More Law & Order Commentary

Watched awesome episode of Law & Order today. Jeffrey Tambor was an incompetent judge presiding over the case of a senator, played by somebody I should recognize but forgot. The defending lawyer was the guy who now plays scruffy cop on the current season. It was like a wormhole in the L & O timeline.

I have been thinking about it, and I think there are a few reasons I actually like Law & Order and can't stand other dramas.

1) Each episode manages to tell a whole story, so I don't have to wait forever for the conclusion of plotlines I don't care about.

2) The characters are not universally irritating. The motivations for the recurring cast are almost irrelevant because they are just doing their jobs, and the motivations for the suspects, etc., just make sense.

That I guess leads to

3) The writing is just better. Usually the second half of each episode centers on some sort of interesting (some readers might say "gimmicky") legal argument, so it's not wholly dependent on "what happens to so-and-so" type stories, which depend on you liking, or at least caring about, the character. The first half of the show is generally just pretty solid mystery-ing.

To expand on my points in a rambling and unstructured way, I'd like to mention that we do get to see more details about the main characters (that is, DAs and detectives) rolled out over the course of many episodes, but it's not generally essential to the plot, and I think the characters are actually more endearing because we are seeing them work and trying to figure out stuff along with them rather than just having their stories shoved at us. Maybe it is a Japanese way of thinking, but I feel a greater connection with the ADAs, whose lives we see very little of outside of the office than with people on other tv dramas who spend their time talking about their messed up childhoods or lost loves and the like.

Law & Order is clearly the best brand of the three that are still on (it is also better to Trial by Jury, I think, but I didn't see much of its lone season), and I think the reasons I talked about before show why. SVU focuses far too much on each of the detectives' overwrought backstories. For example, the episode I watched last night was just a story about Eliot's daughter and his mother who both have some sort of mental illness. It was the kind of story that if it happened to someone in real life would be tragic, but as it was, was just kind of a boring hour of poorly lighted emoting. That is another strike against SVU, which is sort of unrelated to my previous points. It's way too dark, not in subject matter, but in the sense that it looks like the whole show is shot using only a flashlight for lighting. This helps obscure Mariska Hargitay's face, though, so that is a plus (she is ugly and looks like a dude).

Criminal Intent is really a different kind of show. It's pretty much like Sherlock Holmes if Holmes were living in present day Manhattan and also basically a mental patient. The real selling point of the show is watching Gorin twist up his face and body, then own some suspect through psychology or pick out some bizarre clue. It's in no way realistic, but pretty great. Eames makes a great Watson, too. I've only seen one episode with Jeff Goldblum, but he seems pretty great thus far. The Chris Noth episodes were meh, but mostly due to none of his partners having any personality whatsoever. I don't know if that was mostly a writing thing or if they just look shabby compared to D'Onofrio, who is just plain awesome.