# 116. Law & Order

by Adam Ferenz

A simple premise, this. In the first half of an episode, the police investigate a crime and in the second, the courts sort out the mess. In Dick Wolf’s legendary series, which is currently tied with Gunsmoke as the longest running dramatic series in US primetime history-it will be equaled by the spinoff, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit-this is a formula that held up, as did the idea of “ripping the stories from the headlines” and frequently rotating the cast. Lawyers and police come and go, and New York City is always there, a backdrop that is never quite a character but certainly felt.

The cast is likely what most people will remember, aside from the formula. Audiences will think of Sam Waterston as Jack McCoy, or Steven Hill as his boss at the DA’s office. They will think of Jerry Orbach, as Detective Lennie Briscoe, and maybe also Chris Noth as Mike Logan, Benjamin Bratt as Rey Curtis and Jesse L. Martin as Ed Green. They might recall S.Epatha Merkerson as Lt. Anita Van Buren. These are just a few of the-longer tenured-faces to pass through the halls of justice on NBC’s venerable offering.

The show could be prone to gimmicks-stunt casting, crossovers, though the ones with Homicide: Life on the Street worked-and, prior to a late run creative rebirth, recycling stories and beats. That last cast, with Merkerson still there as Van Buren, Waterson now in the big chair at the DA’s office, aided by Linus Roache and Alana De Le Garza’s Michael Cutter and Connie Rubirosa, helped the show regain the luster lost during a good half decade in the wilderness. They were joined by Anthony Anderson’s Kevin Bernard and Jeremy Sisto’s Cyrus Lupo. It was good to see the series close out the final three years without any turnover, and to regain a creative high it had not achieved in over a decade. Alas, it was not enough to save the series and, once it tied Gunsmoke as the longest lived US dramatic series in primetime, NBC pulled the plug.

The series lives on, in reruns, of course, and on disc and streaming services. Everyone that likes the show seems to have their favorites, in terms of character team ups or eras. I gravitate toward the first ten years of the series, with a heavy emphasis on the post Chris-Noth years, by which time I felt the series had worked out what it wanted to do and had begun starting to remember, if only in very small ways, that these characters were people and had lives outside their job. That is the one thing that separated Law and Order from other series, even once it started admitting these characters existed outside of work. The main series was never much interested in character development, in arcs or giving characters massive back-stories. Instead, much like older series, such as Star Trek or, yes, Gunsmoke, the program relied on clearly defining who and what each person was, quickly, simply and then sticking to that in terms of how they would react to each story. The rest was up to the directors and actors to give shadings to these rather strict, yet never too restricting, portrayals.

The original Law and Order, more so than any of its spinoffs and sister shows, seems designed to be watched in isolation, understood within minutes and enjoyed as it unfolds, without either taxing your brain too much or insulting your intelligence. Except of course, for the occasional gaffe where an address-in a series shot in New York, where it was set-would place detective not at a back alley low-rise, but several hundred feet into the East River. The series could also manage humor, alongside the gaffes, such as when Detective Briscoe, having chased a suspect several blocks, finds that the man has fallen out of his shoes and, with the man’s back against a wall, the man raises his shoe to toss it at the Detective. Briscoe, of course, sighs, then grins and says “you have a shoe. I have a gun. Figure the odds.” The odds, of course, are that you have seen, and likely enjoyed, more than an episode of this series. If you have not sampled it, go ahead, find it. It is airing somewhere, now. You’ll recognize it by the “chung chung” noise that opens every new scene.