Muse Droppings
By:
C.C. Youngren

Law & Order, RIP

Doink! Doink!  Cardinal Dolan and the Dalai Lama exit the St. Patrick’s Rectory and stroll west on 51st toward a 2nd Ave bistro.  Chatting intently about transcendental  meditation, transubstantiation and trans fats, their conversation is interrupted by a groan from the entrance well to 345 Park News. Discovering a bloodied victim, the Archbishop begins to administer Last Rights as the Dalai Lama pulls a Blackberry from beneath his robes, dials 911, and reports that a consciousness has moved on to the next link in the chain of existence.  Cue theme music.

Unfortunately, we won’t get to see that episode, replete with its twists ripped from the headlines: a nefarious CEO of a blow-out preventer company caught cutting corners (his products are designed to look like blow-out preventers); and a boat-load of “activists” intercepted by an Israeli submarine off Montauk claim the “Hampton Jitney” is an ethnic slur.  NBC has cancelled Law & Order.

I had thought Law & Order “jumped the shark” with the presumed election of Fred Dalton Thompson as Manhattan District Attorney, but it (& I) survived that curious casting.  There are a few productions that rate higher on my virtual scorecard—“The West Wing” and “The Wire” to name two—but I will miss this show for so many reasons.

II will miss the generic characters: the detective teams, the bevy of stunning ADA’s, the “Twinkie Defense” lawyers, the villains both sympathetic and twisted sister types, the “730” psychologists, the cabbies & store-front witnesses, and maybe especially, the bored and acerbic arraignment judges (“Life is beautiful and all God's children are innocent. $500K bond.”)

I will miss some specific ones too: Lt. Van Buren rolling her eyes, Jack McCoy pulling in his chin in stunned disbelief, the faux naïveté of defense attorney Randy Dworkin (RD: My client pleads “innocent.” Judge: That’s not an option. RD: I’ve always found that interesting.), and of course, the banter of Lennie & Sgt, Green. 

While Briscoe & Green have been gone for several seasons, there is a sense of finality here—the show’s cancelation being more like having your deceased parent’s home torn down.  It took me a while to accept the duo as cops.  Jerry Orbach was still the “El Gallo” from my first encounter with The Fantasticks of 40+ years ago.  I perpetually expected him to break into a chorus of “Try to Remember” when interrogating a witness.  Jesse L. Martin (Ed Green) kept reforming as Josh Exley, the possibly alien slugger for the barnstorming Roswell Grays in the X-Files episode “The Unnatural.”  Eventually they become mostly Lennie & Ed, and spawned the game-within-the-game.

The game-within-the-game is the challenge to accurately anticipate the irreverent comment delivered as a punch line to the crime-scene scene.  I’ve had some near misses, but never a clairvoyant bull’s-eye.  Once, as Lennie & Ed surveyed a gory array of corpses in a ransacked apartment, I blurted out “A serious feng shui problem” with palm extended expectancy of confirmation.  Wasn’t even close, but months later, on the SVU spinoff, Detective Munsch expressed a similar sentiment in similar circumstance… another in a long string of classical “Doh!” moments for me.

I will miss the on-location NYC street scenes—some obvious to even the casual NY observer, some requiring a serendipitous coincidence to identify.  “Hudson University” obviously has an extended campus stretching from downtown NYU, to Columbia’s Butler Library, to the City College gates, to the Lehman College green in the Bronx.  The half a dozen scenes shot at my campus are probably recognizable to only a few.  And twice I stumbled upon an East Village shoot in progress.  Both times I had to resist the impulse to crash the scene yelling, “I got the van’s plate number!”

Most of all, I will miss the explicit calculus of values that entwine procedure and justice, integrity and compromise, routinely at the core most episodes.  Stereotypical?  Maybe—accused with high-priced lawyers are always guilty.  Contrived?  Occasionally—the victim’s ex-roommate’s dog’s former owner is a potential rival candidate for DA.  Abbreviated?  Certainly—we’ll be back after this commercial with an appellate court ruling.  Yet witnessing the decision making process while applying the rules of navigation in a sea of ambiguity should give us something the chew on.  And even the socio-political straw men trotted out as legal fodder typically show a glimpse of some inner Ray Bolger—with or without brain.

Rumor has it that there will be a reincarnation as Law & Order: Los Angeles in the fall.  That might please the Dalai Lama, but I am loath to the concept.  Those transplants never work; NCIS: Los Angeles and CSI: New York are unwatchable.  And please shoot any impresario who pitches a reprise of “90210” as “10048” (Ground Zero ZIP), “PS(Palm Springs)PD Blue,” “Beirut Legal,” or a “Da Vest Ving” (Kremlin back-office drama).

 

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