by Mark Hadley
A friend of mine used to say, “Only a good script promises a good result.” I can only wonder what he would have made of gems like, “Looks like blunt force brain surgery!”, and “I’m going ahead with this – minimum mercy; maximum sentence” – two of my favourite quotes from television’s longest running criminal drama, Law & Order. Snappy scripts filled with lines like these have been the bedrock beneath fifteen seasons of Emmy Award winning episodes. Incidentally, they also serve as an excellent summary of the philosophies behind the show’s prolonged success.
Each episode of Law & Order tells its tale from the differing perspectives of the detectives who investigate New York’s most brutal murders and the attorneys who prosecute them. Apparently, as the voice-over intones, “these are their stories”. In doing so, the show combines two of television’s classic story types. The first is the ‘puzzle’. Typically, our intrepid detectives are presented with several seemingly unconnected pieces of evidence. Their weekly challenge is to fit the ‘puzzle’ together. The second story type is the ‘chess game’. Once the episode shifts from the streets to the courtroom the district attorneys enter into a battle of wits with the defendant’s lawyer. The weapons are subpoenas, gag orders and forensic evidence, and the tension is now generated by the move and counter-move of the courtroom players.
Creator and executive producer Dick Wolf is busy bottling that double-dose of magic formula. The original Law & Order has given rise to three successful spin-offs – Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Law & Order: Criminal Intent and due in early 2005, Law & Order: Trial By Jury. But the focal point is shifting slowly from mystery to perversity and brutality. Special Victims Unit has narrowed the focus to concentrate solely on the work done by detectives dealing with sexual crimes. Rape, incest, paedophilia – each week is a new lesson in the darkest reaches of human sexuality. By contrast Criminal Intent seems to contemplate those crimes perpetrated by the evil geniuses of the underworld. Consequently cults, mass murders and psychological manipulation are high on the agenda.
The Law & Order series are steadily cultivating within audiences a taste for the truly awful. But then there is nothing new in this accusation. Television slowly desensitising us to violence? Shocking! But the transformation of how we view our society is more subtle and far reaching. Several hundred episodes of Law & Order have ensured that I have little faith in either the police or the judiciary to prevent crime. Furthermore, I am less likely to take a walk in a park, drive through any suburb with the doors unlocked, or trust anyone unfortunate enough to be a baby-sitter or an ex-husband.
Criminal fictions are partly responsible for perpetuating a climate of anxiety in society that can result in a refusal to trust even immediate family and real danger towards others. Programs like Law & Order destroy trust as surely as advertising destroys contentedness. The more we watch them, the more we allow for the possibility that anyone deviating from the norm does so with criminal intent. The result is a viewing public that is perpetually building bigger barriers of distrust, while feeding itself fear behind firmly locked doors.
