Iain – I haven’t read Dorothy Rabinowitz’s piece yet, but let’s be clear about one thing: This isn’t even remotely a new trend (it’s hard to tell if that’s your implication ). Law & Order was once a great show because it ripped actual crime stories from the headlines. Now it’s a roving op-ed, for much of the season at least, where it paints not just businessmen but Christians, politicians, adulterers and other barely fictionalized public figures as murderers. Here’s how I put it a while back:

Why take pains to point out that TV fiction doesn’t match reality? Because the original conceit of Law & Order was that it tackled the thorny legal and moral issues associated with actual murders “ripped from the headlines.” In its early years, the show handled Tawana Brawley, the Central Park jogger, Bernie Goetz and other real crimes. The show remains a cash cow for the network — what, with more franchises than Pottery Barn — but it’s been unraveling for years. Now that the crime rate has shrunk, and the egos of the producers have expanded, they think they can translate any current controversy into a homicide. This often becomes a very offensive — and stupid — assault on the character of our republic; most of our political contests do not involve murders.

We do not live in Rome. But, the evolving worldview behind L&O over the last decade is that our political, business and even journalistic differences are settled by assassinations.

And the businessman thing has been going on for years. Anyone remember the L&O where the head of McDonald’s (fictionalized of course) deliberately allows kids to die from e coli and is convicted of manslaughter or some such? (The most unbelievable part of the show was that a nationwide fast food joint got its meat from one butcher in the meat-packing district in lower Manhattan!). A charitable view would be that the show is simply a victim of its long run and the low-crime times. A more realistic criticism is that the show has become a soapbox for liberal sanctimony.

Also, one last observation. I remember that in the 60 Minutes profile of the writing staff they mentioned that it was one of the few shows with older writers, many of them women. I don’t know if that explains it, but there’s an amazing obsession with adulterous middle aged men in the show. Even many of the opening set-ups for L&O — you know where “real New Yorkers” find the dead body — give hints that the writers think New York is just chock-a-block with two-timing men looking to trade up on their aging wives. I know sex sells, but most of this stuff isn’t sexy. It feels more like venting.