Happy Monday! Today was the first day at my NEW JOB! Now I am decompressing after getting home and walking Albie Dog and I thought “Hey, I want to talk to my blog friends! And also, Hulu just added the original seasons of Law and Order and I want to talk about THAT.”
For Americans, Law and Order is a comforting background music to our lives. It’s endlessly re-runnable, and the old joke was you could spend 24 hours going around the cable channels and always find it playing somewhere. But watching in reruns, you usually couldn’t do it in order. Channels would do special like “medical crimes all day”, or would run chunks of 4 episodes in a row and if you missed a week, you’d be a whole season ahead all of a sudden.
For non-Americans who may not know it, it’s an hour long show in which the first hour shows the cops investigating a crime in New York City, and the second hour shows the prosecutors prosecuting it. It’s the same cops and prosecutors in every episode, but we only see them at work, there’s almost no personal drama (or even personal knowledge) of them. It’s just about solving this episode’s crime (thus the endlessly re-runnable in any order effect).
But now it’s on streaming! So I can watch every episode, in order, and pause and rewind and do all those fun things to really REALLY watch it. And it is a FASCINATING history of America!
The technical side alone is a kick. It started in 1990, everyone is using pay phones and paper ledgers. Then beepers come in, then fax machines, then computers start showing up, then cell phones. Same thing with media! We go from newspapers to TV news to “online websites” to bloggers to twitter. It’s a great primary source for all these things, when I try to remember my 90s childhood I would not be able to tell you when computers started getting more common, or when I first started hearing about faxes, but at the pace of 22 episodes a year, Law and Order is very slowly detailing all those things.
And then there’s the social stuff! Not the consciously hot button topics like cases that involve IVF and embryos, but going from couples meeting in bars to gyms to coffee shops, looking through address books to find a list of friends and appointments (I’ve never used an address book in my adult life!), and the constant evolution of the way the female professionals (especially the main cast lawyers) are treated.
Mostly what I am noticing on this watch is the big question of “is this a show that supports the cops or not?” Yes, they are our protagonists. That’s huge, we are seeing everything through their eyes. But on the other hand, every episode starts with the cold open that shows regular folks moving around the city until they find a body. It’s the one part of the episode that is NOT strictly from the view of the cops/prosecutors. And these are good people, people who have their own concerns totally separate from crime. One that sticks with me is a mentally ill homeless man who stumbles across the body of a child and gently pats her head saying “wake up Dorothy! Click your heels and go home”. It’s such a sweet moment, from a forgotten person at the bottom of society. It’s part of a patchwork, showing us a living breathing city where no one is fully alone and the cops are just a small part of the whole.
Something else I am noticing this time around is how often the cops and prosecutors are wrong. That’s a big deal, especially when I compare it with other cop shows. They leap to judgement, they make mistakes, they miss obvious things. That’s a choice, the writers didn’t have to make it play out this way. It’s not a purely “copaganda” show, it has those flaws built in to the characters.
The biggest flaw I see is when the show tries to take on too much. If it is about police and prosecutors in a city solving crimes, that’s fine. They are regular human beings solving regular human problems, I can accept that they are flawed but still capable of performing their function in society. But when the little everyday crimes are no longer enough for the show, THAT is when I start going “wait, you are saying it’s okay for these characters you have established are flawed, to make sweeping civil liberties decisions and pronouncements?” Nope! I want my flawed characters at that point to say “look, this is too much for me, I know my limitations, I’m just here to solve murders.”
I also want my flawed characters to learn how to work around their flaws. There’s an early episode that involves BDSM where they consciously talk about these limits. The very traditional detective asks to be taken off the case because he feels he can’t connect with the victim and understand him. He’s refused by his boss because they don’t get to pick their victims, they have to investigate every death. And then over the course of the episode, the traditional detective consciously works to find a way to connect with the victim, things as small as both being baseball fans. This is a really important thing! He knows he is prejudiced and tries to take action by leaving the case, his boss refuses because the solution is to solve the problem not work around it, and he takes that to heart and finds a way to do his job no matter what.
I don’t think it’s good to see Perfect Cops (or Perfect Doctors or Perfect Lawyers or really Perfect anything) in mass media. That’s a bad lesson, teaching folks to blindly trust a profession instead of seeing the person within it. But I also don’t think it’s good to say “eh, they are flawed but doing their best, it’s okay if they are a little prejudiced and shortsighted”. There’s a way to say “no one is perfect, it is your responsibility to try to do your job the best you can anyway”. That’s what the best episodes of Law and Order accomplished, telling us that these figures of authority aren’t perfect but, on the other hand, we should expect them to TRY to be perfect as best they can.
In a broader sense, that’s what the show is saying about American society and laws. They aren’t perfect, but we should try for perfection. We should try to prosecute the rich as much as the poor, to have mercy for victims, to be perfectly fair. Yes, that isn’t the reality, this isn’t a fair world, but we should TRY for it to be perfect. My least favorite trope, that shows up A LOT in later seasons of Law and Order, is when people shake their heads and say “it’s the system, what to do?” Well then MAKE THE SYSTEM BETTER!!!! Or even better, as a TV writer, show the system working the way it SHOULD work and raise the expectations of the public. I don’t need another sad fictional story of the failure of foster care, I want a fictional story about the success of foster care and how it’s supposed to happen and the standards I should expect from my own local agencies.
I don’t know why Law and Order get farther and farther from this ideal the longer it ran, the idea of flawed people doing their best and a flawed system trying to be the best it can. Less money for good writers and producers? Bad casting choices? Attitudes changing? Or maybe just the steadily decreasing crime rate? Crime went from being a casual everyday thing, to “Oh My God it’s the WORST THING EVER please SAVE ME!” However and why ever it happened, most people seem to agree the show started going downhill around season 8 or 9.
Speaking of, I just got to season 10. Boooooo! Everyone’s getting cell phones and the hair isn’t funky 90s and, more importantly, the scripts are starting to get dumber.
So that’s my big update! I started a new job (today was orientation and I am totally exhausted and overwhelmed), and I am watching Law and Order! And you should watch it too, especially if you haven’t revisited the early seasons in a while.