. In a perfect world, they’d be in their 33rd consecutive season right now.
i guess it’s too late for a L&O/B99 crossover.
On the plus side, B99 is now airing on Comedy Central—they had a marathon on last night.
Yeah, I mean what year is this??
I don’t think it’s technically a reboot – it was cancelled abruptly back in 2010, and this is being billed as the 21st season.
I mean, Law and Order has a pretty big fanbase that would probably ask for it.
This is a terrible approach.Law and Order was always at its best when you could turn off your brain and pretend that the show took place in a fantasy universe where police and prosecutors weren’t inherently shit.This will make it impossible to do that.
I mean, both SVU and Chicago PD (Which take place in the same universe) have tackled those issues, albeit without any real conviction.
It’s always been really weird that Ice-T (with his 90s hit “Cop Killer” which shocked the nation with the notion that cops may be people that people, not necessarily just criminals, hate) acts in SVU.
Considering how completely useless the character is it might be possible Finn is bringing the NYPD down from the inside.
That’s a cold water wake-up call!
Dude, Finn is essential! He’s a gamer! He once mentioned Civ 6 AND Kotaku in the same sentence!
“You tellin’ me some musicians release songs that criticise the abuse inherent in the police system?”
Clearly, There’s something happening here…
I disagree with his idea that invoking the Constitution to defend his right to free speech was wrong because something about “the system.”
Yeah, you and I were just reading the Klosterman book where that was brought up — Ice-T believed that he had a right to free speech as a human being rather than as a mere US citizen subject to the laws of the Constitution. While I think it is ultimately unproductive to take that route (because you know, laws in the US are based on the Constitution), I do kind of get his impatience with the idea that the Constitution is a sacred text or something.
My issue with his logic is that I don’t buy the idea that rights are things that just exist independently(like the idea of “God-given” rights). I think rights are things we create to make society better and we need something like the Constitution to establish and protect those rights. After a bit of research to further examine what he meant it seems he said that it’s wrong to appeal to existing institutions because those can be twisted to take away rights, and while that last point may be true I don’t think realistically that there’s a better option.I think it’s pretty cool that we’ve been reading the same book so we can compare notes(BTW, I’m seeing Chuck at a book signing tomorrow). Did you ever see if that problematic ‘90s move that wasn’t Falling Down was in the book?
Well, the obvious one was there — American Beauty. Which I think is a better example than Falling Down if you are looking for a 90s movie that didn’t age well about privileged people with no real problems feeling oppressed because they don’t have everything they want. Again, I think Klosterman missed that unlike the Spacey character in American Beauty, Douglas’ character does have a real problem — he was laid off in the early 90s recession. Not that justifies his shooting spree of course, but it is more of a sympathetic problem than just wanting forbidden sex with teenagers as in AB.
It would have been interesting if he had discussed Fight Club because on one hand it is another movie about someone with no real problems feeling unsatisfied with their life. On the other hand, the terrorist plot against the financial industry (whether or not it succeeds as in the released movie or fails as in the book and Chinese edit) is rather foward thinking in that it predicts (perhaps unintentionally) the 21st century anti-capitalist movement.
I mean…. whatever. I haven’t read the Klosterman and I’m not gonna die on this hill, but I don’t think that’s a remotely fair reading of American Beauty.
Well maybe, but it’s not just Klosterman that finds this weird trend in ‘90s movies where people seem to have pretty darn upper class/upper middle class good lives and yet we are supposed to feel for them because their lives are “empty”. It’s a view that only made sense in that brief vacation from reality that was the mid/late 1990s (in white American culture) and it very hard to relate to post the Great Recession (which may only be the first of such things in the near future)
Middle class ennui is not only the purview of 90s American film. And I so strongly dislike the idea that cultural relevance only happens if art engages with struggle. Struggle is important and there should be art about it but narrative is so much bigger than that. I’m by no means a pure escapism guy. At all. But nor do I think Art Has to Mean Something Greater.
I think one can watch American Beauty today and see it as both a celebration and a critique of the desire to escape suburban ennui. That both the problems of the white middle class and the solutions most people use to escape them are pretty pathetic, and that to argue that the movie is only about elevating said issues absolutely ignores that, you know, spoilers, the first time the protagonist seems happy isn’t after fulfilling the dreams of his midlife crisis, but after his brains are blown out. It’s actually pretty nihilistic, really.
That said, just because art doesn’t have to engage with struggle to be valid doesn’t mean that films with narratives that seem to willfully ignore such struggles in favor of the mundane problems of the elite can’t feel blinkered in retrospect (or even at the time). In the same vein of Truffaut’s quote about how there can’t really be an anti-war film, even a film that claims to critique middle-class existence can end up making the privileged, petulant and ultimately futile rebellion of the protagonist, well, beautiful, and glorify it in a way that darkly contrasts many modern Americans’ experience with jobs, family, and society. Or that the film seems to be arguing that hell is other people and that you’ll only be really happy when you’re dead, while we’re currently coming out of a period where we’ve been extremely desperate to reconnect to folks and have been extremely fearful of a very present possibility of imminent death. I think folks have a right to be queasy with the film, especially when so many of us can only wish we could have jobs we could quit, or families we could be irritated by, or could find death even darkly beautiful right now.
That’s of course before getting to the fact that the film stars a now-known sexual predator of young people acting like a sexual predator of a young person, even if the character ostensibly realizes what he’s doing in the end. If there’s ANYTHING that signals how much our head was up our ass in the 90s, it’s being reminded how much we celebrated Kevin Spacey, even if (or especially if) it seemed reasonable at the time.
You can’t say our head was up our ass for not having information about something the guy worked hard to hide from the public. Rumors about his sexuality didn’t even surface until after American Beauty was out of theaters, let alone his predatory behavior.And while I’d say it’s fair to feel uncomfortable with the film in the current context, my point was really only that it’s reductive to claim that it’s a movie about a privileged person with no real problems. As though he clearly isn’t depressed. Or his daughter isn’t depressed and dealing with self-esteem issues. Or his wife isn’t depressed and in some anxiety spiral around perfectionism. This is why I find it frustrating. Do “real problems” only constitute systemic oppression?
No, but focusing on problems experienced by an extremely small subset of the population can prompt the question “Exactly who is this art for?”. But though reductive, the feeling that what the film is saying is “rich people can be sad, too, you know” is actually charitable. Because what it actually seems to be saying is far more nihilistic: “happiness is impossible, even for the elite, now here, spend two hours with some miserable people”. American Beauty often feels like a sketch parody of European ennui films.
Say what you will for the depressing lyrical content of rock songs in the 90s, at least they still had a beat and were only three minutes long.
Yes, that’s true. Rejection of “middle class ennui” was just as prevalent in 1960s pop culture, maybe moreso in in music than films. Stuff like “Little Boxes” or the Beatles “She’s Leaving Home”, even the Monkees’ “Pleasant Valley Sunday”. Also there were movies about people “throwing off” middle class life to become “free”.
My issue with American Beauty started with the idea that they lived in that house on what’s revealed to be something like a $60k/yr salary (the amount Spacey extorts from his boss).
In fairness, American Beauty came out in 1999, which may have been the last year that real estate prices were reasonable
I would assume that was basically just some spending money and that they were really living on their savings. Although there is always the standard trope of people living in houses and apartments they couldn’t really afford in movies and TV.
I think the only thing that didn’t age particularly well was Spacey’s starring role. If we only had dramas about lower-income people scraping out a living then the options for movies would get real narrow, real fast.
I mean, yeah, the Spacey connection doesn’t help, but really, do you think a movie about a middle aged guy lusting after teens would fly today post-Epstein? I don’t think the movie could be made today. I’m not saying all dramas need to be about poor people — there have been some brilliant dramas about wealthy people, but they have real, sympathetic problems — they are dealing with the illness or death of a child or spouse, perhaps they are in a war or part of a persecuted ethnic group, and so on.
Even within the film Spacey has a “what the hell am I doing??” revelation, so from a pure storytelling perspective I’m not troubled by it. But I see your point that today it really wouldn’t be worth the public shitstorm.That does raise a troubling question, though – how many movies are not or will not be made because of fear of social media backlash (often from people who’ve never seen the movie in question)?
A big difference between the U.S. constitution and those of other generally democratic nations is that it starts with the concept that those rights are already there, and the Constitution cannot take them away. Other nations’ versions have constitutions that grant those rights, so the ability to infringe is baked into the government’s rights under certain circumstances. It’s a distinction I hadn’t considered until recently.
That’s half of the reason why SVU is shit and the only decent Law and Order was the original one.The other half is that I can’t turn off my brain when the cops get too close to the case and trample over people’s rights in every single episode.
Honestly, the show has tackled these issues. I’m not sure the show can’t work because it focuses on some cops and lawyers that happen to be good ones. Should we make one of the two cops and one of two lawyers be corrupt? The show’s allowed to have a protagonist. I always thought the series didn’t always make the cops superheroes like some current network shows do.
Law and Order was always at its best when you could turn off your brain and pretend that the show took place in a fantasy universe where police and prosecutors weren’t inherently shit.I’m reminded of how popular TV westerns once were, even with Matt Dillon, hero of Gunsmoke, shooting and killing about 20 people a year, like clockwork, for 20 years.
I hope every episode is Sam Watterson trying to figure out which robot murdered an old person to steal their medicine, and nothing else.
I don’t even know why the scientists make them!
For fucking.
See?
excellent 25-plus year old reference
I hereby envoke the rule that AVC’s legendary L&O fake episode thread be reposted in this comment section.It’s mandatory.
“Objection! Witness is not a bat!”“Overruled. You can address the bat situation on redirect, counselor.”https://disqus.com/home/discussion/avclub/sam_waterston_will_be_the_quietly_stern_sam_waterston_type_in_aaron_sorkins_hbo_pilot/
Arthur Branch: ‘As an archconservative good-ole boy with a Tennessee drawl, I was an obvious choice to run for district attorney of Manhattan.’So many gems in that thread.
You are doing the Lord’s work.
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old peoples’ medicine for fuel.
And robots are strong.
*ded*
Sit down officer Stabler. Now.
Dr Harry Vanderspeigle likes this.
Law and Order has always been a whitewash of the criminal justice system disguised as gritty realism.Granted I prefer its approach to the NYPD Blue approach which is to pretend that Dirty Harry is both normal and correct. (Whereas if you actually asked the Harry character he’d deny both.)But L&O’s problem was to pretend that prosecutors in particular actually cared a damn about more than winning.
All told what we need for a criminal justice themed show is Dragnet-style. Courteous, by the book, professional. Not because this is realistic exactly but because we need a show that’s aspirational. We need to encourage legit good guys to get into this line of work. If we have long had bad apples spoil the barrel it’s time to start letting the good apples in.
And we need a Stabler/Scipowicz style cop to be a major villain, not a self-sacrificing hero.
And a nice modern nuclear family like The Lubbocks on Just The Ten Of Us
Nobody is looking at “Law & Order” for your hot take on law enforcement issues. That’s like watching “Breaking Bad” for lab science.
Yes, various denominations of L & O have tackled social issues. However they’ve usually done so in a comically tone-deaf and heavy handed way (and dear god, don’t let them go anywhere near anything related to technology). I liked old school L & O back in the day, but Jerry Orbach’s dead and Chris Noth is…well, he’s what he probably always was, but we didn’t know it back then. I’ll pass on this version.
My favorite is when they rip stuff from the headlines but make the person who’s guilty in real life falsely accused. I’m sure that always goes over well with victim’s families.
Or like when they did the Crown Heights case, where there was a riot and a random Jew was killed because the crowd blamed another Jew for something. But in the L&O version, the guy’s not even Jewish! Psych!
I’m remembering that episode with that awful take on heavy metal frontmen which somehow managed to combine hair metal schlock and 80s extreme metal. In the 90s, when both genres, particularly hair metal, were really out of date.I think the perp’s name was “CSquared” or something ridiculous like that.
SVU & CI, yes, but original L&O has some great “current” episodes. The post 9-11 season is amazing. There are quite a few bangers in that one. Of course there are clunkers too, especially when anyone “discusses” a social issue, but the peak seasons of L&O (the Orbach seasons, basically) hit more than they miss.
My two favorite L&O tropes:Technology. “Enhance. Enhance.”Education. Hudson University, perennial #1 in the U.S. News & World Report rankings for parents who want their children raped and/or murdered. Most dangerous campus in America.
Hudson U is the mouth of the hellhole and yet still, Elliot sent his precious Maureen there. Tsk.
“Enhance. Enhance.” is really more of a CSI/NCIS trope. On L&O they just magically have a clean shot of the guy’s face on the security cam, but first they have to convince Store Across the Street Guy to let them review his footage while he refuses to stop eating his sandwich.
There’s an episode where they spot a person’s eye looking through the tail lights of a car going to through an intersection, after enhancing like three times. Lots of faces in cars in general. I’d say it’s a favorite crutch of many crime procedurals.
Bring back Lupo and Bernard!
Well, Anthony Anderson is back, but Sisto has his own show now.
They were easily my favorite cop duo that didn’t have Lennie Briscoe in it. I’m actually shocked Anthony Anderson is in it, but, hey, the guy must like money. Who can blame him?
Both Sisto and De La Garza are busy with FBI, which is in the same universe.
What? But he’s playing a different character?! I call bullshit!
The funnier part is De la Garza. Rubirosa joined the FBI after the show ended and even showed up as an FBI agent in SVU. Despite that, the show FBI has her playing someone completely different, despite their HQ being in New York. Granted, it’s likely due to the show airing on CBS rather than NBC, but still.
S. Epatha Merkerson is on Chicago Med as a different character from the one she played on Law & Order, and the Chicago series exist in the same universe as the Law & Order series as well.I was a little surprised that Beulah Koale showed up on NCIS: Hawai’i as a new character when he’d spent several years on Hawaii Five-0, but it was cool to hear him speak with his natural accent.
I’m starting to think the Chicago series actually DON’T exist in the same universe as the L&O franchise.
Well, there have been several crossovers, but it’s easy enough for both franchises to ignore them moving forward and pretend they didn’t happen.
I was throwing my shoe at the teevee anyway.
I’m cautiously excited about this. I always liked the original because it mostly kept away from personal stories about the characters and focused on the case at hand. And the cast mostly looks awesome – Jeffrey Donovan, Camryn Manheim and Hugh Dancy are all great and Sam Waterston was always fun as Jack McCoy.Not a fan of Anthony Anderson though – wish they had gotten someone new or brought back Jesse personally.
If I have to look at one main character’s family, once, for a single second, I’m out. Very much here for the straight-played procedural drama though. L&O used to be straight hardcore competence porn.
Where is the goddamned Homicide: Life on the Street revival?
Did you miss The Wire? It was pretty good.But seriously, the Homicide TV movie ended the show on such a tragic note, there was nothing left to put back together. A revival like this of Law & Order works because L&O is a series where you can just recast 4 of the 6 main roles, and it doesn’t make much difference. I don’t think that works for Homicide.
Plus, the showrunners are currently busy with City on a Hill. You can do a Homicide reboot, but without them and David Simon (all three would likely cost a fortune) along with no Yaphet, it would be a mere shell of its former self.
I’m saving The Wire for the nursing home
Screw that, we’re long overdue for a Hill Street Blues revival! A surprisingly high number of the cast are still alive!
In terms of characters they can bring back, I really want to see them bring back defense attorney Shamballa Greene; she was a great foil for Ben Stone and they sadly dropped her from the series when they switched from Stone to McCoy.
Also, would love to see them bring Judith Light’s judge character back too as she was sort of exclusive to SVU and I would love to see her and McCoy share a scene or two.
Anytime these shows have TRIED to piss me off, they did, but for the wrong reasons. Just give me more Ice-T-finding-Lemurs-in-a-Basketball episodes and, more so than any nonexistent pee tape, get that Trump episode in the can.
Is there a happier person in the world than John Mulaney right now?
Me.
The series has always been “ripped from the headlines”, so it’d be hard to get upset with them over it. Granted, it will still happen and they’ll be called “woke.” I just hope this is just like the original and doesn’t get hung up on that one issue. The final season of Brooklyn Nine-Nine got sorta hung up on thinking they just HAD to address current police controversies for the entire season.
I, for one, am excited about this reboot…… but the real reason I posted is just to make sure the extremely tedious process of logging on Kinja to a new device worked. Hey, how about that, it did work.
Stop watching this shit! Dumb boomers
Been watching the last few seasons of Law and Order- 18-20. It should have never been cancelled in the FIRST place. #sorrynotsorry