Law & Order's greatest moment on gun control

Sandy Hook was the last straw for me. That's the point where I just flat out stopped pretending there's any reason to give consideration to the pro-gun rhetoric of the under-educated, trigger-happy degenerates who act like any regulation on guns is a far more violent injustice than a five year-old's head splattered open like a melon with a featured role on Gallagher's comeback tour.

(Gory? Of course it is. I think our only chance of escaping this nightmare is to not ignore the horror. Reduce these victims to a statistic and you dehumanize what was done to them. Think of them as people whose insides ended up on their outside and you'll never look at a gun defender the same way again.)

If you're inclined to argue with me, you're wasting your time, particularly with the same talking points peddled by scum like Fox News, Alex Jones and Rush Limbaugh:

"Criminals don't care about laws so gun laws wouldn't solve anything." Yeah, and laws against homicide don't do a thing to stop the thousands of people to take the lives of others so let's just stop regulating murder too. And fuck you.

"Guns don't kill people. People kill people. People can kill with knives and cars too. Do you want to outlaw them?" Show me the knife capable of cutting 600 people in five minutes from a few under yards away and I'd demand it be outlawed to. And fuck you.

"SECOND AMENDMENT!!!!!!"  ...calls for a "well-regulated militia." So let's compromise and regulate gun ownership so much that you can't buy a starter's pistol without a five-day waiting period and a DNA sample.

And fuck you.

"Now is not the time to have the conversa--" Fuck off and die.

Columbine should have been the end of this. Virginia Tech should have been the end of this. Some degenerate shooting up a pre-school SHOULD HAVE BEEN THE END OF THIS. And every time we get the same bullshit talking points, fueled by a racist xenophobic hate group that gets to call itself a political party, and who scares their base into voting against their own economic interests every time with "They're gonna come to take your guns!"

We can't reason with these people. And it's time to stop pretending that there's any value in being the reasonable adults in the room. They've thrived not because of any adherence to legislature, or facts, or studies. It's pure emotion, pure rage.

Gun enthusiasts are creatures of ID, not intelligence. You don't find a middle ground with them. The slaughter at Sandy Hook should have been an appeal to the emotions of even the most ardent gun supporters. So how did they react? They embraced the claims of a nutcase who argued the entire thing was a staged false flag.  "More lies the libtards tell so they can take your guns!"

Bill O'Reilly called these mass shootings "the price of freedom," as if the needless deaths of hundreds is acceptable collateral damage that deserves not even a conversation about changing our ways. Mind you, this lover of freedom was incensed by expressions of the First Amendment when football players PEACEFULLY protested racial injustice. Maybe they should have taken out a couple toddlers. That seems to be what it takes to get a conservative behind a constitutional right.

So let's stop acting like these nuts can in any way be part of the solution. They won't be. We'll only solve this problem when we're strong enough to do this without them.

And make no mistake. The only solution IS taking all of the guns. There are international studies that show strong gun regulations have had a massive impact on the number of gun deaths. Banning automatic weapons, implementing a background check system, and requiring permits are all things that definitely work.

18 years ago, Law & Order took on the topic of gun control in an episode called "Gunshow." Jack McCoy attempts to prosecute a gun manufacturer for selling a gun that they knew was desirable for its vulnerability to being tampered with to make the firearm fully automatic. It's one of the best closing arguments in the history of the series.

I thought of that scene a lot yesterday when I heard about how the Las Vegas shooter was able to to hit nearly 600 people in a matter of minutes. What I wrote above is pure emotion. Without apologies. If it upsets you, good. It should. What Jack does below is a masterful presentation of how grotesque these weapons are, and what an abomination it is to defend their existence over the lives of the people they injure and kill.


Law & Order "Gunshow" (Jack McCoy's Summation & the Verdict) from Law and Order Diehards on Vimeo.

16 Great TV Shows, Part 9: Law & Order

Part 1: The Wonder Years
Part 2: The Simpsons
Part 3: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Part 4: Seinfeld
Part 5: The John Larroquette Show
Part 6: ER
Part 7: Newsradio
Part 8: The X-Files

What can I say about Law & Order that I haven't already touched on in multiple earlier posts?

I first came upon Dick Wolf's ubiquitous crime drama during the summer after Season 5. At that point, it was to me little more than another legal show to pass the time. It had the virtue of being easy to catch a random episode of, being entirely episodic. Half of the hour is the investigation of the crime, half is the prosecution.

It took me a while to fully appreciate the genius of Dick Wolf's design - half the show was a murder mystery, half was a moral mystery. In other words, we explore the whodunit, and then the case brings out the social issues around the whodunit. It was a brilliant way to inject social commentary, whether the issue was abortion, abusive parents, racial tension and bigotry, corruption, or even female circumcision. It was a structure that demanded each episode be ABOUT something.

Two circumstances made me a regular viewer in season 6. First, the show did a crossover with Homicide: Life on the Street, which I also was a casual viewer of but hadn't really taken to yet. At this point in time, sitcoms were doing crossover stories pretty regularly, but you didn't see TV dramas - let alone dramas from completely unrelated creators and producers - doing that. It was a gimmick, but it worked. After that I was a regular viewer of both shows.

The second circumstance: A&E had just begun airing the first five seasons of the show in reruns - two episodes a day. I spent much of the next several months taping each episode and watching them when I had a chance. (Kids, before DVRs and streaming THIS was how you binge-watched.) The show was known for its cast turnover. Each season saw the departure of at least one actor and the arrival of a new one. The cable channel didn't run the episodes in order, so you never knew if that night's offering was going to feature Jerry Orbach or Paul Sorvino as the lead cop, or Sam Waterston or Michael Moriarty as the lead prosecutor.

One virtue of the writing was that the cases were often so twisty that I could catch a rerun I'd seen just six months earlier and have no idea where that particular case was going to lead and how anything ended up. Only The Simpsons had proven that complex in reruns and it made the vast majority of episodes almost addictively rewatchable. And rewatch, I did. In college, I'd do my best to schedule my college classes around the A&E reruns.

Given that, it's no surprise that the show's influence was keenly felt on the first feature screenplay I ever wrote. It was an assignment for my screenwriting class and as my classmates read my pages, two consistent reactions emerged - they really liked my twists and fast pace. And it TOTALLY felt like a Law & Order story.

So here's the impact that the series had on my writing:

- Get in scenes as late as possible, leave as early as possible. I already wrote a whole post on this, but it's worth repeating. Because of the story distance the show has to cover so quickly, there's not a wasted moment. This is a great series to teach you about efficiency.

- Story density and complexity. Few episodes are straightforward. There's always a left-turn in the story that comes out of nowhere, but also feels organic in the moment. The best way to do this is by plotting backwards. Know where you want to go and find the most circuitous way to get there that still lets you lay pipe for the rest. Keep upending expectations.

- Use the procedural framework to explore several sides of an issue. Let those issues provoke debates among your characters. Through that you can define the issue AND the players.

Law & Order is an incredible accomplishment in television. Just look at the stats:

- 456 episodes
- 8 spinoff series. (Special Victims Unit, Criminal Intent, Trial By Jury, Law & Order: LA, Law & Order: UK, Conviction, the non-fiction Crime & Punishment, and the forthcoming Law & Order: True Crime.)
- a collective 59 seasons of television from those shows!
- One Emmy win for Outstanding Drama Series.

Earlier Law & Order posts:

A Farewell to Law & Order and Jack McCoy, TV's greatest prosecutor

Start late, get out early - Law & Order: LA

A salute to the greatest procedural ever as Law & Order turns 25! (Includes a list of best episodes)

A tribute to Law & Order's Adam Schiff, Steven Hill

I'm a guest on the Law & Order podcast "These Are Their Stories!"

Part 10: Homicide: Life on the Street

Part 11: Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Part 12: Gilmore Girls

Part 13: Everwood

Part 14: The Office

Part 15: Breaking Bad

Part 16: 13 Reasons Why

I'm a guest on the Law & Order podcast "These Are Their Stories!"

Longtime readers of this blog will know that I am a MASSIVE fan of Law & Order. My essay declaring Jack McCoy one of TV's greatest characters will attest to that, and I've been known to berate you to track down some of the best episodes of the series.

Thus, when I recently learned that there was a new podcast devoted to Law & Order called "These are Their Stories," my first thought was "How can I become a guest on this?" Fortunately, the creators of the podcast, true crime writers Rebecca Lavoie and Kevin Flynn were kind enough to oblige and booked me an episode from Season 18, the period of the show where Jack McCoy was the District Attorney of New York, and had to deal with an Executive Assistant DA named Michael Cutter who was even more of a maverick than Jack used to be. It's an under-appreciated era of the show, and while this episode in particular, "Tango" is not representative of that era at its best, I think we got a great conversation out of it.

If nothing else,  you can learn my favorite detective team in all the franchise, as well as my favorite legal team. I got the sense that at least one of those answers surprised the hosts.

Go here to listen to the episode. You can also download the episode here.

You can find the homepage for These Are Their Stories here.

A tribute to Law & Order's Adam Schiff, Steven Hill

Longtime readers of this blog know of my deep affection for LAW & ORDER. It was one of three shows (the other two being ER and HOMICIDE) that acted as my gateway drugs into modern television drama in the mid-90s. For my money there has never been a better procedural drama than the original L&O. The caliber of writing was not just the best of its era, but it stands above many shows even in this later period of "peak TV." 26 years after its debut, the writing of the early seasons still holds up, save for a few instances where everyone has rather quaint views about the internet and cell phones. I'm trying to imagine TV drama from the 1970s holding up as well during the time frame when I discovered L&O.

I came into L&O casually in the fifth season and then fell hard for the show in season six after it did a then-unusual crossover with HOMICIDE. Pretty much concurrent with this, I was channel-surfing and stumbled upon L&O reruns on A&E. Except... there was something weird. There was no Jerry Orbach, no Sam Waterston. They were replaced by Michael Moriarty (whom I vaguely recalled having seen stories about a couple years earlier, when he quit the show after attacking the Attorney General in the press) and Paul Sorvino. So how did I know that this was Law & Order?

Because Adam Schiff was there.

Even with so much around him that was different, Steven Hill still held court with the same wry wisdom and "Make a deal" drive I was so familiar with from his scenes overseeing Sam Waterston. He was a comfortable presence, a constant amid the regularly changing casts. For a long time he was an answer to the trivia question, "Who was the longest-serving cast member of Law & Order?" Sometimes it was inaccurately claimed he was the only one left from the very beginning, though actually joined in the first episode after the original pilot. Still, he outlasted everyone else from the first season by the time he departed the show after season 10.

Steven Hill died this week at the age of 94. Just looking at that number makes me feel like we should be celebrating his longevity rather than dwelling on mourning his loss. It's never quite that easy, though, is it? The man's resume is quite remarkable. It makes it all the more ironic that to the best of my memory, the only project I saw him in outside L&O was The Firm. This is not a career-encompassing obituary. For that, I'll direct you to Variety's excellent memorial.

In the Law & Order: The Unofficial Companion written by Kevin Courrier & Susan Greer, Hill's co-star Jill Hennessy recalls an exchange with Robert Duvall. "On the set of The Paper, Robert Duvall said to me, 'So I hear you work with Steven Hill on that Law & Order. He's the best working actor today, bar none.'" In another anecdote, showrunner Rene Balcer fondly stated, "I love writing for Steven Hill more than anyone else. He's one of the few actors who will call and tell the writers to give him fewer lines. And then when you give him the lines, he'll say give him fewer words. Then you give him the words and he'll say 'Give me fewer syllables.'" He didn't need long speeches to make an impact.

Hill never thought the show would be a huge hit. "I felt, especially in the beginning, the format was so predictable," the Companion quotes him as saying. "I wondered how long people were going to be able to take this. I was never a detective story buff; I could really care less. I didn't have the patience for the whodunit puzzle but the audience never tires of it."

Schiff would usually pop up for three or four scenes in most episodes, often to get cranky about the state of the case on McCoy or Stone's desk and to advise them to "make a deal!" A lesser actor might have played Schiff like the demanding boss from hell. Instead, Hill was a presence that was at once fatherly, Yoda-like and disciplinarian.

Though he had been on the show for four years before Waterston arrived, the two actors quickly fell into a dynamic reminiscent of a father and son. With Jack's complicated history with his father, it was easy to see how he'd look up to Schiff, even while his rebellous nature often put him at odds with that same affection he sought. Jack McCoy needed Adam Schiff. The younger man's righteous crusades were as noble as often as they needed to be reigned in. In Schiff existed the one person who could yank McCoy's leash when needed and still have his back.

Law & Order always worked best when Jack was the crusader for justice who wielded the law like a sword in pursuit of what was right. But a character like that can only exist so long as he has someone above him bound by the rules of the real world, someone who can throw cold water on Jack's windmill tilting. Neither Dianne Wiest nor Fred Thompson's characters were up to that task after Hill left. Wiest was a wishy-washy presence at best. Thompson's character's more conservative nature led to some interesting clashes with Jack, but you never felt like McCoy respected him in the same way he did Schiff. If Jack pulled an end run that Schiff disapproved of, even if he got away with it in the courtroom, you knew there'd be consequences for the two men's friendship. Thompson's Arthur Branch felt like the sort of arrogant boss one would enjoy disobeying.

(This is also why I feel like Abbie Carmichael was a lesser assistant for Jack. On paper it seems interesting to give him a partner who's even more of a loose cannon than he is. The problem is that it weakens Jack to not be cowboy in the room, and it forces him to play Schiff's role, thereby rendering much of the Schiff/McCoy dynamic moot. It worked better when years later, karma got its revenge on McCoy by putting him in Schiff's office where he didn't have the luxury of bending the rules so far. And naturally, he was given an Executive Assistant DA who bent the rules even more aggressively than Jack himself did.)

People who accuse Law & Order of being nothing more than a plot-driven procedural have overlooked how much the character relationships are woven into the fabric of the cases. It's also escaped them just how important the actors and their characters are to the stories. Steven Hill was irreplaceable as Schiff. His dry comments often either helped cut to the core of a point for the audience, while bringing a bit of humor to the moment. I recall one moment when Claire Kincaid expressed frustration with a miscarriage of justice, only to be reminded by Schiff, "We don't make the system, we just try to survive in it." Hill gave those words the weight of a lifetime of experience. You could easily understand that he meant "we can argue about how the world SHOULD be for hours, but at the end of it, we'll still be back here with the same problem. Find a solution that works."

In another episode, former ADA Jamie Ross returned as a defense attorney and twice out-maneuvered her former bosses. Upon hearing that Ross's strategy had caught even McCoy with his pants down, Schiff remarked, "I knew there was a reason I hired that young lady." He even has the opportunity to rub it in later when another of Jack's strategies blows up in his face.

Steven Hill always played Schiff like he was the smartest guy in the room even as he was resigned to the reality he'd be ignored until proven right. And maybe three or four times a year, the writers would give Hill a story where Schiff had even more to work with. The seventh season finale "Terminal" involves a case where the governor wants the DA to seek the death penalty, but Schiff feels it's not warranted. Concurrent with this, Schiff's wife has suffered a stroke and is hospitalized on a ventilator. The governor removes Schiff under the pretense that the family crisis has impaired the DA's judgement. McCoy follows Schiff out the door and the two of them take the governor to court. There's a nice moment where the courtroom histrionics of McCoy and his adversary are trumped when the soft-spoken Schiff stands up and sums it up in a brief speech that ends, "The governor thinks he's above the law. He's not." Few actors have the presence that could make such a simple statement carry real import.

And then there's the moment at the end of that episode. After signing the DNR for his wife, Schiff stands by his wife's bedside as her ventilator is turned off. The entire action of the scene is played on his face. We hear the machines, the breathing and the heart monitor. We hear the ventilator deactivated, the heartbeat briefly continuing... and then clear beeps of distress preceding a flatline. Hill lets out a whimper - not an agonized cry but a brief whimper that one might mistake for "No..."

Even typing this now, I can hear that moan in my head and it's agonizing. His wife dies right before his eyes, and rather than going for overwrought tears, Hill chooses to play Schiff's pain in a more subtle way. It's all in his eyes and he looks so... lost. It's one of the most affecting depictions of death I can recall seeing on TV, and it's all evoked with such minimalist directing and acting. Hill made you feel Schiff's loss by allowing the audience to project their emotions onto him.

I could quote Schiff all day. My favorite Schiff one-liner might be from "Double Down," where he notes a defendant "confessed to a murder to avoid being prosecuted for a murder. I'm putting this one in my memoirs."

Someone pointed me to a collection of his best one-liners, and I'd like to end this on my favorite McCoy/Schiff exchange from "Showtime."

Schiff: "Started with a murder, ends with an execution. You got what you wanted. Take the rest of the week off."
McCoy: "It's Friday, Adam."
Schiff: "So it is. See you on Monday."

Farewell, Steven Hill.

A salute to the greatest procedural ever as Law & Order turns 25!

Yesterday marked the 25th Anniversary of the premiere of one of the greatest TV dramas of all time: Law & Order. Dick Wolf's procedural has left behind an amazing legacy. Consider these stats:

- 456 episodes
- 7 spinoff series. (Special Victims Unit, Criminal Intent, Trial By Jury, Law & Order: LA, Law & Order: UK, Conviction and the non-fiction Crime & Punishment.)
- a collective 59 seasons of television from those shows!
- One Emmy win for Outstanding Drama Series.

In that, it's easy to forget the "Mothership" L&O struggled for a while to find its audience. Today's television climate doesn't seem to allow for the kind of nurturing that let Law & Order sprout into the empire it became. It's first three seasons it finished ranked in the low 40s, at a time when that was a pretty terrible place to be. NBC was ready to cancel the show unless Dick Wolf added some women to the all-male cast for the 4th season. The additions coincided with a ratings climb to #38 for season 4 and #27 for season 5. From then on, with one exception, the show's ranking rose every season until it peaked at #7 in season 12. 

How many shows get their greatest success in their second decade? The L&O universe didn't even begin branching out into spinoffs until SVU debuted during the mothership's ninth season. It's hard not to marvel at that long game as we prepare to enter a new TV season, where some shows will be declared dead by week 2.

It's possible one factor in L&O's rising popularity was the syndicated reruns that seemed to run endlessly, first on A&E (where I became addicted to the show) and later on TNT. As a pure procedural, there were no serialized stories to complicate rerun scheduling or viewer experience, and remarkably, many of the social issues it dealt with from over the years - abortion, racial tension, terrorism - have remained relevant even two decades later.

I was an occasional watcher of Law & Order around the time of the fifth season, but I wasn't a total convert until the novelty of the drama crossing over with equally acclaimed drama Homicide: Life on the Street lured me in. I'd seen HLOTS here and there, but the stunt of mixing the two casts made me a convert to both shows. From that point, I watched the syndicated reruns every night and in college, made an effort to schedule my classes around the repeats. 

Law & Order was one of those series that showed me what great TV writing could be. It was my gateway drug into an entire generation of fantastic compelling drama, and it remains one of the shows I can watch endlessly. A couple of my spec scripts have been procedural, no doubt due to the influence of the series. It's such a brilliant concept for a show because the half-cops, half-courtroom approach makes for complex, twisting stories.  As Dick Wolf has often said, "The first half is a murder mystery, the second half is a moral mystery."

I've already paid tribute to my favorite Law & Order character, Jack McCoy, in this earlier post, so today I decided to spotlight 10 classic L&Os that can probably teach you a thing or two about writing.

Sanctuary (season 4) - A Jewish driver accidentally runs over a black boy in Harlem and leaves the scene. When the investigation rules it an accident and prosecutors decline to file charges, outrage in the black community sparks a riot caught by television cameras. Racial tensions run high as Ben Stone pursues convictions for men who killed an innocent man during that melee. It's got echoes of issues that surrounded the Rodney King and Reginald Denny trials (the latter a clear influence on the riot) and is another great instance of Law & Order using its procedural format to pick at larger social matters.

Remand (season 6) - The inspiration this time is the Kitty Genovese murder. A 30 year-old conviction is jeopardized by new evidence, and when a new trial is ordered, McCoy has to win the case without the aid of a confession obtained decades ago under circumstances that now appear dubious. It's an instance where the show manages to explore the sort of police work done 30 years earlier, and work in some personal stakes amid the motions. (Adam Schiff prosecuted this case and is determined that the still-living victim not see her rapist go free, even though his sentence is already longer than many similar convicts.

Charm City (season 6) - A master class in how to write a crossover between two shows with very different styles. Frank Pembleton, Tim Bayliss and John Munch from Homicide make appearances, and despite their show's vastly different approach (Homicide is much more of a character-based show than L&O ever was), they fit right in. Pembleton's manipulative style in "The Box" - rarely put under scrutiny on his own turf - becomes the complication in McCoy's case here. Better still, the story is constructed in a way that doesn't leave things feeling unresolved for viewers unable to track down the Homicide half.

D-Girl/Turnaround/Showtime (season 7) - the only three-parter in the show's history, and a pivitol episodes in terms of the audience because for these airings, Law & Order took over ER's timeslot while the other show stored up new episodes for sweeps. The OJ trial clearly inspired the media circus that surrounds the investigation into the murder of a studio exec and the expanded scope lets the writers play with more twists and red herrings than normal. Gilmore Girls fans will enjoy seeing not just Lauren Graham here, but her on-screen boyfriend Scott Cohen here as well. Again, character stakes are woven in through strife in Curtis's marriage and Jamie Ross's tension with her ex-husband, the defense attorney opposing McCoy and Ross. This allows for a few more instances of the show's various partnerships interacting to discuss matters beyond the case. It also sets up one of my favorite McCoy lines in court: "Your grief might be more convincing, sir, if you hadn't just admitted... you cut off your wife's head!"

Double Down (season 7) - one of the best episodes in the entire franchise. Law & Order is often at pains to develop conflict among its regulars because its rare to use continuing subplots that make it easier to develop and resolve tension across several episodes. It also would get tiresome to have everyone at each other's throats over every case, so in general the characters work together pretty harmoniously and professionally. This episode is something of an exception to that, as the cops and prosecutors differ on how to handle a case where a captured bank robber and cop killer wants an incredibly light sentence for giving up the location of his dying hostage. McCoy makes the deal, then spends the back half of the episode trying one legal trick after another to nulify it. When the only card he has left to play requires the cops putting their own necks on the line, the result is one of L&O's best courtroom moments.

Terminal (season 7) - The personal stakes this time come from the governor clashing with Adam Schiff when Schiff refuses to pursue the death penalty. Schiff faces removal from office in an episode that gives the great Steven Hill more screen time than normal. For Schiff, the matter is complicated by his ailing wife's condition making it necessary to for him to decide if he should prolong her life through life support. The final shot plays entirely on Schiff's face as sound effects indicate the termination of life support... and the heartbreaking outcome. Hill's brief gasp of sorrow is more devastating that the vast majority of emotional histrionics found in most medical dramas.

Refuge (season 9) - another rare two-parter finds McCoy taking on the Russian Mob. McCoy's case hangs on the testimony of a traumatized young boy, only to have a mistrial declared when the boy's testimony goes out of bounds. Before a new trial can begin, an ADA and the boy's mother are murdered, and the boy left in critical condition. That he survived creates a complication that forces McCoy to either put him through another trial or withdraw his case. (In a cruel twist, had the boy died, his prior testimony would be admissible.) At that point, McCoy fights dirty, going well past the edge of what the law permits as he suspends habeas corpus. Some of this plays VERY differently post-9/11. Here McCoy is the hero for breaking the rules to go after "the bad guys" but in a post Bush/Cheney world, McCoy's actions are horrifying in their own way.

Gunshow (season 10) - A man shoots up a park with a semi-automatic gun which he converted to fully automatic. McCoy's investigation finds that the gun manufactors were not only aware of the design flaw that made the gun vulnerable to tampering, but they ignored it despite the fact making the gun tamper-proof would have added minimal costs. Thus, he takes on the gun companies in court and delivers a powerful closing statement pouring out two trays in succession. The first tray contains the number of bullets the gunman could have fired in a 30-second period using a semi-automatic. The second... contains the number of bullets he actually fired using a fully-automatic weapon. The difference in sound as each tray's contents hit the floor are a masterful bit of theatricality.

Killerz (season 10) - A chilling episode revolving around the prosecution of a sociopathic 10 year-old girl for the murder of a younger boy. The legal and moral questions surrounding how to bring this killer to justice let the characters grapple with hard questions, but the real highlight is Hallee Hirsh's (later Mark Greene's daughter on ER) unsettling performance as the killer.

Justice (season 10) - Another twisting plot that brings back Jamie Ross - this time in opposition to her former partner McCoy. There's some deft legal maneuvering and an incredibly well-constructed mystery that I dare not spoil. McCoy not only has to face his former colleague, but he also takes on a judge after uncovering evidence that he buried possibly exculpatory evidence years ago when he was prosecuting a murder. Like many of the best episodes, this episode will have you marveling at the density of what the writers pack into 44 minutes, balancing strong twists while insuring the characters still drive the story.

I could easily have selected another 10 or 15 episodes, but these all stand as a pretty good representation of the series at its best. My "golden era" of the show is Seasons 5-10, though the "Cutter years" of seasons 18-20 were also fantastic. If you haven't exposed yourself to the mothership series, I urge you to rectify that immediatley. For those of you who have watched, what are your favorite episodes?

Start late, get out early - Law & Order: LA

I'm going to give you a little bit of homework here. There's a fundamental rule of screenwriting that says "start a scene as late as possible; get out as early as possible." Or to put it in layman's terms...

STOP FUCKING OVERWRITING AND OVER-EXPLAINING EVERY! LAST! DETAIL!

*whew!* That actually felt good. Maybe it was just venting that, maybe it was that effigy of bad spec scripts I just burned, but I genuinely feel better.

Anyway, though pretty much every good movie or TV show should stand as an object lesson of this, there are probably few shows on TV that better demonstrate this than Law & Order. It's pretty much pure procedural, which means every scene is driving the story. The show is more plot-driven than character-driven, so that makes the series a perfect teaching tool for noting how little we actually need to see in order to follow the story. The plots are so dense that every scene has to cut right to the point, while still managing smooth transitions.

Unfortunately, the original Law & Order is no longer in production, but since its retooling, Law & Order: LA has been almost as good and this weeks episode "East Pasadena" can stand with the best of the classic series. Even better, this episode not only has one of the series strongest plots, but it manages a pretty good character-driven subplot for Detective Morales (Alfred Molina.)

If you have some free-time and keep track of how short the individual scenes are and how much information is conveyed in them.

Friday Free-for-All - The Tommy Westphall Multiverse Theory

Some of you might remember that a while back I noted that actor/comedian Richard Belzer has appeared as Detective John Munch on six different shows: Homicide: Life on the Street, Law & Order, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, The X-Files, The Beat and The Wire. The obvious implication of this is simple - via the transitive property, Law & Order and The X-Files exist in the same universe.

Better still, since Law & Order has crossed over with several other spin-offs (Criminal Intent, Trial by Jury, Law & Order: Los Angeles and Conviction) and The X-Files crossed over with Millennium and The Lone Gunman, that means that this TV universe contains at least 12 distinct TV shows.

And yet, Homicide has a few other crossovers to add to the mix - notably St. Elsewhere, and here's where things get interesting. See, St. Elsewhere crossed over with Cheers (no, really!). Cheers spun off Frasier and crossed over with Wings, and because of NBC's ubiquitous crossover and cameo stunts in the 90s, Frasier is linked to many other sitcoms.

So in theory, it's possible that Fox Mulder could have stopped into Boston and had a beer with Norm and Cliff, then headed to New York and butted heads with Detective Lennie Briscoe over jurisdiction.

(These are the things I spent my days thinking about when I was in college. All of this is from memory - not from research.)

Ready for me to blow your mind? In the final episode of St. Elsewhere, we were shown that the entire series had actually been a fantasy existing only in the mind of an autistic child named Tommy Westphall.

So in theory, not only do all of these shows exist in the same universe - they ALL exist in the mind of an autistic child!

One night in college I was poking around the internet, and I stumbled onto a site discussing this very phenomenon... but their take on the Tommy Westphall Universe was far more comprehensive than mine. I established connections based only on direct contact between the shows - they tend to be a bit looser, using common references between different series as enough to establish a link. Currently, the site alleges a link between 282 series!

So if you're into TV geekery and want to see just how you can get from All in the Family to CSI: NY, head on over to Tommy Westphall's Mind - A multiverse explored and drink in the TV trivia. They even have a handy chart showing how each show connects to the others.

UPDATE: Thanks to poster Nat G on Ken Levine's site, I've rediscovered another TV crossover site.

A Farewell to Law & Order and Jack McCoy, TV's greatest prosecutor

Farewell, Jack McCoy.

If that name has no meaning for you, then you likely haven't turned on a TV in the last sixteen years or so. Since the 1994-95 season, Sam Waterston has brought the character of Jack McCoy to life each week on Law & Order. Introduced as the Executive Assistant District Attorney, McCoy finally got a promotion to New York's District Attorney three seasons ago. He's the prosecutor we all wish was representing us, the guy who looks beyond politics and goes strictly after justice.




Tonight, after 20 seasons on NBC Law & Order will air its last original episode. 20 seasons! The only scripted show on TV that is older than that is The Simpsons, which beats L&O's first airdate by nine months. That kind of achievement is likely to never be seen again in TV. Think about this - there are students graduating college this spring who cannot remember a world where Law & Order wasn't on the air.

As the final episode was shot while it was still assumed the series would get a 21st season, the finale will likely offer no closure for long-time fans. It's utterly shameful that NBC would treat a long-time cornerstone of its lineup with this much disrespect, and one hopes that the rumors of a two-hour TV movie to tie up all the lose ends prove to be true.

It was one of the first major series to tackle issues like abortion and child abuse. The show regularly "rips from the headlines," often borrowing details of set-ups from real life cases before spinning them into new directions. Executive Producer Dick Wolf always says, "The first half of the show is a legal mystery, the second half is a moral mystery."

I started watching the show occasionally in the fifth season, McCoy's first, and became a full-blown regular viewer in season six. For me, the golden age of Law & Order is pretty much Seasons 5-10 and 18-20. When I did Mock Trial for two years in high school, I modeled my performance on Jack McCoy and walked away with three "Best Attorney" awards.

(How did I get three awards in two years? Well, each team has to compete in two trials, one as the plaintiff and one as the defendant. Usually each team member only takes one part in one trial. I handled the closing arguments and cross-examinations for both sides. So after spending the morning fighting for the plaintiff and totally demolishing the defense's witnesses on the stand, I then played the defense attorney in the afternoon and likewise cleaned the prosecution's clock.)

Late in my high school years, I discovered that A&E ran two episodes a day and within a matter of months I'd seen most of the series. When I entered college, I even scheduled my classes around the afternoon reruns. (That might - MIGHT - be an exaggeration. Or it might not.) I became a true crime buff and there might have even been a brief point when I considered pursuing law as a career. The reason I didn't? Because I don't think I wanted to be a lawyer so much as I wanted to be Jack McCoy. The thing I love about Jack is that he's always out for justice. He's not political - he's neither Republican nor Democrat even though his values and motives often coincide with one side of the aisle or the other - and neither is the show.

Now, there are some pinheads out there who are probably already set to disagree with that statement. Head to Deadline.com and you can find a few people complaining loudly that the show promotes a "leftist agenda" and is little more than "hippie liberal propaganda," just as a trip over to sites like Television without Pity will fairly easily lead you to some poster decrying executive producer Dick Wolf for using the show as a platform for conservative, ring-wing ideals. Anytime each political party is accusing you of shilling for the other guy, you're doing something right.

I remember when I first fully realized that I was neither Republican nor Democrat, but what I call a Jack McCoy-ican. The ninth-season finale of the series was a two-part episode called "Refuge," wherein Jack took on the Russian mob. The second part opened with the aftermath of a brutal hit that claimed the life of an ADA on the case, left an 8 year-old witness critically wounded and killed his mother. Already Jack had dealt with the opposing attorneys leaking information so that jurors could be intimidated and when the Russians plant a bomb in the basement of Police headquarters, Jack has had enough. He announces he plans on having the suspects rounded up. When his second chair and his boss remind him he doesn't have enough evidence to make the arraignments stick, Jack says he's not going to present them for arraignment. His boss, the always crusty (and much missed) Adam Schiff isn't pleased:

Adam Schiff: I see. You're planning to violate three, no, five amendments to the Constitution.
Jack McCoy: It's time someone talked to Mr. Volsky in a language he understands.
Adam Schiff: And what language is that?
Jack McCoy: Adam, unless you order me not to do it ...
Adam Schiff: I'm ordering you! (leaves)
Jack McCoy: (to his second chair ADA) Hand me that stack of arrest warrants.

Thus, Jack has his suspects locked up in what amounts to a suspension of habeas corpus, appealing to higher and higher courts to keep them locked up indefinitely.

Notably, this episode aired in 1999. Had this been done post-9/11, it would be difficult not to draw comparisons between this and the legal shellgame that the Bush Administration played with the Guantanamo detainees, many of whom might not have belonged there. The difference is, when Jack does it it's for justice and not for political gain. I defy anyone to watch that two-parter and not cheer as Jack not only locks these men up without a second thought, but then defiantly argues in higher and higher courts to keep them where they belong. And as much as the episode has characters call Jack on this behavior, it's pretty clear we're supposed to see him as heroic.

So if you look at that today, you'd be expecting Jack to be on the same side of the political spectrum as Karl Rove, right?

In the very next episode "Gunshow," the tenth season opener, deals with a case where a gunman shoots a dozen or so women in a park. The investigation quickly uncovers that the gun was a legal semi-automatic that had be easily modified into a fully-automatic weapon. McCoy learns that to make the gun tamper-proof, it would have added about $50 to the manufacturing cost of a gun that retailed for over a thousand. Outraged at the negligence, he prosecutes the gun company.

Before long, the DAs get some disturbing evidence. An internal memo shows that they not only knew about the flaw, but felt that making the gun tamper-proof would have actually hurt sales. As Jack says, the gun's vulnerability is their whole marketing plan. In doing so, he gives one of the greatest closing arguments in the series history (one I can't quote effectively because it relies on some visual components) and actually wins the case, only to have the judge set aside the verdict.

The "gun control" aspect of the plot likely ticked off a number of conservatives, just as the previous episode offended some liberals. But that's Law & Order. It deals with political issues, but it is not political itself. Everyone has had their turn as the target. No single political viewpoint is 100% right, and the show understands that better than people who make their living off of politics.

Five more Jack McCoy episodes that you MUST see:

Angel (season 6) - In a story inspired by the Susan Smith case, Jack prosecutes a mother who believes God wanted her to kill her baby, and is very nearly outmaneuvered by a green defense attorney (played by Fisher Stevens) who allows Jack to underestimate him.

Double Down (season 7) - One of the series' best episodes ever. McCoy makes a immunity deal with an armed robber who killed a cop while fleeing with his missing accomplice, agreeing to a light sentence in return for the location of a kidnapped taxi driver. When the driver is found dead, McCoy works to get the agreement nullified, then stops as soon the cops discover the robber's accomplice dead. The cops are perplexed until McCoy reveals his legal shellgame, arguing that the immunity applies only to the cop's murder and not the robber. Since he kept the robber's statement, he can use it as evidence that the two men worked together on the robbery. As Briscoe notes, "So he walks for killing a cop, but you nail him for killing the cop killer?" But it's still not that simple, and the twists keep coming right up until the end. (Netflix this one NOW!)

Thrill (season 8) - McCoy tangles with the Catholic Church to make a confession admissible in the prosecution of two teens who killed a delivery boy. This episode boasts some of Jack's slyest maneuvering as he gets the defendant's trials severed from each other to keep each boy from pointing the finger at the other as the real killer, then prosecutes them simultaneously in two different courtrooms.

Nullification (season 8) - McCoy takes on members of a right-wing militia who killed an armored truck driver while robbing an offtrack betting parlor. The militia leader represents all the men at trial and argues that they should be treated as POWs in a war against the government and push for the jury to nullify. Even when things turn against him at trial, Jack's win-at-all-costs attitude still won't allow him to use government records that should have been destroyed in order to bump one more juror and get a mistrial. After what has to be one of Jack's greatest closing arguments ever, the jury returns a hung verdict. The delighted militia leader gloats, "Admit it, Mr. McCoy. We won." With conviction in his voice, Jack says, "You didn't win anything. The system you wanted to destroy won. I'll see you back here in a couple months. Enjoy your freedom. While you still have it."

Under the Influence (season 8) - While prosecuting a drunk driver, Jack gets emotionally involved recalling how his previous assistant and lover was killed by a drunk driver. When he bends the rules to put away the defendant, he crosses a line that could get him disbarred.

There have been great episodes in the last few years too, as the new EADA Cutter has shown an even greater ingenuity than Jack in bending the rules. It's amusing to see Jack dealing with this younger, brasher version of himself. (Somewhere, Jack's former boss Adam Schiff must be smiling.) Even better, when McCoy calls Cutter on the carpet, Cutter is always quick to site an earlier episode where Jack bent the rules in similar ways. As a Law & Order fanboy, I enjoy trying to beat Cutter to his references and its nice to see a show that remembers its history even 10 or 15 years after the fact.

So farewell, Law & Order. We'll always have the reruns and the DVDs, but it won't be quite the same.