#NICOLE WALLACE LAW AND ORDER SERIES#
Jack McCoy and Jerry Orbach’s Detective Lenny Brisco are generally considered to be the “mascots” of the series), and the series remained fairly consistent throughout its impressive 20 season run. Even fans would grow attached to certain regular characters more than others (Sam Watterson’s D.A. It’s also common for both halves to feature a plot twist: The “inciting” crime will often appear ordinary, only to lead to a more complicated crime typically derived from a newsworthy “ripped from the headlines” real-life case and it’s pretty standard for the first person arrested to not be the “real” or “boss” criminal.Īt the time, the fact that the series focused on procedure was revelatory. At that point, the focus shifts to the regular lawyer characters, who prosecute the case. Over the course of roughly half an hour, the regular police characters investigate the crime and (for the most part) make an arrest by the half hour mark. In the opening moments, a crime is either committed or discovered. Law & Order revived both forms of the genre by mashing them together: The series is rigidly – almost dogmatically – committed to a formula. This format had ruled the cop and lawyer genres in the 50s and 60s, beginning with Jack Webb’s immortal Dragnet, but had fallen out of favor in the 70s and 80s as legal dramas became more consumed with the psyches and personal-lives of its profession and cop shows came to favor action and/or witty banter. shows where the story and tension were derived not (primarily) from the characters but from the step-by-step details of their work.
Interesting, then, that in the 90s it was viewed as a revival of the mostly-dead “procedural” genre i.e.
Sometimes clarified as L&O “Classic” or “Prime” by fans, this was the original series and the original fire for an entire epoch of broadcast television. Suffice it to say, it seems like more than a few people (not all of them “gamers,” but many of them) will be dipping into this franchise for the first time which, I imagine most have probably already guessed, is more than enough of a fig-leaf to justify finally taking this breakdown of the franchise’s myriad incarnations out of my “to do” pile.
#NICOLE WALLACE LAW AND ORDER TV#
But as someone who’s probably watched more Law & Order over the years than is humanly healthy (I work mostly overnight and cable networks like to run them in blocks) it was amusing to me to see the perplexed reaction from some “geek” circles unfamiliar the franchise’s… “unique” sense of tone and rhythm, which I can only accurately summarize as “2015’s crimes solved by 1994’s TV cops.” It’s easy to forget, in this supposed “Golden Age” of cutting-edge cable dramas, classy limited-series and built-for-bingers streaming heavyweights, that decidedly middlebrow programmers like this still reign supreme across a lot of network TV – many of them running long enough to have accrued fan-followings that would be the envy of more prestigious critical-darlings.
The reaction to the episode will likely be as predictable as… well, an episode of Special Victims Unit itself, one imagines. Still, that’s exactly what happened last week, because this week’s new episode is covering certain recent unpleasantries in the online and gaming communities. The online release of a teaser for an upcoming episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit is normally the last thing The Internet gets itself worked up about – which is incredible in and of itself, considering that “gigs of chatter about meaningless trivium hardly anyone actually cares about” is pretty-much The Internet’s reason for existing. Here’s the skinny on every series in the Law & Order franchise.
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