NRO
Weekend, August 12-13, 2000
TV's
Law and Order
A
sad decline.
By Dan Mindus, NRO
or
a monumental 14 seasons, Law and Order was one of the best shows
on television: sophisticated, unpredictable, somewhat believable. But
the show made a business decision for this past season; now it's obvious,
sensationalistic, and worst, preachy. The formula of a murder in the first
few minutes pursued until the end of the program, with false leads and
interesting lawyerly tricks along the way (and a little moral debate worked
in, naturally), has ceded to a murder merely setting the stage for a heavily
made-up district attorney McCoy to spew leftist tripe, most of it only
tangentially related to the case at hand. Worst part is, ratings are up
— way up; and this summer, prime-time reruns have been aired twice
a week.
Law and Order used to be a conservative show — mostly in that it wasn't explicitly liberal — but also for questioning psychology as the mother of all sciences, and for its largely sympathetic portrayal of policeman and prosecutor. The guys on trial were generally guilty; liberal judges were the enemies of the main characters, and therefore of justice. In one episode, the audience was made to feel pathos for a security guard who shot a 60s radical.
Now the show is explicitly liberal in the same way that Hannity and Colmes is explicitly conservative. The left-wing McCoy, playing the part of Hannity, is the more charismatic and articulate; his rightist counterpart, the defense lawyer, playing the part of Colmes, is never allowed to shine. The only difference is that McCoy's soliloquies last slightly longer, and are accompanied by melodramatic music.
Defendants can always be defeated, morally, with a good dose of leftist wisdom. I say defendants and not criminals because the real criminals — the ones who commit the murder within the first few minutes of the show — are now merely distractions. The first episode of the season introduced this new formula: A mass-murderer left the screen after 15 minutes, superseded in evil by the gun manufacturer whose products were too easily convertible into automatic weapons. A man is stabbed to death by a common criminal, and the defendants become the businessmen whose company sold life insurance to Jews right before the Holocaust. A man is found murdered, and the issue becomes a 1973 execution ordered by Chilean General Emilio Pantoya, who happens to be receiving medical treatment in New York. This particular Chilean military strongman proves an unsympathetic witness in his own defense, and the jury is moved to deliver a guilty verdict. So off we go to the Supreme Court.
The prosecutors now make new law, to go along with their new, leftist moralism, and the show's reliance on cheap thrills. They decide to prosecute a father for the crimes of his son, since he bought the kid martial-arts weapons and encouraged his aggressive behavior. "Nobody's ever tried it," McCoy's leggy assistant notes. "Did that ever stop you two before?" the wise old boss answers.
It's not only the prosecutors who try to make new law. In one episode, a defense attorney offered the innovative affirmative-action-got-me-into-Harvard-and-the-pressure-was-so-great-that-I-killed-a-man defense. Of course, that opened up the precious opportunity for McCoy to convince the jury (a jury!) that affirmative action is…good. Studies and all — it sounded more like a bad Crossfire debate on preferences than a court case. And so the show is condescending, and so you no longer learn anything about the criminal-justice system.
The final line or two used to be the highlight of Law and Order. They ranged from witty to bordering on the profound; now they are either pathetic ("tomorrow is another day") or patronizing ("there's nothing redeemable about Wall Street"). That last followed an episode whose lesson for the day was: Day-trading induces violence. "You used his desperation [caused by losing money in the market] to force him to kill," McCoy neatly argues.
In perhaps the most amusing example of easy moral superiority, one episode concerns a pseudo-Randian cult, which commits murder in the midst of a sexual power struggle. Readers of Rand will appreciate these tidbits: The founders of the cult dreamed up their "religion" after meeting in a quarry. And the goal of the founder, "the greatest person on earth," is to "take over the world." In a not quite original twist on objectivist thought, one cult-member claims that "you only value what you pay for." Read that one again. To its credit, the show still moves relatively quickly, and I had to think a moment before I fully grasped its meaning.
The changes in Law and Order stem from an effort to mainstream the show. So it had to be dumbed down and sensationalized. But the ideological shift? That one's a mystery. Why would dumb and leftist have to go together?
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