Law and Order

posted to www.marxmail.org on January 19, 2003

Although USA television presents itself in Newton Minow's memorable words as a "vast wasteland", there is some product differentiation, just as you will find different types of cactus in the Mojave versus the Painted Desert.

The original three "prestige" networks formed in the 1940s were CBS, NBC and ABC, now owned by Viacom, General Electric and Disney respectively. Their bread-and-butter is situation comedies geared to young white people, with shows like "Seinfeld", "Cheers", "Friends", "Will and Grace", "Spin City", etc. garnering huge audiences and hype. Even if these shows were watchable, I couldn't tolerate them because of the insufferable canned laughter that punctuates every exchange.

The other staple is cop shows, either set in a city like NY or Miami with the local gendarmerie profiled, or based on a federal agency like the FBI or CIA. Since 9/11 some of these shows have taken on an openly propagandistic character. Last night "The Agency," based on the CIA, aired a show on CBS that was described in the NY Times TV guide as follows: "Stiles and Terri pursue a terrorist in the Gaza strip." I suspect that it was not sympathetic to the cause of the Palestinian people.

One of the longest-running and most topical shows is NBC's "Law and Order", which attempts to provide a more or less liberal viewpoint. This is constrained obviously by the very nature of the show, which sides with the District Attorney and detectives whom the viewers are meant to identify with. Nearly every show ends with a conviction.

A typical "Law and Order" might dramatize a random killing of the sort that take place occasionally in NYC, when a former mental patient pushes somebody on the subway tracks for example. Although the show is sure to include a mental health professional who makes the case for better support, the perpetrator is seen as worthy of conviction. Generally speaking, the show might be said to reflect the sensitivity of the white middle-class Democratic Party voter who crossed over to vote somewhat sheepishly for Giuliani because things had gotten "out of hand".

The original "Law and Order" has spawned two offshoots. One is titled "Law and Order: Special Victims Unit", which includes episodes involving elder abuse, child smuggling, a female serial killer disguised as a prostitute, the dangers of the child welfare system, and whether children who have committed heinous crimes should be tried as adults and incest. Sort of like Oprah Winfrey crowned by a billy club. The oddest touch is comedian Richard Belzer cast as a truculent detective. In real life Belzer is a radical who can be heard on WBAI asking people to send in money to support the cop-hostile station.

The latest spin-off is "Law and Order: Criminal Intent," which is virtually identical to the original but with a different cast of characters. Most noteworthy is Vincent D'Onofrio as Detective Robert Goren, a character who evokes Colombo's (Peter Falk) plebian oafishness, but stripped of comedy. Both the Goren character and Detective Briscoe (Jerry Orbach) from the original show appear influenced by Detective Eddie "Popeye" Doyle (Gene Hackman) in "The French Connection", who while wolfing down a hot-dog in the rain, stakes out his aristocratic drug-dealing prey through the window of luxurious French restaurant.

As far as I know, this is D'Onofrio's first regular TV gig. He is an especially gifted and versatile film actor with a long career who was featured as the bug from outer space in "Men and Black" and as the brutalized army recruit in Stanley Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket".

In a sign of the changing times, last night's show (originally aired last May) drew sharp class lines around a criminal conspiracy drawn from recent Wall Street scandals. In the opening scene, a top accountant of a company clearly based on Enron confronts her boss with what she views as a questionable quarterly earnings report. She refuses to sign the report until the inflated profits are adjusted to meet the foundering company's true financial situation.

In the convoluted plot, the top executives frame her in the murder of her boy friend and then blackmail her into signing the report in exchange for providing a witness that will free her. All this is incredible, but necessary for the show's boilerplate.

The most interesting aspects involve D'Onofrio penetrating through the bogus finances in the process of nailing the oily CEO. In a striking scene that takes place in the interrogation room of the police station, they go back and forth over whether the company was part of a "bubble" that was now bursting. The CEO assures D'Onofrio that the bubble never bursts, it only recedes and grows based on the hopes and expectations that the American people have in the capitalist system, which he names specifically.

We shall see.