|
 Review:
The Law And Order Marathon
Written By
Carrie Pruett, May 30th, 1999, Copyright 1999
Can't get enough
Law & Order? Can you even read that sentence with a straight
face? Reruns of the venerable NBC cop-and-lawyer drama are set to
air twice a week during the summer - in its regular Wednesday, 10
ET time slot and also on Mondays at 9, prepping the time slot for
this fall's spinoff. On cable, A&E regularly reruns the show four
times a day.
It takes some
ingenuity to create a must-see event out of something as commonplace
as "Law" reruns, but A&E has done it. On Monday, the cable network
is airing a twelve-hour marathon of "Law" episodes, beginning at
8 AM. These won't just be any twelve episodes; they will chronicle
the entrances and exits of every major character over the first
7 seasons.
That's a lot
of characters. "Law" has seen almost a full-scale turnover since
its 1990 premiere, with only Steven Hill as District Attorney Adam
Schiff remaining in place. The marathon should provide a great introduction
to the show for anyone who has somehow avoided it up to this point.
Because A&E typically shows its reruns in more-or-less random order,
this is also a chance for "Law's" many rerun junkies (and I
go to law school with a lot of them) to catch up on crucial moments
that they missed. Best of all, in a show whose one-case-per-episode
formula that tends to restrict character development, A&E's approach
places a rare focus on the personalities that have ebbed and flowed
through the course of the series.
The standard
Law & Order episode starts with a crime, and the crime brings
us detectives, who travel in pairs. "Law"'s partner dynamic of choice
is "old codger, young whippersnapper." The original codger was Detective
Max Greevey, played by George Dzunda, who exited the cast after
a single season. Greevey, we barely knew thee! It's our loss; for
my money, Max's blunt common sense and deeply expressive eyes could
have graced many a future case. Dzunda appears in only one episode
of Monday's marathon - the first ("Prescription for Death," 8 AM
ET). The second ("Confession," 9AM) is devoted to the aftermath
of Greevey's death in the line of duty.
Dzunda was replaced,
for the next season and a half, by Paul "Mira's Dad" Sorvino as
Phil Ceretta. The character has never really jelled for me, and
he was most memorable for his hideous fur hat. His exit ("Prince
of Darkness," 9AM) cleared the way for everybody's favorite codger,
Jerry Orbach's Lennie Briscoe (introduced in "Point of View," 10
AM). A recovered alcoholic and eternal cynic, Lennie' s most memorable
moments have probably come during Law & Order's three crossovers
with Homicide. He was born to trade wisecracks with Richard
Belzer's Detective Munch.
Thirtysomething
Chris Noth wouldn't have been the youthful scamp on most shows even
back in 1990, but next to his onscreen partners, Noth's Mike Logan
seemed positively spry. He teamed well with Greevey and Ceretta,
but he was positively inspired beside Briscoe. Logan lasted five
seasons, but his marquee show in the marathon is "Pride" (4 PM),
a convoluted episode in which his behavior earns him a transfer
from Manhattan to Staten Island. The cause of Noth's departure from
the show is less clear, but he patched things up enough last year
with executive producer Dick Wolf to make "Exiled," a TV movie about
Logan's post-"Law" travails. The movie, which was unremarkable but
fun, pleased NBC enough that more might be in the works.
Noth's popularity
ensured that his successor would have a rough road among die-hard
fans, but Benjamin Bratt managed to turn in four respectable seasons
as Detective Reynaldo Curtis. From his debut ("Bitter Fruit," 5
PM), Bratt displayed a nice repartee with Orbach (of course, who
wouldn't?). Curtis's character, a straight-laced family man whose
brief extramarital affair provided a lot of complications that nobody
really cared about, was never a big hit with fans. Bratt cried all
the way to the cover of "People," probably getting his picture in
more magazines than the rest of the cast combined did in nine years.
That's partly because he's more conventionally glamourous that the
rest of the cast, mostly because he's dating Julia Roberts. Bratt
left the show at the end of this season. His replacement will be
Jesse L. Martin, best known as Ally McBeal's doctor boyfriend.
We may love
"Law"'s cops, but the first half of the show is just an appetizer
to give us a whiff of the main course, which comes when the case
is handed off to the prosecutors. The series' two real leads have
been the chief prosecutors: Michael Moriarty's Ben Stone and, beginning
in 1994 ("Second Opinion," 3 PM), Sam Waterston's Jack McCoy. Herein
lies the greatest rift among "Law" fans. You can like them both,
but everybody has a preference.
I confess an
affection for Ben Stone. Soft spoken, gentle but firm, ethical,
to be sure, but also fundamentally good - Ben was the last of a
dying breed. Not dying in the real world, where they probably never
existed, but on the screen. Stone may be the last fictional lawyer
who would have seen a kindred spirit in Atticus Finch. Lawyer shows
are back, thanks to David E. Kelley, but it seems mandatory to bathe
the characters in buckets of angst. In Kelley's mind, any lawyer
who actually believes in what he or she is doing will turn out to
be boring or dangerous. Stone never wasted time doubting what he
was sure of, but his brand of intellectual serenity was hardly dull.
If anything, it brought him into sharper conflict with the tawdry
and immoral world of the law in 1990s New York.
Like Ben Stone,
Jack McCoy is a true believer, but the characters could not differ
more in style and temperament. While Stone's idealism sometimes
kept him out of the trenches, McCoy's pragmatism teaches him to
jump right in. Waterston tends to shout his arguments where Moriarty
almost whispered his, but it is the apparently straightforward McCoy
who has become the (usually) benevolent Machiavellian of the DA's
office.
Stone played
with novel legal strategies and even danced around ethical lines
at times, but McCoy regularly tears through envelopes that Stone
would barely push. McCoy and Stone never shared a screen, so the
only battle between their approaches to the law was carried on by
proxy , through assistant DA Claire Kincaid. Jill Hennessy's character
bridged the gap between the Stone and McCoy regimes. Kincaid became
Ben's assistant in the fourth season, replacing the excellent Richard
Brooks. (Truly an odd day in the history of "quota casting" when
he, the only African-American in the original cast was removed to
give the show a female presence.)
Hennesy, a former
model reminiscent of a brunette Jodie Foster, was probably added
to sex the show up and, truthfully, her first season didn't give
her too much to do. With Waterston's arrival, Claire finally took
on her own life. She became a conduit for Stone's idealism in the
more rough-and-tumble world of McCoy ball - although, moreso than
either of the men, Claire wrestled with her share of doubts. And
of course, they shared one thing that Stone and McCoy (probably)
wouldn't have - that old TV standby, sexual tension. The show hinted
at times that the two were having a totally offscreen affair.
Lovers or not,
these two had the best "partnership" in the history of the show.
Sorry Mike and Lennie.
McCoy and Kincaid's
personal and professional conflicts culminated when they disagreed
over the reinstitution of the death penalty. Hennesy's final episode,
"Aftershock" (6 PM), could have offered this conflict as the reason
for Claire's departure but, uncharacteristically for "Law," it chose
a more dramatic catastrophe. Hennessy was replaced by Carey Lowell
as Jamie Ross and, this season, Angie Harmon as Abbie Carmichael.
All three are exceptionally attractive brunettes, which has led
to quips about "Jack and the assistant babe." In fact, both characters
have been competent and occasionally interesting. They do their
jobs, and they do them well. Which doesn't stop me from wanting
Claire back.
Don't agree
with my assessments? Make your own judgments, draw your own conclusions.
The cast may change again, but the show will go on.
|
The Archives
Related Links