Law and Order. - television program reviews

Commonweal, Nov 4, 1994 by Frank McConnell

I am, and I admit it, a bear of rather little brain, which may be why it took a stint of jury duty for me to realize what a really good show--and what an unusual one--is "Law and Order," now beginning its fifth season on NBC. (As usual, of course, my wife Celeste got it before I did, remarking at least two years ago that "the only thing wrong with "Law and Order" is that it should be two hours long.") Five seasons for a series is the equivalent of the Biblical three-score and ten for a person; and early episodes of "L&O" are now being rerun in syndication. So this is a good time to talk about a rare bird: a TV series that starts with a brilliant premise, delivers with class and style, and--for sure rare--stays strong.

I call creator Dick Wolf's originating concept "brilliant," but it is rather slyly so--the way all real innovations in genre fiction at first appear to be just variations on established themes. Our obsession with the literature of crime--and by "our" I mean Western culture's--takes one of two seemingly inevitable forms. One is the detective story: as in "Who brought this terrible plague upon Thebes?" (Sophocles) or "Who killed Laura Palmer?" (David Lynch). The other is the trial narrative: "Has Socrates corrupted the youth of Athens?" or, say, "Did Captain Queeg's actions during the hurricane justify relieving him of command?" That's not exactly a Manhattan-Project-level secret, I grant you. But it's not often remarked that, in popular and so-called "high" culture alike, the two forms are not only complementary, but mutually exclusive.

In other words the detective story assumes that once the investigator--private or official--has reconstructed the events of the crime so as to point to a single perpetrator, the story is over, chaos has been controlled again, and the business of a trial--if the "perp" hasn't already been killed--is superfluous. Now anybody with the slightest knowledge of law enforcement realizes that this is only slightly less realistic than tales of Hobbits, elves, and dragons. Even more bemusing, perhaps, is the assumption of most trial stories that the crime is not really solved until the trial has finished. Think about "Perry Mason," "Matlock," or most of the trial scenes in "L.A. Law"; the trial is a pressure-cooker confessional in which, sooner of later, to the gasps of the jury, one of the witnesses will break down on the stand and confess that he, not the defendant, did it. Any lawyer will tell you that this is Hobbits, elves, dragons, plus Vulcans, Klingons, and the Kilgore Rangerettes.

We'll get to why we need to reinvent again and again these inexhaustible fictions. For now the important point is that Brother Wolf--I repeat myself, TV is a producer's medium--had the splendid idea that "Law and Order," for once, would combine those two incommensurable stories. Simple? You bet. I'll meet him in heaven somewhere near the guy who first thought oysters and Tabasco might do nicely together. Because by putting them together, he redefined--and helps us understand a little better--both.

Every episode of "L&O" contains two stories, or actually, two tellings of the same story, one a detective narrative, the other a trial. A crime has occurred: Rex Stout once said that the damned hard thing about writing detective fiction is that the most interesting event in your tale has happened before the tale can start. The first half-hour follows the cops--always--with cast changes--two detectives working under a lieutenant--as through interviews and forensics they center upon their perp. The second half-hour follows the prosecutors--two assistant DA's working under a DA--as they bargain with the defendant's lawyers and consider among themselves precisely what charges, and what penalty, they can reasonably propose. But that only begins to describe the formulaic quality of the show--and, of course, if you think "formulaic" means "bad," then you shouldn't read Shakespeare's comedies or listen to the blues.

The special quality of "L&O," the quality that sets it apart from even such fine shows as "Homicide" or "NYPD Blue," is, I think, its deliberate and bracing coldness. Cop shows and lawyer shows are mainly melodrama--they want us to care about, not just the crime, but the investigator-heroes; they want us to like Columbo or Matlock or Andy Sipowicz. "L&O" doesn't. Every shot opens with a black screen and the place and date of the scene displayed at bottom left. Any reference to the private lives of the detectives or the prosecutors is relegated, at best, to throwaway dialogue. The cops talk the way cops do talk about awful crimes, with defensively smartass irony that can seem, to outsiders, brutally cynical. And the prosecutors, for all their commitment to the idea of "justice," find themselves again and again forced into compromise, into moral diminution, by the very system of proof to which they are committed. Even the camera work brilliantly enforces chilliness and distance. The "detective" scenes are mainly city-street shots, quick-cuts, and documentary-style handheld, while the "trial" scenes tend to be longer takes, dark interiors, with lots of tight close-ups--film's version of the introspective. The writing, the cinematography, and the brilliant ensemble acting have this final effect: we are never allowed to forget that what is going on is the reconstruction and judgment of a single awful event.