These Aren’t Our Stories Anymore: A Critical Review of the revived Law & Order
I argue why, as a lifelong Law & Order fan, I believe why the legendary show — and the accompanying show — has failed its audiences by refusing to adapt or adjust to modern times (and by producing subpar television.)
Like millions of others, I have obsessively watched episode after episode of shows from the Law & Order franchise — Law & Order, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Law & Order: Trial By Jury, Law & Order: Los Angeles and other related shows — for years, since I was a pre-teen.
I did numerous essays and class assignments on the series or its stars from middle school through college. I even ran a Tumblr in my teen years solely dedicated to the Law & Order universe. Last fall, I appeared on a podcast discussing the final episode (as of now) of Criminal Intent. To say I have been a fan would be an understatement: the impact these shows have had on me can’t be measured in the sentence.
Over the years since the original Law & Order pilot was produced in 1988, some things haven’t changed. One thing that has remained consistent throughout the franchise’s existence is the mantra of nearly every show’s opening sequence: “These are their stories.”
But as much as some things haven’t, much has changed. While our understanding and perspective of the criminal justice system is chief among them, the change most evident is the show’s disregard for those that inspire the stories themselves.
During its initial run, the original Law & Order revolutionized TV by combining a half-hour of police procedural with a half-hour of legal drama into one show. After 20 seasons, a record run at the time for a primetime network drama, it was canceled in 2010 by NBC before the cast and writers were able to prepare for a proper conclusion. Special Victims Unit (known as SVU) lived on and subsequently surpassed the original in length, remaining popular enough that it would spawn another spin-off, Law & Order: Organized Crime, in 2020.
So when NBC revived Law & Order and ordered a 21st season to begin airing in 2022, its return made complete sense. Unfortunately, the resulting version of the show that came to fruition is nowhere near as riveting or revolutionary as it was in its original run. Some of that stems from how radically different the public perception of law enforcement and criminal justice has become, and yes, our collective understanding of what “copaganda” is — but ultimately, Law & Order falls short of even some of the basic standards necessary for compelling television.
In one episode (S21E3, “Filtered Life”), the show’s new Executive ADA Nolan Price — played by Hugh Dancy — is leading the prosecution of someone accused of kidnapping and murdering a social media influencer after taking them on a date. The defendant was arrested in a park with a shovel and zip-ties in his truck, but the influencer’s body was not recovered. Price is presented with a choice: the defendant, midway through the trial, “hypothetically” offers to share where the victim’s body is buried in exchange for a plea deal.
This creates one of the quintessential moral dilemmas Law & Order was known for: the prosecutors can either achieve what they believe is justice in a maximum prison sentence, or help others (in this case, a grieving family) gain closure and finality.
Price and his assistant, Samantha Maroun (played by Odelya Halevi), hold a meeting with the victim’s parents, explaining to them that the defendant would be willing to serve up to 15 years in prison on a manslaughter charge. Price, however, says, “I think we have a good shot at a guilty verdict on murder in the first degree charges.”
The victim’s mother (Molly Lloyd) tells Price, “believe me, I want him to rot in prison, but there’s one thing I want more: closure.” Price tells her that a conviction will give her closure, to which she responds, “No, a conviction will give you closure. You move on to your next case, but we’ll still be in the exact same position. Waiting by the phone, wondering where our daughter is.”
She says with finality, “No, we want to give our daughter a proper burial. So make the deal.”
Although Maroun agrees with the mother’s position, Price is in opposition. He claims, “I have tremendous empathy for them… [but] we can’t let their grieving, their emotion, drive the train here.” After hearing them both out, McCoy tells Price to “bury this son of a bitch,” and the deal is rejected just like that. Price delivers what’s supposed to be a stirring closing argument that will convince the jury of the defendant’s guilt — again, something classically done throughout the franchise’s history — and as you can expect from a written-for-TV teleplay, the prosecutors receive a guilty verdict. The defendant is expected to spend his life in jail, and Price claims they did the right thing — but the episode ends with the victims’ parents crying and consoling one another in the court gallery, knowing that effectively they’ll never know where their daughter is.
It’s a perfect encapsulation of what the new rendition of the once iconic legal drama has become. As more time has passed, the realities that Law & Order once aimed to unveil are now one in the same with the realities they now actively work to misconstrue.
In short, the most significant change to happen to Law & Order is how explicitly it demonstrates that the show isn’t telling our stories anymore — if it even intended to at all.
While the franchise has enjoyed worldwide admiration and success — especially in syndication since its airing — the original Law & Order first became a phenomenon in the 1990s, with SVU becoming even more of a monstrous hit on its own in the early 2000s. A key difference between the original show compared to the rest of the universe — and Dick Wolf’s other universes, such as Chicago and FBI — is its inability to maintain the “ripped from the headlines” element alongside a consistent flow of meaningful character development.
For the revival, the show’s writers and producers clearly tried to replicate the formula that the Law & Order franchise first achieved its initial acclaim with. They seem to have replicated it almost to the letter — maybe too well — because the flaws it produces as a result are too glaring for it to overcome.
Before the original ended in 2010, the police portion of the show starred Jeremy Sisto and Anthony Anderson as detectives, with S. Epatha Merkerson as their commanding officer; Linus Roache and Alana de la Garza were the prosecutors, and Sam Waterston as the elected District Attorney.
The only cast members returning 12 years after the show last aired are Anthony Anderson and Sam Waterston. The lack of returning characters alone wouldn’t be much of a hindrance on its own: most of Law & Order’s characters are intentionally designed to be little more than archetypes with recurring Shakespearean tropes anyway. “It’s driven by story, not character,” Chris Noth, an original cast member of Law & Order, once said about it in 1993.
At the time that Noth said that though, Law & Order had not become a hit yet and struggled in the ratings. It took adaptation — the addition of iconic characters, such as Jack McCoy (played by Waterston) and lead detective Lennie Briscoe (played by Jerry Orbach, who passed away in 2004) — to bring the show popularity.
With that popularity, though, came further blurring of the lines between reality and fiction exemplified within the justice system, as it constantly tried to mirror the present day world and the public’s perception of issues — almost like an extended Shouts & Murmurs column told via true crime fiction.
It’s that important understanding that seems to constantly escape Wolf and the show’s producers. McCoy (played by Waterston) became the show’s trademark, embodying the crusader trope like no other. Towards the end of Law & Order’s initial run, however, the character transformed from a prosecutor with heart to an elected official, little more than just another talking head, an irritating but necessary commander that doesn’t really add much from episode to episode.
The version of him that returns this time around is even more neutered: not only is the “crusader” Jack McCoy of the past long gone, there’s not a trace of him to be found whatsoever (in one episode, he pushes for prosecutors to make a plea deal at the behest of the Deputy Director of the CIA). If Waterston hadn’t brought much of the same mannerisms to the role this time around, you’d have a hard time convincing many longtime viewers that that’s supposed to be the same character (especially in a show that constantly casts actors as different characters.)
Although Anderson is reprising his role in Law & Order right after the conclusion of his lead role on the sitcom Black-ish (where his character routinely dealt with the effects of being on the other side of law enforcement’s discrimination) with a much clearer sense of identity and influence than when the show last aired, that doesn’t translate to his character on-screen. His identity and household recognition alone can’t save the show from its decrepit storytelling methods. There’s one point in an episode (S21E4, “Fault Lines,”) where Anderson’s character, Det. Kevin Bernard, unironically tells a defendant on trial for murder, “plead guilty to manslaughter and serve 15 years, then move on with your life… [and] you’ll be free.”
The nature of television almost necessitates that any show aiming to achieve, then maintain, success has to have a unique character that audiences can attach to, a constant that isn’t replicable with scriptwriting or production costs. If you try and look for any kind of character on the caliber of past Law & Order greats, you won’t find it. Although actors playing characters that are carbon-copies of the same typecasts can still find occasional moments of brilliance in long, drawn-out, 20-plus episode seasons, there wasn’t much opportunity for that in the revival, which only had ten episodes.
The closest attempts to standout characters may be Price — but Jack McCoy he is not — or Bernard, who gets a lot of the solo camera angles and one-line zingers — but at no point is he able to display discernable characteristics. (On top of that, Anderson did not return for a 22nd season anyway.) Besides, the show’s writing is insurmountable for anyone to translate into convincing television, although it’s not from a lack of trying. Successful TV also necessitates that shows adapt, and Law & Order proves too unwilling to do so where it matters most: the format of the show’s plots.
The show tries to recapture some of its past magic in other ways, though, with clear grabs for nostalgia throughout the storyline. How it’s done, however, is tactless and head-scratching. In the first episode of the new season (S21E1, “The Right Thing”), longtime viewers are treated to the return of the character Jamie Ross (Carey Lowell). Ross was an assistant prosecutor for two seasons before her character left, but hardcore fans will remember that she re-surfaced in the show numerous times since then, last appearing as a judge. In the revival, however, her character is inexplicably a prosecutor again.
Ross is thrown into the story in nonsensical fashion, just to have everything we know about her character blatantly disregarded. She comes up as an acquaintance to a person of interest in a murder investigation, but when it turns out that person might have committed said murder, Ross then refuses to help in any way, flaunting her duty as an officer of the court and hampering her own co-workers’ attempt to get a guilty verdict just so she could avoid betraying a fellow woman’s confidences. Rather than anyone (most of all her boss, McCoy) pushing her to live up to her sworn responsibility, the teams are tasked with completely maneuvering around her existence while she remains in the background.
It’s far from the first time the franchise has shot itself in the foot with mismanagement of its own self-development. Attorney General Janet Reno infamously criticized the original Law & Order for heavy violence in 1993. (That eventually led original cast member Michael Moriarty to rage-quit the show within a year, complaining that Wolf’s decision to hear out Reno’s complaints equated to the “Nazification of television.”) The show faced cancellation at the same time after its lack of women received scrutiny from NBC, and even after that, the casts all across the franchise have remained largely white and/or male — rarely having more than two women or people of color in any of them at one time, although they’re set in the most diverse city in the world. To date, the franchise has still only had three regular characters who were identified as anything other than straight (Law & Order ADA Serena Southerlyn, in addition to SVU’s Dr. Wong and Kat Tamin).
In recent years, SVU has growingly courted controversy and arguably become antithetical to its own values. Between guest stars (such as convicted rapist Mike Tyson and Maddie Corman, whose husband is a convicted sex offender) and producers or directors, a growing number of accused abusers or violent malefactors have partaken in the show. That’s not to mention that a significant source of influence for SVU’s very existence was Linda Fairstein, who led the ill-mannered prosecution of the Central Park Five and misrepresented the facts to her own benefit for nearly two decades after. Ice-T, who’s starred on the show as a detective investigating sex crimes for the last 20 years, openly made jokes about alleged rapist Bill Cosby having a “Hot Boy Summer” after he was released from prison last year.
Even the creation of the franchise’s most recent spin-off, Law & Order: Organized Crime, led to a visceral fan reaction and growing disdain for the franchise. Isabel Gillies, an actress who had a recurring role on SVU, became the subject of targeted harassment based solely on the storyline from the show’s beginning, shortly leading to members of the fandom organizing a viral hashtag to criticize the show’s disregard for its own audience, #SVUSilencedMe.
That’s not even beginning to address the franchise’s most harmful consequence, what we now define as copaganda. The overwhelming popularity and trust in law enforcement that have long enjoyed, which only intensified after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, was paramount to the success of all the Law & Order shows. Fittingly, it’s been the same factor that has caused the franchise’s show to continuously fall short since the emergence of the Black Lives Matter and Defund the Police movements: it refuses to challenge the monstrous image it has helped build anglicizing police officers, prosecutors, and government.
Despite the time and space to learn from its past, Law & Order tries to pick up where it left off as if little has changed in the “real world” it purports to represent. We see once bleeding-heart justice crusaders like McCoy and SVU’s Olivia Benson (who appears in one episode of Law & Order season 21 to help investigate a woman suspected of killing a police officer) have been reduced to power-protecting, self-interested faces solely for vindicating the badge and shields they wield from the harm, injustices, and terror they represent. They stand for the “blue wall” and bemoan how “under attack” police are from big, bad smartphones and tweets. In effect, the show’s hero characters have lived long enough to become the villains to its audience.
The Law & Order formula was not only dependent on a pro-police perception, but a public still largely accepting the propagandized perception as well. Now that the narrative is being broken apart bit by bit, even the most entrenched or accepting of viewers will have a hard time buying what Law & Order is selling.
I honestly believe that, flaws and all, my life has been impacted for the better by the Law & Order franchise. Despite its overwhelming issues, it gave hope and comfort — albeit, a largely falsified form of it — at times when the world didn’t for many people. Many people have taken the positive impact the show has had and used it to make even better changes — but with impact comes negative returns, too.
The version of the criminal justice system portrayed in the show was considered plausible when it first began to air, but now, anyone who has paid any attention to the unevenness of the system anywhere in the United States knows otherwise. The rosy-colored tint we viewed the franchise through has fractured and those blurred lines are fading. How much more of this fairytale should we endure before we can accept it’s doing more harm than good?
Watch the full Last Week Tonight With John Oliver segment related to Law & Order below.
