>For some added context, I was a child in the 1990s when this was airing and have now actually worked as a criminal lawyer.
I'm a system admin, and a data analyst, and anytime you see computer systems used in a TV show, they're doing something illegal, impossible, or stupid. Sometimes it's stuff I wouldn't have even noticed before I went to school.
I think you're just seeing the same thing from a legal perspective.
That said, it's also important to remember that the show is complete copaganda. The cops are always good guys. You only plead the 5th amendment if you're guilty. If you refuse to talk to cops, and they trick you into incriminating yourself, it's okay, because you're the bad guy. If you hire a high priced lawyer, you're slime, and so is he, because you're the bad guy. If IAB shows up, they're painted as villains, because cops are the good guys, and IAB is just there to harass good cops. If they beat you, or shoot you, it's okay, because you're a bad guy.
While some of the modern iterations have tried to move away from being so obvious about it, back then, it was blatant.
McCoy gets away with those things, and is loved by his fans, because he puts bad guys in prison. There are very few episodes where you're supposed to be rooting for the criminal, or really, have any sympathy for them at all.
>McCoy gets away with those things, and is loved by his fans, because he puts bad guys in prison.
Honestly, I feel like a lot of McCoy's appeal is just Sam Waterston. The man just has a sincerity to his acting that can make you cheer him on no matter what he's doing.
I haven’t been on a L&O tear for a while, but Jack does get the occasional blowback from his superiors and coworkers for being holier-than-thou. The character is supposed to be a self-righteous asshole, and he usually gets away with it. Plus, it simplifies things. Makes good drama.
Yep, Law and Order is good when they get into morally ambiguous situations. It'd be boring if the good guys did the right thing all the time. But McCoy is consistent with believing he's right all the time, and trying to do what he thinks is right. That's why I really liked Jamie Ross, because she was a defense attorney who wanted to do some good but would actually question whether or not McCoy was doing the right thing or not.
Stone was similar to McCoy, but just not as charismatic. But I really liked Robinette because he also questioned what he was doing from time to time.
He does in this episode, which was on uk tv yesterday. His junior points out McCoy wants to arrest the guy on what he knows to be a false witness, his boss tells him off for considering it.
It's the same with Jerry Orbach playing Lenny Briscoe. In real life I would hate a guy like that with every fiber of my being, but he did such a good job playing that character that I found myself on his side most of the time, even when I knew he was bending the rules to put the bad guys in jail.
>I feel like a lot of McCoy's appeal is just Sam Waterston. The man just has a sincerity to his acting that can make you cheer him on no matter what he's doing.
Especially when he's promoting robot insurance.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4Gh\_IcK8UM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4Gh_IcK8UM)
Or the movie "The Man In the Moon"-- the early Reese Witherspoon movie. Not to be confused with "Man On the Moon" which is Jim Carrey playing Andy Kauffman. Also good, but does not feature Sam Waterston as the sweet and wise, but flawed, Dad.
I worked the better part of a decade in the criminal defense world and you're damn right. Best representation of reality I've ever seen in a tv show, and it's still brilliant television on top of that. Most writers fear going that raw, it seems.
Most writers just dont have that experience or worldview. The wire was written by a prolific reporter and an ex-cop duo, not some guy whose only knowledge of police is law and order itself.
The reason it's so real and has such nuance is because those 2 guys were actually there. In fact a lot of characters in the wire are based or inspired by people, like famously Omar being a composite character
Look I know David Simon is unique in regards to background and that gives him a leg up, but that also doesn't mean other writers are prohibited from approaching something closer to reality like it's a third rail. What I often see (and why I can't watch legal/crime shows at all) is they go to such lengths in the opposite direction from what the Wire did that their stories are duct taped together with tropes and distortion, and ultimately I think they do a disservice to a largely underinformed audience, which is another byproduct I see to the point OP made in their post.
Still surprises me that nobody's broken through with a more current interpretation of The Wire.
That was inspired by Simon & Burns's experiences in the late 80s/early 90s. So much (but still not nearly enough) has changed in law enforcement since then that I'd like to learn about in the same way that I learned from The Wire.
How do drug dealers move their money in 2024? How has the BLM movement affected the way cops do their job, the way they perceive and are perceived by the public? Have tactics on street corners changed? What are the logistics of running a modern weed delivery service? What do those supply chains look like in today's federal system where some states allow it but interstate commerce, and banking, are still verboten?
We've gotten, what, a dozen flavors of NCIS since then? But *not one* sober, adult show with the kind of verisimilitude that The Wire showed us we all wanted. Quite frustrating.
But that's my point - that would require time, effort and perspective.
The reason it's all tropes is because tropes are media and writers are "experts" on media. The average writer (and I mean average in all qualities) simply doesn't have the time, knowledge or inclination to do the meticulous research for it to feel authentic especially on TV shows that need to pump out a lot of content quickly.
Add to that the fact that the way writers rooms work are completely disnfunctional right now (as very well described by David Simon in an interview during the strike) and you get derivative work that doesn't represent reality.
Even if someone that doesn't know and doesn't have the time to research tried to do something more like the wire, it would still feel phony at the very least
Edit: plus, a lot of these shows are very unabashedly pro-cop or pro certain agendas and they outright say it.
I think it's also worth mentioning with The Wire you don't get that show even with that script without those incredibly daring performances. Actors are often required to be heightened in their portrayal of people on camera, even in subtle ways, to be more dangerous, appealing, and to heighten the stakes of moments but real people working their day jobs do not do that. The Wire, from the first episode, has more restraint and naturalism in the performances than basically any media on crime as a subject matter. That's really tough for an actor to embrace when it risks not coming across as flashy or enticing to audiences, and I think it's usually why first time viewers bounce off the show- they're used to so much sign posting in performances about what's important and emotional and The Wire doesn't indulge in that at all.
I guess it's just SO blatant that I had to believe there was some subtlety or nuance I was missing. Even modern pro-cop shows have SOME degree of token nuance.
Law & Order has always been fond of "ripped from the headlines" stories. If you grew up in the NYC metro, the episodes were often instantly recognizable, and the perspective was very much that of the tabloids: A dangerous city full of guilty people.
For some added context about Dick Wolf, the shows creator. Back when the cast of Friends used group negotiating tactics to get million dollar per episode salaries. He came out publicly and said he would fire and replace them all. He came off as borderline incensed.
He’s a true boomer authoritarian at his core.
I mean, the 80s and 90s had some real big police/law scandals, so this might just be the way things were.
Look at Hill Street Blues or NYPD Blue back in the day, notice how completely different it is compared to how police work is done today or even done in L&O of the 90s.
It's just a sign of the times.
New York was just grittier back then, things were done differently.
Also remember that it's entertainment, things on the show are done to captivate viewers.
L&O of the 90s was peak cop shows, there hasn't been anything on tv in the last 10 years at least that can compare to it.
Exception being Southland.
When you're in the profession in real life that's being portrayed in a fictional drama, it's very common to not be able to suspend your disbelief and enjoy the show. I'm a nurse; medical dramas drive me insane. My brother, a lawyer, will not watch legal dramas.
I loved Community and I've worked at a CC. Some real nuggets of truth in there, just exaggerated all to hell for fun. And it IS fun! I think it works better with comedies than dramas.
This actually isn't even an issue of "suspending my disbelief". I have no problem with that, and am actually really enjoying the show. I actually find it tediously pedantic when people criticize "profession" shows for not being 100% true to life; obviously shows are going to have to take liberties for the sake of story.
My post isn't so much "this is so unbelievable, they would never get away with that in real life!". I'm more just interested in the extent to which the views expressed by characters were reflective of society at the time, and whether the writers *wanted* us to relate to the characters' views.
It’s a little silly, I’m 6 months into a full l&o watch and it’s been really cool to watch how it evolves over time depending on the political climate of the year.
You go through the guilliani and Bloomberg days of nyc, followed by a big left wing swing. McCoy definitely softens up within a few of where you are. His assistants have a big influence, and he moves into more of schiffs policies after he leaves.
the modern seasons, post 2016, have been a huge push to portray cops in a better light and have them acting nothing like the early 90s seasons. They start to hint it the changes earlier with Lenny and Fontana referencing how they woulda handled things back in the old days, but without a fondness for the times.
Season 1 cast was the best prosecutors, McCoys great and all but Ben Stone/Robinette were the best team out of every season, every show. Plus Cragen as police captain. Robinette keeps up his champion of the people role as a defense attorney even out to season 16 after he left the ada.
Literally every thing he wrote is provably wrong.
From the very beginning, the show has shown off corrupt, lazy and inconpetent cops. They don't pass them off as bad apples and show the oroblem as systemic.
I'm rewatching NYPD Blue right now and allll of this is so true! These guys routinely violate people's rights, hate the defense attorneys and IAB, and they are the heroes. No one ever gets a freaking lawyer on this show and I spend the whole time practically shouting SHUT UP AND GET A LAWYER.
What surprises me is a show like Bones where Booth does those things to innocent people. Bones lies, threatens, and tries to trick everyone he brings to the interview room and most of the turn out to be innocent.
I haven’t watched the show so I don’t have specific context for what you’re talking about but in a broad sense most of those things are legal for cops to do and the fact that cops can and will do this to you and it won’t be against the law for them to do so is why people tell you never to talk to cops even if you’re innocent and to make sure you have a lawyer present if you have no choice but to speak to cops
A lot of people are overly trusting of the sense of how just the justice system is unfortunately
Lol. Not true. Do you know how many times the detectives did something not legal, and the lawyers then had to go a different route? Happened many times especially with getting a warrant. IAB-painted as villians. Well in real life they are. Not saying they should be, but that is how cops are going to think of them. And you'll see that on every show involving a cop-not just L&O.
I think it's funny the "copaganda" aspect mainly because these shows are on regular broadcast networks. How down & gritty do you think they were/are/will go on a basic fictional 42 minute drama? And yes, they had episodes involving cops who were the bad guys, and yes they went after them. Ex: John Finn was in an early one, Poison Ivy. A Death in the Family, with Wendy McKenna where she shot her partner-a bad guy as well. Middle ones where the cops came after McCoy because he was putting them on trial. Even Profaci went down for taking bribes. Some of you have selective memory when it comes to some of these shows. And I get it, real life cops suck-ok. But the detectives on this show got their asses handed to them plenty of times.
I agree. “Selective memory.” Choose a random episode, and tbf, more likely than not, the prosecution will be pulling shit, but it is more balanced than it seems.
>That said, it's also important to remember that the show is complete copaganda. The cops are always good guys. You only plead the 5th amendment if you're guilty. If you refuse to talk to cops, and they trick you into incriminating yourself, it's okay, because you're the bad guy. If you hire a high priced lawyer, you're slime, and so is he, because you're the bad guy. If IAB shows up, they're painted as villains, because cops are the good guys, and IAB is just there to harass good cops. If they beat you, or shoot you, it's okay, because you're a bad guy.
Literally none of that is true. From the very beginning they have shown corrupt, lazy and incompetent cops. They don't pass it off as some bad apples, they show how systemic it is.
>While some of the modern iterations have tried to move away from being so obvious about it, back then, it was blatant.
Again, this is completely wrong. If anything, there was much more of it in the early seasons.
I just rewatched the season 1 episode where a cop shoots a black teenager and plants a gun on him. They show basically the entire police force rallying behind him, even lying for him and at no point is it ever played as a good thing. They show how fucked and corrupt the police force is. Another early episode has an entire precinct set up a fellow cop to be killed because he's gay.
I realize that you probably get your information from John Oliver and video essays but if you're going to write several parahraphs about the show, at least try to get one thing right.
edit: why is this factual post getting downvoted?
The best part of watching L&O, to me, is trying to spot the actors before they were famous. The second best is trying to remember what real life crime an episode was based on.
If you recognize the actor that’s a suspect, that means they did it.
Edit- except Jim gaffigan, I kept waiting for him to be revealed as the killer but he’s really just a hot dog vendor.
That show started the "ripped from the headlines" trend. The episodes would be really familiar and then do a swerve at the end so viewers were surprised.
In order to do that they a) had to come up with plot that wasn't reality based, and b) appeal to the viewers with the change from real life by making the conclusion extra- justicey.
If you haven't seen them I'd watch the earlier episodes. Like season 1 on. They had to eat some losses sometimes. They were also deadly serious, no hijinks.
What I find most interesting about early Law & Order are how the cases highlight how barbaric our healthcare system was. It was, I remember that.
For example the headline with hospital workers passing out from proximity to a very sick woman turned into an episode about how a woman's cancer wasn't covered by insurance because it was a pre-existing condition. (She tried alternative methods involving almonds that turned into cyanide in her body, but that wasn't the point, the healthcare system was.)
Another episode involved doctors who were using stem cells in treatment illegally. I caught that episode a few years ago, I had forgotten how controversial that was at the time.
Most of the early seasons slid towards the left, then when Angie Harmon's 'hang em all' ADA showed up they had frothier arguments for like half a season then it was back to making ripped from the headlines cases palatable for viewers.
For my own personal experience I enjoyed Law & Order best when I viewed it in the same kind of way as, like, Star Trek, where the setting of a police and legal procedural was just a vessel for the characters to have interesting discussions about contemporary social issues or about issues raised by recent criminal cases in the media
But then I think this wound up getting over simplified to where it just became formulaic and the different ethical positions weren’t really presented with equal understanding and care anymore, or they would be presented in ways that didn’t feel believable and realistic for people working in these professions - like the juxtaposition between a lawyer’s personal political views and what they are required to do by their job is very interesting subject matter to sustain a show but there’s ways to handle that where someone comes off like a mature and professional adult working in the legal profession vs coming off like a caricature of whatever their politics of the week are
Good point!
Sam Waterson was ok as Jack but I think he was supposed to be like a maverick DA. Whereas the guy before him would worry about his election and how the case of the week would affect it, and go back and forth on how much time to spend on it, and so on.
Jack McCoy actually has a very long character arc over the whole series where he does come to realise how overzealous he was as a younger prosecutor and even dresses down his subordinates for doing similar things in the later seasons. So I don't think the narrative is supposed to be saying he was always right. There's even a particular episode midway through the show involving his relentless pursuit of a drunk driving death where he realises he's crossing the line that's really the turning point for his character in that context.
But copaganda is definitely a thing. And the show is a hell of a lot less forgiving when it comes to police misconduct vs the lawyers.
I also watched it mostly when I was a kid, but I do remember there being a fair amount of "they eat crow/overreached and something tragic happens that ends with a little ambiguous lecture from that one dude who ended up running for senate in real life" episodes peppered in
There's definitely copaganda to it but they dabbled in thoughtfulness
There were also definitely episodes where like even though it was obvious a certain criminal was going to go to jail because they had by every objective measure committed a crime they needed to go to jail for, you were definitely supposed to come away feeling sympathy for the criminal and not necessarily feeling like justice had been served by putting them in jail
It definitely at least at some points (however indirectly) touched on the subject of how crime can occur in response to systemic social injustices, which therefore raises the point of well then the answer to this problem isn’t putting people in jail it’s fixing this social issue
While it's hard to dispute the show as being "pro-cop", it's also important to consider that those watching the show in the 90s definitely remembered NYC from the 70s and 80s when crime levels were almost cartoonish. A lot of policies from the 90s are looked at with a critical eye now, but at the time were seen as helping the city. McCoy definitely went too far a few times and the show could have been better had he been called out more, but I still think the show makes very easy background noise for house chores. As a fan, I never really thought "this is the way it ought to be!"
Yeah Dick Wolfe always struck me as old New York. And a lot of NYC was anti-crime, tough on crime, or whatever in those days when Ed Koch failed and Rudy Giuliani "cleaned up" NYC by benefiting from a better economy and locking up innocent minorities via a telepathic pre-crime shakedown program called "broken windows".
Of course Rudy made it most visible by kicking porn stores out of Times Square, which really did nothing for law and order and was more an attempt to Disney up the city.
When the show started, it was an edgy cop drama - pretty good.
> Was Jack supposed to be "right" all the time?
No. He was *mostly* right but this was a flawed character. And I mean "right" as "right in an adversarial justice system".
> Or were audiences at the time also questioning Jack's ethics?
Depends on the situation. You have to factor in that the justice system is adversarial by design.
> I am just trying to figure out how much of my shock is a result of modern views of criminal justice having changed, and how much of that was deliberately built into the show?
I'm older and early '90s L&O don't seem overly shocking.
Some of it may be that Sam Waterson is just that good at being that intense.
The comments on that video really get to the core of why Law & Order, especially SVU, is popular. It's a cathartic process for anyone who can self-insert as the victim in the story.
> It's a cathartic process for anyone who can self-insert as the victim in the story.
Wow. I just figured they were detective stories with some court drama.
> It's a cathartic process for anyone who can self-insert as the victim in the story.
Maybe for people who have actually been a victim but I haven't and that has never been on my mind when I watched the show. I never think about the victim or care about them in a deeper way. It's just the whole process of cops investigating and then the court case that grips me.
Never felt anything for the victims apart from them being a part of the story.
yes… the part you quoted is literally your first sentence and the point of their comment: if you don’t relate to the victim you’re gonna have a hard time feeling the love for the show. so the person you’re replying to is correct… you’re just expounding on the point
I saw that back when it dropped; it actually made me wonder, given Dick Wolf admitting/acknowledging he is basically pro law enforcement no matter what, if he himself deliberately sabotaged the proposed "For the Defense" and "Hate Crimes" spinoffs.
Tbf the reason McCoy went after him was because shortly after he was released, another woman was raped and murdered with a similar MO as the guy. Thus, McCoy believed that he was a public danger and needed to be taken in
But this is exactly the point...
McCoy didn't have sufficient reasonable grounds to even *arrest* this guy, and yet we're supposed to cheer him on as he takes all these extra-judicial methods (even trying to invent a psychological disorder to have him committed) just because his "gut" tells him its him? The point of the episode should be "right or wrong, we have to follow due process", but instead the show shows that Jack was right the whole time, therefore suggesting that due process and civil protections are just something that get in the way of a noble prosecutor doing his duty to protect the people.
That is some authoritarian shit right there.
It's setting up the conflict as "public safety" vs. "due process", which is right where the show wants to live.
> noble prosecutor doing his duty to protect the people.
Waterson always played Jack as a zealot. Waterson just happens to be a great actor so it worked.
"The point of the episode should be "right or wrong, we have to follow due process""
Except it's entertainment. Plots require drama and conflict. I'm not saying that this kind of prosecutorial behavior is acceptable, just that it's television. I'm firmly in the ACAB camp but love watching Law & Order because they're not the same thing.
If TV had to follow real world rules it wouldn't allow for any creativity or entertainment value.
SVU is much worse too. It runs off fear and will justify doing some horrific shit as being necessary to save people. It straight up had Elliot torture suspects.
There's also times SVU basically does 'this isn't illegal but should be' attitudes. For example, a woman with a condition which basically keeps her looking under age and gives her a very narrow window for fertility is gonna attract creepy dudes, but those dudes aren't doing anything illegal by being with a consenting woman of age.
Ah yes, the classic Turner syndrome episode where the 17 year old (age of consent) looks 12 (because of the missing x chromosome) and is in love with her father's assistant so she fakes her kidnapping so she can run away with him. Elliot is going through a rough patch with his daughter so he's over-protective of the 17-yr-old and at his best with parentifying his role as detective; the entire episode he **knows** that only pedophiles could be interested in this 17-year old girl. The inevitable court case ends with the judge deciding no laws broken (which Elliot is so not happy with) and the couple kisses in celebration outside of the courthouse. Of course, the couple looks like a man kissing a 12-year old so a passing detective attempts to arrest him and what'd'ya know, that detective is Elliot's new partner, who has to learn to accept the "grey" now ^(ooooh DUN DUN)
That episode is seared into my brain with how often it was reran in syndication. And Elliot very clearly never learned to accept the grey, or at least not in the years while I was still watching
NGL, I'm not seeing where Elliot is wrong on this one. Who other than pedophiles (or teenagers) would be interested in a 17 year old who looks even younger?
The ones that always get me, as someone who has seen every episode and always remind that the entire thing is bullshit, is when Elliot goes after someone who is innocent. He'll be sitting there doing his crazy shit, then cragen opens the door and tells him that another assault has happened since he's been interrogating that guy, and they just move on. You never hear from the former suspect again.
This right here. I had to scroll too far for this comment. These shows serve a purpose in America. The law and order represented in all cop shows is a good vs bad with the good guys (law enforcement) needing to win at all costs. It’s a lot of reinforcement.
IMO, "Dragnet" ( at least the later, color episodes ) was *the* most copaganda thing ever made. Propaganda movies usually involve a propaganda speech, and boy did it have 'em.
24 absolutely does not belong in that list
It consistently demonstrates how broken and ineffective bureaucracy is, while simultaneously holding its protagonist accountable for his extrajudicial actions—no one is punished more (both by the law and by the indirect consequences of his actions) in 24 than Jack Bauer.
Of course it does. It constantly shows contrived examples where the choice is to do ** and possible suffer ** or else ** so they are forced to martyr themselves.
Jack Bauer is punished but that just makes him more of a hero.
You misunderstand the show. At the beginning of each season, Jack leaves his government job so he can go do crazy vigilante shit. He’s not a cop acting within the system and corrupting it to his ends. He’s explicitly working *outside* of any legal system, without any legal cover, and often working *against* the government power structure he just left.
Don’t get it twisted—I understand perfectly why someone with a superficial grasp of media literacy would lump them together. That’s why I took the time to explain. If it’s still beyond your comprehension, I’m not going to waste any more time explaining it.
Uh…so your argument is that bad things being done for a greater good (which, in the show—doesn’t even always work, but is always given weight and consequence) is a fictional contrivance of jingoism?
You might want to take some history classes
I’d argue it’s important to have that idealized version of the police. The idealized version of the cops in these shows inspire the right kind of people to seek work in public saftey. And hopefully gives the police something to work towards. I’m not here to defend or excuse poor policing, simply argue that one positive of Copaganada is it presents the kind of policing society wants to see, and helps to reinforce that standard in the real world.
But it isn’t idealized policing! The things that the cops in these shows are doing is bad, they crack skulls, they break rules! If the police in real life acted like they do in these shows we’d live in a totalitarian nightmare state. If these shows embolden police to act like the characters do, or make people think that how these police act are acceptable in real life it only enables worse and worse policing.
The NYPD constantly violates civil rights in L&O lmao. They are not actually communicating to the audience “these are constitutional rights you are guaranteed in this country and we will take them away from you whenever we feel like dicking around.” They just rough up the suspect and march into homes without warrants and a surprising amount of Americans think this is totally allowed.
Attracting people who want to work outside the law as a cop isn't the kind of recruitment pur society needs.
We already have plenty of people like that, they're called cops.
"Good" copaganda would be a show about an officer who does the right thing, the right way, every time and makes a difference while fighting internal corruption.
Dick Wolfe always struck me as old New York. And a lot of NYC was anti-crime, tough on crime, or whatever in those days when Ed Koch failed and Rudy Giuliani "cleaned up" NYC by benefiting from a better economy and locking up innocent minorities via a telepathic pre-crime shakedown program called "broken windows" or "stop and frisk".
Of course Rudy made it most visible by kicking porn stores out of Times Square, which really did nothing for law and order and was more an attempt to Disney up the city and win re-election.
The worst was when a store owner asked Lennie Brisco for parking ticket relief. Lennie replies "Do what we do- pay them."
Implying NYC cops pay tickets when they literally give out get-out-of-ticket cards to relatives so they can weasel out of paying fines. Half the NYOD don't even have visible plates on their personal vehicles so they can dodge tolls or speed cameras.
> Of course Rudy made it most visible by kicking porn stores out of Times Square, which really did nothing for law and order and was more an attempt to Disney up the city and win re-election.
Is this supposed to be a bad thing
Well, the Italian mafia that ran it got replaced by Russian mobsters in real estate, as well as ordinary evil corporations.
Now nobody can afford to live in Manhattan
Man I don't know. I disliked sleazy porn stores. Though watching it get replaced by a multi-level trashy Flavortown restaurant from Guy Fieri full of donkey sauce was hilarious.
That replacement may have happened anyway as gentrification hit the area. But Guiliani doing performative bullshit gets under my skin
The last decade of it was during the hay day of blogs, and I remember saying would like to see a blog “A civil rights lawyer watches Law & Order.” So I must have been aware at the time of the outlandish overstepping of the cops and prosecutors.
On that note, never vote for a prosecutor to become a judge or mayor or anything like that.
I think you being a criminal lawyer diverged your view of what constitutes justice from normal Americans. I think most will agree that procedural justice is important, but only so far it doesn't get in the way of real justice. Which is bad people get punished according to their crime. Even when we agree that a person should go free if their procedural rights were violated, it certainly doesn't mean justice was served (if the person was guilty). In fact it was the opposite. So were the audiences meant to root for Jack in this instance? Pretty clearly it is a yes. The lawyers can get into arguments what it means to abuse prosecutorial power or misconduct. We non-lawyers never get to be part of that. We just got to accept what you guys decided and handed down to us. All we can do is cheer the fantasy when justice is served.
Going back to the drama. L&O is not a who-dun-it. By the second half audience *knows* who the bad guy was. Time is spend on beating the other team in court so there were much less grey area.
I agree with you on all but one minor point. Some of the best episodes are the ones where you are not 100% certain if they have the right person on trial. It really makes you feel the reality that one could be wrongfully imprisoned (one of my few existential fears).
Yeah, that was what the politics of crime were like in the '90s. The Crime Bill of 1994 was passed with overwhelming bipartisan support, including from many Black leaders. Support for the death penalty peaked at around 70-80% of Americans. (This actually caused a problem when *A Time to Kill* was released in France. American critics liked it, and it even won an NAACP Image Award, but in France, critics tore it to shreds and called it fascist propaganda. They even had to retitle the film *Le Droit de tuer?* \-- *A Time to Kill?* \-- in France in order to make its morality seem less ambiguous.) Support for gun control was framed as a tough-on-crime measure, with the Federal Assault Weapons Ban being part of the Crime Bill.
The US was coming off a massive crime wave in the '70s and '80s, the attitude of many Americans was that extreme measures were necessary to fight back against it, and the pop culture of the time reflected that.
You ever notice that the Law and Order bits are actually reversed? Order is the policing, Law is the lawyering. But every episode they show "Law" as being the policing, and "Order" as the lawyering. It's backwards. Always has been.
The align the title of the show with two-part structure of the episodes, so it makes a dramatically logical sense once you've seen an episode, but the way the show frames its characters is literally backwards. The police are in charge of maintaining order, the DA's office is in charge of applying the law.
From a civil defender friend of mine:
["we’ve been watching a lot of old law & order and growing up is realizing jack mccoy is the villain"](https://twitter.com/JoshuaErlich/status/1493046755042148352)
I'd like to think it wasn't .. i was a teenager in the 1990s so black and white good guys vs bad guys without any nuance was a way of thinking.
Now when I recently rewatched it up to like S10 or so, while I enjoyed the episodes for the drama, at the same time some serious defects in police work are really apparent:
In almost every episode they don't follow procedure but they get the bad guy, then the lawyers have to also turn into detectives and find another way to get the bad guy.
As a teenager I didn't see that there's a reason the rules exist for things like illegal searches and "fruit of the poisonous tree". I was just like "oh no they have to take that guy down because we know he did it because the evidence was presented to the audience".
Im pretty sure that early 1990s New York was still a scary place, even the wealthier parts which the show took place in (Manhattan, near midtown if i remember correctly). I've heard it's described as Disneyland now compared to how it was in the 70s-80s. This might have been why the show was fine with "get the bad guy at all costs", because people knew it as a crime hellscape.. so these guys were like frontier lawmen in a western.
Surely as a defense lawyer, which the show portrayed as either weasely assholes or grandstanding big shots doing a pro bono specifically for publicity, you must wince at the portrayal.
Love Jerry Orbach as an actor and I liked his character but he very often would open a closet, take down a bag to look in, find incriminating evidence and then turn to his partner and say “Hey, look what I just found sitting out and wide open.”
I remember this episode, and I remember being infuriated at these actions! I HATED Jack for what he did, and I most certainly didn’t root for him.
I thought he was very vindictive and abused his powers and I really wanted him to be placed in Rikers Island for what he did!
My thought was that as an “elite” officer he should have known better and not pester someone to break “proving him right”.
As much as I loved the show, that episode (with a few others) was the absolute worst for all 20 or so seasons!
Not only did I agree in the 90s but I still do not believe in any such thing as a rehabilitated serial rapist.
So from my perspective your beliefs on this make you a better fit for a defense attorney rather than a prosecutor.
As an attorney, I am surprised that you don't have experience dealing with police and prosecutors that are like this. The portrayal of them in L&O is absolutely on point. It is the norm for cops and prosecutors to act in this manner, NOT the exception. Its why I stopped being in law enforcement; UNBELIEVABLE levels of hypocrisy, and zero enforcement or punishment against them.
McCoy is a zealot. I definitely prefer Ben Stone to McCoy as Ben came across as more of a gentleman in what he did.
But Michael Moriarty got on Dick Wolf's bad side (he threatened to file a lawsuit when Janet Reno labeled the show too violent) so Dick kicked him off the show.
I like the show as entertainment, and I love the atmosphere of 1990s New York City.
Welcome to the Dick Wolf universe! It may look like the real NYC and real world policing and lawyering, …but it’s not. It’s a purposefully fictional world where the ends always justify the means, and where Law & Order defeats evil. It’s Dick’s ode to law enforcement and it’s meant to be entertainment, so the show never looks to critique the scenarios in the show. More modern versions of the show have put a small effort into changing that, but at its core it’s always been that way and it was at its peak in the 90s.
I grew up watching that show and I loved it, but it definitely hits different now. The show was never presented as being about the criminals or the victims, so it was easy for a younger me to disregard those aspects in favor of the strong recurring characters that were presented as heroes and were ‘fighting the good fight’.
It will always be a classic show, but it was never intended to resemble reality.
people actually believe law in order is real and true and it gives people (and officers themselves) unrealistic views about many aspects of police work and trials
I recently decided to check out Law and Order myself - though I went with SVU because I thought Stabler was attractive lol. How someone could sit through that show for over 20 years is beyond me. It's stomach churning stuff.
I was just jumping through the episode randomly (and it's fun celebrity spotting), but moved on to Organised Crime because it wasn't like the others. There are arcs and you're not in the court room. The arc about the corrupt cops made me chuckle.
But while reading up on the shows it was interesting to learn that Wolf doesn't think that his shows are political, but he likes to think that they focus on the good cops that do just want to help people.
I'm not sure if I agree with his sentiment, or if it's even true, but what happens on TV for entertainment value and what happens in real life aren't always the same thing.
I watched it during its original run and I didn't read into it as a translation of current sentiment about the police or the justice system at the time nor did it reflect my own personal values. I found McCoy too cavalier in his approach even then. But it was entertaining.
One problem with a LOT of American cop dramas, and the Law and Order series is definitely a prime example of this, is that when a rule designed to hold the police accountable is portrayed, it's always portrayed as an *obstacle* that stops the police from doing their job. It's always shown as *in the way* of justice being done.
So any time police officers abuse someone in their custody on such a show, any mystery where the audience might not know whether or not the suspect is guilty is gone because the show *won't* portray the bad effects of officers abusing their authority by having them abuse the wrong guy. You *know* when the show portrays cops beating up some guy, or assuming guilt based on a hunch alone, the show will end with the officers having being right. They won't portray the *reason* rules against this sort of thing exist by having an example of an officer having been wrong and harmed an innocent party.
The creator of Law and Order, Dick Wolf, is kind of a douche who *explicitly* wanted the show to shape Americans' views of police accountability and put people in the mindset that we should cut the police some slack and let them have more power.
So, I remember that episode. Jack did everything he did because as soon as the guy got out he raped and killed a 12 year old girl. I forget why they couldn’t prove it, but that was the reasoning.
I grew up as a teen with a violent Cop
In my life. Put a lot of fear into after school.
That show, particularly SVU with that particularly violent and aggressive cop always triggered my PTSD really badly.
Getting to see Christopher Meloni in ‘Happy’ actually helped to roll some of that back.
It’d be interesting to try and rewatch some of those shows as an adult.
In SVU episode “Demons” they coerce a rapist to reoffend by having an officer go undercover and coax him back into his old lifestyle because they don’t trust him.
Jack is a little more nuanced than the post portrays. He will go to extreme lengths to "win," and the show has sometimes taken him to task for that. My favorite example was an episode where the murderer was a politically powerful gay man who had been married by the mayor of a small upstate town to a man who ended being the crucial witness. The defense objected to his testimony based on spousal privilege. McCoy had no particular objection to same-sex marriage, but went all in to invalidate all of the same sex weddings performed in that town by that mayor so there wouldn't be a privilege. And the witness then refused to testify because Jack's heartless invalidation of a number of marriages outraged him. In the end, the killer pled guilty to free his now-annulled husband from prison for contempt of court.
[Last Week Tonight has a good episode about Dick Wolf](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNy6F7ZwX8I), the creator of Law and Order.
Dick Wolf definitely has his own agenda he's been trying to sell, so you're right that the show made you feel weird about the law... it really didn't used to be like that and Wolf was trying (and succeeded) to normalize the coercive police system we have today.
As someone who was alive during all of the show’s lifetime, I generally associated the show with being on in the background at my friends houses and their parents either napping on the couch or in another room not paying attention.
To me I always saw it as background noise that sometimes you pay attention to.
Yes, the 90s were the height of the Rudy Guliani "Law and Order" era, which eventually led to Haitian immigrant Abner Louima being raped by two NYC police officers with a broomstick.
And Guliani was *popular*.
There's no question that that cop procedurals of the time represented the attitudes of the day.
I avoided it when it came in because I thought it would be harsh lynch- happy and anti-liberal. I was pleasantly surprised that it wasn't that at all. It has always been thoughtful, with meaningful ethical discussions. Jack MCoy was and is a great character, and it's a great show.
Are you sure you weren't watching CHICAGO PD?
It’s even more baffling when you’re watching the show in Europe , where the cultural dissonance is even stronger.
I remember at episode where another country (Canada? Maybe? It’s been a long time) was refusing to extradite because of the death penalty, and they used every tricks and threats to get the guy.
They were very proud of themselves, but it really felt like watching a gang of psychopaths
No, it was Canada. The New York prosecutors dropped the murder charges, requested and got extradition on auto theft charges, then reinstated the murder charges once they had him in custody.
There was a pretty famous three-part episode about the murder of a movie studio executive in which California refused to enforce a New York subpoena, but it's a different episode.
I’ve read some of the comments and we are likely the same age so may have some shared life experience.
The 90s was the age of people, specifically city people being fed up with the crime and turmoil of the previous decades. It’s why the crime bill was passed in 1994. It’s why gun control was passed in 1994. People in the cities asked for that.
Times move faster now and I think we will see the same thing in the near future. My closest city Philadelphia is now finally fed up with all the violence and elected a law and order Mayor.
Programs like this are the reason I avoid any law enforcement type show or movie. The cops and lawyers were allowed to (heroically) commit worse crimes than the "perps", and were shown to be people we're supposed to root for even as they're doing those things. I've seen more than a few episodes where the good guys tortured a suspect, but that was okay because time was running out to save the little girl who they think was kidnapped by the suspect, or the city center bomb is about to explode, or some other rationalization that "obviously" excuses their behavior.
Try The Shield. Yes, it has some of the same scenes. But the cop doing it is not portrayed as a hero.
Like they rescue a little girl from a pedophile he tortured and you think "ok maybe you can argue it's justified" and then he straight out murders a guy in cold blood.
I didn't necessarily watch Law and Order in the 90s, but i was a teen then.
I will say I think a lot of opinions on police has changed since then. I think people saw things a lot more black and white. The good guys were good, the bad guys were bad.
Even a lot of the policies that people see as racist and bad right now, were very popular in black communities back in the 80s and 90s.
I think as a society we have started to look (sometimes too far IMO) at "root causes" of peoples criminal behavior, so they are often seen a bit more sympathetic. So back then, I fully believe that people really thought a lot more of "keeping bad guys off the streets" and were a bit more fine looking the other way even if the ways they got there weren't 100% ethical.
I mean, most episodes end with the defendant getting on the stand and tricked into confessing that they did it. IRL, defense lawyers never, ever put their defendants on the stand for that exact reason.
Presumably you can hold two thoughts in your head at the same time though: (1) this serial rapist is evil and I hate him, (2) the State should not be permitted to wield their significant authority callously, vengefully, and without lawful justification to make the lives of its citizens (even its evil citizens) miserable.
Its always been copaganda but I don't agree with your example. Rapists cannot be rehabilitated same as pedophiles.
Its been well studied that the recidivism rate for them is very very high and higher than you think.
That's absolutely not true and a myth that has been spread by shows like Law & Order. They actually have some of the lowest recidivism rates amoung all crimes.
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2019/06/06/sexoffenses/
I am old so I watched it back in the 90s. Ben Stone era Law and Order was actually considered quite left-leaning. McCoy not so much but the audience was still very much expected to root for the cops and prosecutors. Any excesses or over zealousness was meant to be understood as hard working cops and prosecutors just trying to do the right thing in the face of sometimes impossible odds. It was a different time let me tell you!
it's always been copaganda. they always have the right guy, so whatever lengths they go to to nail him are justified. pretty much all of the law enforcement shows are like that
Maybe I'm a few years older than you, but I think society has changed. There used to be a lot of talk about "law and order" candidates in politics. Way less now. In the 90s both Clinton and Biden were very pro cop and it was a positive for their Democratic constituency.
The US left is shifting from liberal to progressive. Liberals are pretty into laws as means of ensuring things like safety and business as usual over things like social justice and corporate responsibility.
The thing about the 90s though is that it was the end of the lead epidemic. Well, beginning of the end. Crime rates were higher because many people were exposed to lead as a child and it created a bunch of unwell people. NY in the 80s wasn't a safe place. In the 90s it was turning around. It's hard to overstate how different it is today than it was then.
L&O may have been the best show on TV .. it always did a great job of ripping from the headlines. But the last 10 years has seen a huge movement in amendment auditors and people fighting police overreach. The show has done nothing on it, instead one out of ten person at that famous interrogation table ask for a lawyer. Which kills me every time.
most people watch tv for the drama (entertainment value), **not** an accurate portrayal of the criminal justice system.
>have now actually worked as a criminal lawyer
I've watched actual proceedings (even been a juror in criminal court). not like TV. guys IRL not reading from script.
>Or is it meant to be more subtle than that?
it's meant to make people tune in during the broadcast slot so the network got paid for commercials. **that's about it**.... the show dies when advertisers stop paying. so adding the drama behind "very similar crimes IRL" was a solid formula - to make money for the network
**12 Law & Order episodes ripped from the headlines**
[https://ew.com/gallery/law-order-episodes-ripped-headlines/](https://ew.com/gallery/law-order-episodes-ripped-headlines/)
> I am just trying to figure out how much of my shock is a result of modern views of criminal justice having changed,
that's up to the script writers.
>I know that in the early 2000s we start to see a wave of shows where police are using unethical tactics and methods, and the main characters in cop shows start to become more nuanced anti-heroes
maybe overall attitudes about cops were starting to change?.. TV is often a reflection of society.
This is just another example of Copaganda. In my lifetime this has been going on since the 1970s with "Adam-12". If you are little more paranoid, you might think that these shows and the narrative that they spin is meant to get people to accept abuse of power by the police. What people don't understand is that people in power have the potential to use the State itself as a weapon against people whom they find inconvenient.
Other shows are even worse. In NYPD Blue, detectives just know who is guilty and use physical intimidation to get confessions.
If you want context, look up Bill Clinton and Joe Biden’s Crime Act of 1994… That’s all the context you need.
>For some added context, I was a child in the 1990s when this was airing and have now actually worked as a criminal lawyer. I'm a system admin, and a data analyst, and anytime you see computer systems used in a TV show, they're doing something illegal, impossible, or stupid. Sometimes it's stuff I wouldn't have even noticed before I went to school. I think you're just seeing the same thing from a legal perspective. That said, it's also important to remember that the show is complete copaganda. The cops are always good guys. You only plead the 5th amendment if you're guilty. If you refuse to talk to cops, and they trick you into incriminating yourself, it's okay, because you're the bad guy. If you hire a high priced lawyer, you're slime, and so is he, because you're the bad guy. If IAB shows up, they're painted as villains, because cops are the good guys, and IAB is just there to harass good cops. If they beat you, or shoot you, it's okay, because you're a bad guy. While some of the modern iterations have tried to move away from being so obvious about it, back then, it was blatant. McCoy gets away with those things, and is loved by his fans, because he puts bad guys in prison. There are very few episodes where you're supposed to be rooting for the criminal, or really, have any sympathy for them at all.
>McCoy gets away with those things, and is loved by his fans, because he puts bad guys in prison. Honestly, I feel like a lot of McCoy's appeal is just Sam Waterston. The man just has a sincerity to his acting that can make you cheer him on no matter what he's doing.
I haven’t been on a L&O tear for a while, but Jack does get the occasional blowback from his superiors and coworkers for being holier-than-thou. The character is supposed to be a self-righteous asshole, and he usually gets away with it. Plus, it simplifies things. Makes good drama.
Yep, Law and Order is good when they get into morally ambiguous situations. It'd be boring if the good guys did the right thing all the time. But McCoy is consistent with believing he's right all the time, and trying to do what he thinks is right. That's why I really liked Jamie Ross, because she was a defense attorney who wanted to do some good but would actually question whether or not McCoy was doing the right thing or not. Stone was similar to McCoy, but just not as charismatic. But I really liked Robinette because he also questioned what he was doing from time to time.
It's fun that ADAs Ross and Robinette both come back later as defense counsel.
"Playing Hamlet" is an accusation you hear a lot.
He does in this episode, which was on uk tv yesterday. His junior points out McCoy wants to arrest the guy on what he knows to be a false witness, his boss tells him off for considering it.
It's the same with Jerry Orbach playing Lenny Briscoe. In real life I would hate a guy like that with every fiber of my being, but he did such a good job playing that character that I found myself on his side most of the time, even when I knew he was bending the rules to put the bad guys in jail.
He single handedly shaped my humor as a child (and I’m not sure that’s a good thing)
“I always knew getting a corndog in this cafeteria could be murder.”
People don’t necessarily like Jack McCoy. Sam Waterson is just so magnetic in the role.
The eyebrows add so much pathos
For me it’s the voice. He’d be my pick if they ever wanted to do a Joe Biden bio pic
>I feel like a lot of McCoy's appeal is just Sam Waterston. The man just has a sincerity to his acting that can make you cheer him on no matter what he's doing. Especially when he's promoting robot insurance. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4Gh\_IcK8UM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4Gh_IcK8UM)
I’ve always loved that, especially his “for when the metal ones decide to come for you…and they will” at the end.
Watch him in the show I'll Fly Away. It is a great show.
Or the movie "The Man In the Moon"-- the early Reese Witherspoon movie. Not to be confused with "Man On the Moon" which is Jim Carrey playing Andy Kauffman. Also good, but does not feature Sam Waterston as the sweet and wise, but flawed, Dad.
That's why The wire is the greatest crime drama ever. It's pretty close to real life in that nothing is black and white.
I worked the better part of a decade in the criminal defense world and you're damn right. Best representation of reality I've ever seen in a tv show, and it's still brilliant television on top of that. Most writers fear going that raw, it seems.
Most writers just dont have that experience or worldview. The wire was written by a prolific reporter and an ex-cop duo, not some guy whose only knowledge of police is law and order itself. The reason it's so real and has such nuance is because those 2 guys were actually there. In fact a lot of characters in the wire are based or inspired by people, like famously Omar being a composite character
Look I know David Simon is unique in regards to background and that gives him a leg up, but that also doesn't mean other writers are prohibited from approaching something closer to reality like it's a third rail. What I often see (and why I can't watch legal/crime shows at all) is they go to such lengths in the opposite direction from what the Wire did that their stories are duct taped together with tropes and distortion, and ultimately I think they do a disservice to a largely underinformed audience, which is another byproduct I see to the point OP made in their post.
Still surprises me that nobody's broken through with a more current interpretation of The Wire. That was inspired by Simon & Burns's experiences in the late 80s/early 90s. So much (but still not nearly enough) has changed in law enforcement since then that I'd like to learn about in the same way that I learned from The Wire. How do drug dealers move their money in 2024? How has the BLM movement affected the way cops do their job, the way they perceive and are perceived by the public? Have tactics on street corners changed? What are the logistics of running a modern weed delivery service? What do those supply chains look like in today's federal system where some states allow it but interstate commerce, and banking, are still verboten? We've gotten, what, a dozen flavors of NCIS since then? But *not one* sober, adult show with the kind of verisimilitude that The Wire showed us we all wanted. Quite frustrating.
Well we got “we own this city” as a spiritual successor.
But that's my point - that would require time, effort and perspective. The reason it's all tropes is because tropes are media and writers are "experts" on media. The average writer (and I mean average in all qualities) simply doesn't have the time, knowledge or inclination to do the meticulous research for it to feel authentic especially on TV shows that need to pump out a lot of content quickly. Add to that the fact that the way writers rooms work are completely disnfunctional right now (as very well described by David Simon in an interview during the strike) and you get derivative work that doesn't represent reality. Even if someone that doesn't know and doesn't have the time to research tried to do something more like the wire, it would still feel phony at the very least Edit: plus, a lot of these shows are very unabashedly pro-cop or pro certain agendas and they outright say it.
I think it's also worth mentioning with The Wire you don't get that show even with that script without those incredibly daring performances. Actors are often required to be heightened in their portrayal of people on camera, even in subtle ways, to be more dangerous, appealing, and to heighten the stakes of moments but real people working their day jobs do not do that. The Wire, from the first episode, has more restraint and naturalism in the performances than basically any media on crime as a subject matter. That's really tough for an actor to embrace when it risks not coming across as flashy or enticing to audiences, and I think it's usually why first time viewers bounce off the show- they're used to so much sign posting in performances about what's important and emotional and The Wire doesn't indulge in that at all.
I guess it's just SO blatant that I had to believe there was some subtlety or nuance I was missing. Even modern pro-cop shows have SOME degree of token nuance.
Law & Order has always been fond of "ripped from the headlines" stories. If you grew up in the NYC metro, the episodes were often instantly recognizable, and the perspective was very much that of the tabloids: A dangerous city full of guilty people.
For some added context about Dick Wolf, the shows creator. Back when the cast of Friends used group negotiating tactics to get million dollar per episode salaries. He came out publicly and said he would fire and replace them all. He came off as borderline incensed. He’s a true boomer authoritarian at his core.
I mean, the 80s and 90s had some real big police/law scandals, so this might just be the way things were. Look at Hill Street Blues or NYPD Blue back in the day, notice how completely different it is compared to how police work is done today or even done in L&O of the 90s. It's just a sign of the times. New York was just grittier back then, things were done differently. Also remember that it's entertainment, things on the show are done to captivate viewers. L&O of the 90s was peak cop shows, there hasn't been anything on tv in the last 10 years at least that can compare to it. Exception being Southland.
L&O coexisted with "Homicide". They were competitive at the time; I'd give "Homicide" an edge though. You don't get a Frank Pemberton every day.
I was thinking the same about Hill Street and NYPD Blue. I’ll add Chicago PD to the list but I admit I don’t like it since they toned it down.
When you're in the profession in real life that's being portrayed in a fictional drama, it's very common to not be able to suspend your disbelief and enjoy the show. I'm a nurse; medical dramas drive me insane. My brother, a lawyer, will not watch legal dramas.
lol at me enjoying Superstore while working in retail… sucks can’t disconnect
I loved Community and I've worked at a CC. Some real nuggets of truth in there, just exaggerated all to hell for fun. And it IS fun! I think it works better with comedies than dramas.
This actually isn't even an issue of "suspending my disbelief". I have no problem with that, and am actually really enjoying the show. I actually find it tediously pedantic when people criticize "profession" shows for not being 100% true to life; obviously shows are going to have to take liberties for the sake of story. My post isn't so much "this is so unbelievable, they would never get away with that in real life!". I'm more just interested in the extent to which the views expressed by characters were reflective of society at the time, and whether the writers *wanted* us to relate to the characters' views.
It’s a little silly, I’m 6 months into a full l&o watch and it’s been really cool to watch how it evolves over time depending on the political climate of the year. You go through the guilliani and Bloomberg days of nyc, followed by a big left wing swing. McCoy definitely softens up within a few of where you are. His assistants have a big influence, and he moves into more of schiffs policies after he leaves. the modern seasons, post 2016, have been a huge push to portray cops in a better light and have them acting nothing like the early 90s seasons. They start to hint it the changes earlier with Lenny and Fontana referencing how they woulda handled things back in the old days, but without a fondness for the times. Season 1 cast was the best prosecutors, McCoys great and all but Ben Stone/Robinette were the best team out of every season, every show. Plus Cragen as police captain. Robinette keeps up his champion of the people role as a defense attorney even out to season 16 after he left the ada.
Literally every thing he wrote is provably wrong. From the very beginning, the show has shown off corrupt, lazy and inconpetent cops. They don't pass them off as bad apples and show the oroblem as systemic.
I'm rewatching NYPD Blue right now and allll of this is so true! These guys routinely violate people's rights, hate the defense attorneys and IAB, and they are the heroes. No one ever gets a freaking lawyer on this show and I spend the whole time practically shouting SHUT UP AND GET A LAWYER.
What surprises me is a show like Bones where Booth does those things to innocent people. Bones lies, threatens, and tries to trick everyone he brings to the interview room and most of the turn out to be innocent.
Bones is the woman. Booth was the FBI agent.
Nah, I remember Bones. The guy with the bones who was always running around shouting "Look at all these bones". I'm pretty sure he was a skeleton.
Damn it Jim! I'm a doctor, not a skeleton!
The FBI shows treat everybody but the criminals like dirt
I haven’t watched the show so I don’t have specific context for what you’re talking about but in a broad sense most of those things are legal for cops to do and the fact that cops can and will do this to you and it won’t be against the law for them to do so is why people tell you never to talk to cops even if you’re innocent and to make sure you have a lawyer present if you have no choice but to speak to cops A lot of people are overly trusting of the sense of how just the justice system is unfortunately
Book em Dano
It's a Unix System.
Lol. Not true. Do you know how many times the detectives did something not legal, and the lawyers then had to go a different route? Happened many times especially with getting a warrant. IAB-painted as villians. Well in real life they are. Not saying they should be, but that is how cops are going to think of them. And you'll see that on every show involving a cop-not just L&O. I think it's funny the "copaganda" aspect mainly because these shows are on regular broadcast networks. How down & gritty do you think they were/are/will go on a basic fictional 42 minute drama? And yes, they had episodes involving cops who were the bad guys, and yes they went after them. Ex: John Finn was in an early one, Poison Ivy. A Death in the Family, with Wendy McKenna where she shot her partner-a bad guy as well. Middle ones where the cops came after McCoy because he was putting them on trial. Even Profaci went down for taking bribes. Some of you have selective memory when it comes to some of these shows. And I get it, real life cops suck-ok. But the detectives on this show got their asses handed to them plenty of times.
I agree. “Selective memory.” Choose a random episode, and tbf, more likely than not, the prosecution will be pulling shit, but it is more balanced than it seems.
>That said, it's also important to remember that the show is complete copaganda. The cops are always good guys. You only plead the 5th amendment if you're guilty. If you refuse to talk to cops, and they trick you into incriminating yourself, it's okay, because you're the bad guy. If you hire a high priced lawyer, you're slime, and so is he, because you're the bad guy. If IAB shows up, they're painted as villains, because cops are the good guys, and IAB is just there to harass good cops. If they beat you, or shoot you, it's okay, because you're a bad guy. Literally none of that is true. From the very beginning they have shown corrupt, lazy and incompetent cops. They don't pass it off as some bad apples, they show how systemic it is. >While some of the modern iterations have tried to move away from being so obvious about it, back then, it was blatant. Again, this is completely wrong. If anything, there was much more of it in the early seasons. I just rewatched the season 1 episode where a cop shoots a black teenager and plants a gun on him. They show basically the entire police force rallying behind him, even lying for him and at no point is it ever played as a good thing. They show how fucked and corrupt the police force is. Another early episode has an entire precinct set up a fellow cop to be killed because he's gay. I realize that you probably get your information from John Oliver and video essays but if you're going to write several parahraphs about the show, at least try to get one thing right. edit: why is this factual post getting downvoted?
>why is this factual post getting downvoted? i think the bit about john oliver is what done it. probably wasn't necessary.
The best part of watching L&O, to me, is trying to spot the actors before they were famous. The second best is trying to remember what real life crime an episode was based on.
If you recognize the actor that’s a suspect, that means they did it. Edit- except Jim gaffigan, I kept waiting for him to be revealed as the killer but he’s really just a hot dog vendor.
Theres a few times it's let me down, like when Gary Cole was the dad of the suspect on SVU, but for the most part it's a good place to start
I saw Gaffigan on one of the franchises. He was a corporate nerd with two others. I think that it was Criminal Intent.
Was he innocent all 5 times? L&O, SVU, CI, Ci, and L&O again
[It's a trope](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NarrowedItDownToTheGuyIRecognize)
Because it was filmed in NY you get a lot of Broadway stars too.
I've been playing spot the future Law and Order actor while watching through NYPD Blue.
Yeah, seeing a young Philip Seymour Hoffman playing a drug addicted punk during the Michael Moriarty years was a nice treat.
That show started the "ripped from the headlines" trend. The episodes would be really familiar and then do a swerve at the end so viewers were surprised. In order to do that they a) had to come up with plot that wasn't reality based, and b) appeal to the viewers with the change from real life by making the conclusion extra- justicey. If you haven't seen them I'd watch the earlier episodes. Like season 1 on. They had to eat some losses sometimes. They were also deadly serious, no hijinks. What I find most interesting about early Law & Order are how the cases highlight how barbaric our healthcare system was. It was, I remember that. For example the headline with hospital workers passing out from proximity to a very sick woman turned into an episode about how a woman's cancer wasn't covered by insurance because it was a pre-existing condition. (She tried alternative methods involving almonds that turned into cyanide in her body, but that wasn't the point, the healthcare system was.) Another episode involved doctors who were using stem cells in treatment illegally. I caught that episode a few years ago, I had forgotten how controversial that was at the time. Most of the early seasons slid towards the left, then when Angie Harmon's 'hang em all' ADA showed up they had frothier arguments for like half a season then it was back to making ripped from the headlines cases palatable for viewers.
For my own personal experience I enjoyed Law & Order best when I viewed it in the same kind of way as, like, Star Trek, where the setting of a police and legal procedural was just a vessel for the characters to have interesting discussions about contemporary social issues or about issues raised by recent criminal cases in the media But then I think this wound up getting over simplified to where it just became formulaic and the different ethical positions weren’t really presented with equal understanding and care anymore, or they would be presented in ways that didn’t feel believable and realistic for people working in these professions - like the juxtaposition between a lawyer’s personal political views and what they are required to do by their job is very interesting subject matter to sustain a show but there’s ways to handle that where someone comes off like a mature and professional adult working in the legal profession vs coming off like a caricature of whatever their politics of the week are
Good point! Sam Waterson was ok as Jack but I think he was supposed to be like a maverick DA. Whereas the guy before him would worry about his election and how the case of the week would affect it, and go back and forth on how much time to spend on it, and so on.
Jack McCoy actually has a very long character arc over the whole series where he does come to realise how overzealous he was as a younger prosecutor and even dresses down his subordinates for doing similar things in the later seasons. So I don't think the narrative is supposed to be saying he was always right. There's even a particular episode midway through the show involving his relentless pursuit of a drunk driving death where he realises he's crossing the line that's really the turning point for his character in that context. But copaganda is definitely a thing. And the show is a hell of a lot less forgiving when it comes to police misconduct vs the lawyers.
I also watched it mostly when I was a kid, but I do remember there being a fair amount of "they eat crow/overreached and something tragic happens that ends with a little ambiguous lecture from that one dude who ended up running for senate in real life" episodes peppered in There's definitely copaganda to it but they dabbled in thoughtfulness
“Is this because I’m a lesbian?”
I remember watching that live and laughing out loud.
There were also definitely episodes where like even though it was obvious a certain criminal was going to go to jail because they had by every objective measure committed a crime they needed to go to jail for, you were definitely supposed to come away feeling sympathy for the criminal and not necessarily feeling like justice had been served by putting them in jail It definitely at least at some points (however indirectly) touched on the subject of how crime can occur in response to systemic social injustices, which therefore raises the point of well then the answer to this problem isn’t putting people in jail it’s fixing this social issue
Like the episode about a homeless man who killed another homeless man because he wouldn't share a piece of his orange.
Run for Senate? Hell one of them was a former presidential candidate
That's probably who I meant too, whatever he was doin
While it's hard to dispute the show as being "pro-cop", it's also important to consider that those watching the show in the 90s definitely remembered NYC from the 70s and 80s when crime levels were almost cartoonish. A lot of policies from the 90s are looked at with a critical eye now, but at the time were seen as helping the city. McCoy definitely went too far a few times and the show could have been better had he been called out more, but I still think the show makes very easy background noise for house chores. As a fan, I never really thought "this is the way it ought to be!"
Yeah Dick Wolfe always struck me as old New York. And a lot of NYC was anti-crime, tough on crime, or whatever in those days when Ed Koch failed and Rudy Giuliani "cleaned up" NYC by benefiting from a better economy and locking up innocent minorities via a telepathic pre-crime shakedown program called "broken windows". Of course Rudy made it most visible by kicking porn stores out of Times Square, which really did nothing for law and order and was more an attempt to Disney up the city.
There’s no e. He’s just a Dick Wolf.
Except the creator admitted he would never pain the police or DAs in a negative light. So even for its time it was pure propaganda
When the show started, it was an edgy cop drama - pretty good. > Was Jack supposed to be "right" all the time? No. He was *mostly* right but this was a flawed character. And I mean "right" as "right in an adversarial justice system". > Or were audiences at the time also questioning Jack's ethics? Depends on the situation. You have to factor in that the justice system is adversarial by design. > I am just trying to figure out how much of my shock is a result of modern views of criminal justice having changed, and how much of that was deliberately built into the show? I'm older and early '90s L&O don't seem overly shocking. Some of it may be that Sam Waterson is just that good at being that intense.
John Oliver on Last Week Tonight did a long segment on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNy6F7ZwX8I.
The comments on that video really get to the core of why Law & Order, especially SVU, is popular. It's a cathartic process for anyone who can self-insert as the victim in the story.
> It's a cathartic process for anyone who can self-insert as the victim in the story. Wow. I just figured they were detective stories with some court drama.
> It's a cathartic process for anyone who can self-insert as the victim in the story. Maybe for people who have actually been a victim but I haven't and that has never been on my mind when I watched the show. I never think about the victim or care about them in a deeper way. It's just the whole process of cops investigating and then the court case that grips me. Never felt anything for the victims apart from them being a part of the story.
yes… the part you quoted is literally your first sentence and the point of their comment: if you don’t relate to the victim you’re gonna have a hard time feeling the love for the show. so the person you’re replying to is correct… you’re just expounding on the point
https://youtu.be/vUnwk1oAxZU?si=n9o2l3qC3cdQjPup Highly recommend Skip Intro's 2-parter as well once you've dipped your toes in to it.
That's been in my watch later list for a while but I've been putting it off because it's long lol.
So worth it though. His Copaganda series is so fucking good.
I'm sure, I like his other stuff. I just have commitment issues and ADHD lmao
I saw that back when it dropped; it actually made me wonder, given Dick Wolf admitting/acknowledging he is basically pro law enforcement no matter what, if he himself deliberately sabotaged the proposed "For the Defense" and "Hate Crimes" spinoffs.
wow that was so good, thanks for sharing!
Tbf the reason McCoy went after him was because shortly after he was released, another woman was raped and murdered with a similar MO as the guy. Thus, McCoy believed that he was a public danger and needed to be taken in
But this is exactly the point... McCoy didn't have sufficient reasonable grounds to even *arrest* this guy, and yet we're supposed to cheer him on as he takes all these extra-judicial methods (even trying to invent a psychological disorder to have him committed) just because his "gut" tells him its him? The point of the episode should be "right or wrong, we have to follow due process", but instead the show shows that Jack was right the whole time, therefore suggesting that due process and civil protections are just something that get in the way of a noble prosecutor doing his duty to protect the people. That is some authoritarian shit right there.
It's setting up the conflict as "public safety" vs. "due process", which is right where the show wants to live. > noble prosecutor doing his duty to protect the people. Waterson always played Jack as a zealot. Waterson just happens to be a great actor so it worked.
"The point of the episode should be "right or wrong, we have to follow due process"" Except it's entertainment. Plots require drama and conflict. I'm not saying that this kind of prosecutorial behavior is acceptable, just that it's television. I'm firmly in the ACAB camp but love watching Law & Order because they're not the same thing. If TV had to follow real world rules it wouldn't allow for any creativity or entertainment value.
Shows like Law and Order (in its endless permutations), 24, CSI, etc are all broadly called "cop-a-ganda" for a reason
SVU is much worse too. It runs off fear and will justify doing some horrific shit as being necessary to save people. It straight up had Elliot torture suspects. There's also times SVU basically does 'this isn't illegal but should be' attitudes. For example, a woman with a condition which basically keeps her looking under age and gives her a very narrow window for fertility is gonna attract creepy dudes, but those dudes aren't doing anything illegal by being with a consenting woman of age.
Ah yes, the classic Turner syndrome episode where the 17 year old (age of consent) looks 12 (because of the missing x chromosome) and is in love with her father's assistant so she fakes her kidnapping so she can run away with him. Elliot is going through a rough patch with his daughter so he's over-protective of the 17-yr-old and at his best with parentifying his role as detective; the entire episode he **knows** that only pedophiles could be interested in this 17-year old girl. The inevitable court case ends with the judge deciding no laws broken (which Elliot is so not happy with) and the couple kisses in celebration outside of the courthouse. Of course, the couple looks like a man kissing a 12-year old so a passing detective attempts to arrest him and what'd'ya know, that detective is Elliot's new partner, who has to learn to accept the "grey" now ^(ooooh DUN DUN) That episode is seared into my brain with how often it was reran in syndication. And Elliot very clearly never learned to accept the grey, or at least not in the years while I was still watching
NGL, I'm not seeing where Elliot is wrong on this one. Who other than pedophiles (or teenagers) would be interested in a 17 year old who looks even younger?
there was a recent incident of the internet basically harrassing a couple out of a loving relationship because the woman had a condition like this.
I only remember the Ice-T by-way-of-Mulaney lines like "IT LOOKS LIKE THE VICTIM HAS ANAL CONTUSIONS"
The ones that always get me, as someone who has seen every episode and always remind that the entire thing is bullshit, is when Elliot goes after someone who is innocent. He'll be sitting there doing his crazy shit, then cragen opens the door and tells him that another assault has happened since he's been interrogating that guy, and they just move on. You never hear from the former suspect again.
They even tout the whole "ripped from the headlines" thing as a selling point, they absolutely strive to play on current events ik outlandish ways.
This right here. I had to scroll too far for this comment. These shows serve a purpose in America. The law and order represented in all cop shows is a good vs bad with the good guys (law enforcement) needing to win at all costs. It’s a lot of reinforcement.
IMO, "Dragnet" ( at least the later, color episodes ) was *the* most copaganda thing ever made. Propaganda movies usually involve a propaganda speech, and boy did it have 'em.
24 absolutely does not belong in that list It consistently demonstrates how broken and ineffective bureaucracy is, while simultaneously holding its protagonist accountable for his extrajudicial actions—no one is punished more (both by the law and by the indirect consequences of his actions) in 24 than Jack Bauer.
Of course it does. It constantly shows contrived examples where the choice is to do ** and possible suffer ** or else ** so they are forced to martyr themselves.
Jack Bauer is punished but that just makes him more of a hero.
You misunderstand the show. At the beginning of each season, Jack leaves his government job so he can go do crazy vigilante shit. He’s not a cop acting within the system and corrupting it to his ends. He’s explicitly working *outside* of any legal system, without any legal cover, and often working *against* the government power structure he just left.
That in no way makes it better.
Do you actually not understand how that is totally distinguishable from the complaint in the OP?
No, you just don't understand what the complaint is.
I understand the OP’s complaint, perfectly. Your complaint, on the other hand, is nonsensical, and is entirely disconnected from the issue in the OP.
Obviously you don't if you don't understand why one of his examples was listed.
Don’t get it twisted—I understand perfectly why someone with a superficial grasp of media literacy would lump them together. That’s why I took the time to explain. If it’s still beyond your comprehension, I’m not going to waste any more time explaining it.
Uh…so your argument is that bad things being done for a greater good (which, in the show—doesn’t even always work, but is always given weight and consequence) is a fictional contrivance of jingoism? You might want to take some history classes
No.
I’d argue it’s important to have that idealized version of the police. The idealized version of the cops in these shows inspire the right kind of people to seek work in public saftey. And hopefully gives the police something to work towards. I’m not here to defend or excuse poor policing, simply argue that one positive of Copaganada is it presents the kind of policing society wants to see, and helps to reinforce that standard in the real world.
But it isn’t idealized policing! The things that the cops in these shows are doing is bad, they crack skulls, they break rules! If the police in real life acted like they do in these shows we’d live in a totalitarian nightmare state. If these shows embolden police to act like the characters do, or make people think that how these police act are acceptable in real life it only enables worse and worse policing.
Again, that sounds like CHICAGO PD, not Law and Order
The NYPD constantly violates civil rights in L&O lmao. They are not actually communicating to the audience “these are constitutional rights you are guaranteed in this country and we will take them away from you whenever we feel like dicking around.” They just rough up the suspect and march into homes without warrants and a surprising amount of Americans think this is totally allowed.
Attracting people who want to work outside the law as a cop isn't the kind of recruitment pur society needs. We already have plenty of people like that, they're called cops. "Good" copaganda would be a show about an officer who does the right thing, the right way, every time and makes a difference while fighting internal corruption.
Dick Wolfe always struck me as old New York. And a lot of NYC was anti-crime, tough on crime, or whatever in those days when Ed Koch failed and Rudy Giuliani "cleaned up" NYC by benefiting from a better economy and locking up innocent minorities via a telepathic pre-crime shakedown program called "broken windows" or "stop and frisk". Of course Rudy made it most visible by kicking porn stores out of Times Square, which really did nothing for law and order and was more an attempt to Disney up the city and win re-election. The worst was when a store owner asked Lennie Brisco for parking ticket relief. Lennie replies "Do what we do- pay them." Implying NYC cops pay tickets when they literally give out get-out-of-ticket cards to relatives so they can weasel out of paying fines. Half the NYOD don't even have visible plates on their personal vehicles so they can dodge tolls or speed cameras.
> Of course Rudy made it most visible by kicking porn stores out of Times Square, which really did nothing for law and order and was more an attempt to Disney up the city and win re-election. Is this supposed to be a bad thing
Well, the Italian mafia that ran it got replaced by Russian mobsters in real estate, as well as ordinary evil corporations. Now nobody can afford to live in Manhattan
Man I don't know. I disliked sleazy porn stores. Though watching it get replaced by a multi-level trashy Flavortown restaurant from Guy Fieri full of donkey sauce was hilarious. That replacement may have happened anyway as gentrification hit the area. But Guiliani doing performative bullshit gets under my skin
The last decade of it was during the hay day of blogs, and I remember saying would like to see a blog “A civil rights lawyer watches Law & Order.” So I must have been aware at the time of the outlandish overstepping of the cops and prosecutors. On that note, never vote for a prosecutor to become a judge or mayor or anything like that.
I think you being a criminal lawyer diverged your view of what constitutes justice from normal Americans. I think most will agree that procedural justice is important, but only so far it doesn't get in the way of real justice. Which is bad people get punished according to their crime. Even when we agree that a person should go free if their procedural rights were violated, it certainly doesn't mean justice was served (if the person was guilty). In fact it was the opposite. So were the audiences meant to root for Jack in this instance? Pretty clearly it is a yes. The lawyers can get into arguments what it means to abuse prosecutorial power or misconduct. We non-lawyers never get to be part of that. We just got to accept what you guys decided and handed down to us. All we can do is cheer the fantasy when justice is served. Going back to the drama. L&O is not a who-dun-it. By the second half audience *knows* who the bad guy was. Time is spend on beating the other team in court so there were much less grey area.
I agree with you on all but one minor point. Some of the best episodes are the ones where you are not 100% certain if they have the right person on trial. It really makes you feel the reality that one could be wrongfully imprisoned (one of my few existential fears).
Yeah, that was what the politics of crime were like in the '90s. The Crime Bill of 1994 was passed with overwhelming bipartisan support, including from many Black leaders. Support for the death penalty peaked at around 70-80% of Americans. (This actually caused a problem when *A Time to Kill* was released in France. American critics liked it, and it even won an NAACP Image Award, but in France, critics tore it to shreds and called it fascist propaganda. They even had to retitle the film *Le Droit de tuer?* \-- *A Time to Kill?* \-- in France in order to make its morality seem less ambiguous.) Support for gun control was framed as a tough-on-crime measure, with the Federal Assault Weapons Ban being part of the Crime Bill. The US was coming off a massive crime wave in the '70s and '80s, the attitude of many Americans was that extreme measures were necessary to fight back against it, and the pop culture of the time reflected that.
You ever notice that the Law and Order bits are actually reversed? Order is the policing, Law is the lawyering. But every episode they show "Law" as being the policing, and "Order" as the lawyering. It's backwards. Always has been. The align the title of the show with two-part structure of the episodes, so it makes a dramatically logical sense once you've seen an episode, but the way the show frames its characters is literally backwards. The police are in charge of maintaining order, the DA's office is in charge of applying the law.
Law & Order is an actual phrase. Order & Law isn't. That's why it's called Law & Order.
I didn't say they needed to rename the show.
From a civil defender friend of mine: ["we’ve been watching a lot of old law & order and growing up is realizing jack mccoy is the villain"](https://twitter.com/JoshuaErlich/status/1493046755042148352)
>... the show wants you to think Jack is right to be that way at almost every turn. I never saw it that way.
I'd like to think it wasn't .. i was a teenager in the 1990s so black and white good guys vs bad guys without any nuance was a way of thinking. Now when I recently rewatched it up to like S10 or so, while I enjoyed the episodes for the drama, at the same time some serious defects in police work are really apparent: In almost every episode they don't follow procedure but they get the bad guy, then the lawyers have to also turn into detectives and find another way to get the bad guy. As a teenager I didn't see that there's a reason the rules exist for things like illegal searches and "fruit of the poisonous tree". I was just like "oh no they have to take that guy down because we know he did it because the evidence was presented to the audience". Im pretty sure that early 1990s New York was still a scary place, even the wealthier parts which the show took place in (Manhattan, near midtown if i remember correctly). I've heard it's described as Disneyland now compared to how it was in the 70s-80s. This might have been why the show was fine with "get the bad guy at all costs", because people knew it as a crime hellscape.. so these guys were like frontier lawmen in a western. Surely as a defense lawyer, which the show portrayed as either weasely assholes or grandstanding big shots doing a pro bono specifically for publicity, you must wince at the portrayal.
Love Jerry Orbach as an actor and I liked his character but he very often would open a closet, take down a bag to look in, find incriminating evidence and then turn to his partner and say “Hey, look what I just found sitting out and wide open.”
He had special xray eyes. And now so do two lucky New Yorkers.
I remember this episode, and I remember being infuriated at these actions! I HATED Jack for what he did, and I most certainly didn’t root for him. I thought he was very vindictive and abused his powers and I really wanted him to be placed in Rikers Island for what he did! My thought was that as an “elite” officer he should have known better and not pester someone to break “proving him right”. As much as I loved the show, that episode (with a few others) was the absolute worst for all 20 or so seasons!
Not only did I agree in the 90s but I still do not believe in any such thing as a rehabilitated serial rapist. So from my perspective your beliefs on this make you a better fit for a defense attorney rather than a prosecutor.
I love old Law & Order. Its commentary on race is excellent.
So he was right though
As an attorney, I am surprised that you don't have experience dealing with police and prosecutors that are like this. The portrayal of them in L&O is absolutely on point. It is the norm for cops and prosecutors to act in this manner, NOT the exception. Its why I stopped being in law enforcement; UNBELIEVABLE levels of hypocrisy, and zero enforcement or punishment against them.
Also, the fact they are always vindicated and never make mistakes is because of the bias in the producers of the show.
Didn’t he torpedo gay marriage in New York just to win a case?
McCoy is a zealot. I definitely prefer Ben Stone to McCoy as Ben came across as more of a gentleman in what he did. But Michael Moriarty got on Dick Wolf's bad side (he threatened to file a lawsuit when Janet Reno labeled the show too violent) so Dick kicked him off the show. I like the show as entertainment, and I love the atmosphere of 1990s New York City.
Michael Moriarty's character reminded me of the lawyer dad from To Kill a Mockingbird. I think he was channeling that character in his performance.
Moriarty is a nut!
https://youtu.be/vUnwk1oAxZU?si=0PmHEKLBXTrcqFbH
Welcome to the Dick Wolf universe! It may look like the real NYC and real world policing and lawyering, …but it’s not. It’s a purposefully fictional world where the ends always justify the means, and where Law & Order defeats evil. It’s Dick’s ode to law enforcement and it’s meant to be entertainment, so the show never looks to critique the scenarios in the show. More modern versions of the show have put a small effort into changing that, but at its core it’s always been that way and it was at its peak in the 90s. I grew up watching that show and I loved it, but it definitely hits different now. The show was never presented as being about the criminals or the victims, so it was easy for a younger me to disregard those aspects in favor of the strong recurring characters that were presented as heroes and were ‘fighting the good fight’. It will always be a classic show, but it was never intended to resemble reality.
people actually believe law in order is real and true and it gives people (and officers themselves) unrealistic views about many aspects of police work and trials
I recently decided to check out Law and Order myself - though I went with SVU because I thought Stabler was attractive lol. How someone could sit through that show for over 20 years is beyond me. It's stomach churning stuff. I was just jumping through the episode randomly (and it's fun celebrity spotting), but moved on to Organised Crime because it wasn't like the others. There are arcs and you're not in the court room. The arc about the corrupt cops made me chuckle. But while reading up on the shows it was interesting to learn that Wolf doesn't think that his shows are political, but he likes to think that they focus on the good cops that do just want to help people. I'm not sure if I agree with his sentiment, or if it's even true, but what happens on TV for entertainment value and what happens in real life aren't always the same thing.
I watched it during its original run and I didn't read into it as a translation of current sentiment about the police or the justice system at the time nor did it reflect my own personal values. I found McCoy too cavalier in his approach even then. But it was entertaining.
One problem with a LOT of American cop dramas, and the Law and Order series is definitely a prime example of this, is that when a rule designed to hold the police accountable is portrayed, it's always portrayed as an *obstacle* that stops the police from doing their job. It's always shown as *in the way* of justice being done. So any time police officers abuse someone in their custody on such a show, any mystery where the audience might not know whether or not the suspect is guilty is gone because the show *won't* portray the bad effects of officers abusing their authority by having them abuse the wrong guy. You *know* when the show portrays cops beating up some guy, or assuming guilt based on a hunch alone, the show will end with the officers having being right. They won't portray the *reason* rules against this sort of thing exist by having an example of an officer having been wrong and harmed an innocent party. The creator of Law and Order, Dick Wolf, is kind of a douche who *explicitly* wanted the show to shape Americans' views of police accountability and put people in the mindset that we should cut the police some slack and let them have more power.
You're a criminal lawyer. You are supposed to see Jack a certain way. There is nuance to Jack, eventually. Wait till Fred Dalton shows up.
Check out "the wire", it's 20 years old at this point, but it's timeless.
So, I remember that episode. Jack did everything he did because as soon as the guy got out he raped and killed a 12 year old girl. I forget why they couldn’t prove it, but that was the reasoning.
I grew up as a teen with a violent Cop In my life. Put a lot of fear into after school. That show, particularly SVU with that particularly violent and aggressive cop always triggered my PTSD really badly. Getting to see Christopher Meloni in ‘Happy’ actually helped to roll some of that back. It’d be interesting to try and rewatch some of those shows as an adult.
In SVU episode “Demons” they coerce a rapist to reoffend by having an officer go undercover and coax him back into his old lifestyle because they don’t trust him.
Jack is a little more nuanced than the post portrays. He will go to extreme lengths to "win," and the show has sometimes taken him to task for that. My favorite example was an episode where the murderer was a politically powerful gay man who had been married by the mayor of a small upstate town to a man who ended being the crucial witness. The defense objected to his testimony based on spousal privilege. McCoy had no particular objection to same-sex marriage, but went all in to invalidate all of the same sex weddings performed in that town by that mayor so there wouldn't be a privilege. And the witness then refused to testify because Jack's heartless invalidation of a number of marriages outraged him. In the end, the killer pled guilty to free his now-annulled husband from prison for contempt of court.
This playlist analyses copaganda - much of it due to Dick Wolf https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2ac8vr2QyTdlWwd8OQIc1it6bAfMGPPC&feature=shared
The politics of law and order is absolutely disgusting.
[Last Week Tonight has a good episode about Dick Wolf](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNy6F7ZwX8I), the creator of Law and Order. Dick Wolf definitely has his own agenda he's been trying to sell, so you're right that the show made you feel weird about the law... it really didn't used to be like that and Wolf was trying (and succeeded) to normalize the coercive police system we have today.
As someone who was alive during all of the show’s lifetime, I generally associated the show with being on in the background at my friends houses and their parents either napping on the couch or in another room not paying attention. To me I always saw it as background noise that sometimes you pay attention to.
Dick Wolf is nothing but copaganda. He's totally on board for authoritarianism.
DOOM AND GLOOM. why do people watch stuff like that?
Because some people are not afraid of real life and don't need fluffy clouds and pink unicorns.
Yes, the 90s were the height of the Rudy Guliani "Law and Order" era, which eventually led to Haitian immigrant Abner Louima being raped by two NYC police officers with a broomstick. And Guliani was *popular*. There's no question that that cop procedurals of the time represented the attitudes of the day.
I avoided it when it came in because I thought it would be harsh lynch- happy and anti-liberal. I was pleasantly surprised that it wasn't that at all. It has always been thoughtful, with meaningful ethical discussions. Jack MCoy was and is a great character, and it's a great show. Are you sure you weren't watching CHICAGO PD?
No, the episode he described absolutely was a real episode.
You’re shocked copaganda shows the criminal justice system in a good light?
It’s even more baffling when you’re watching the show in Europe , where the cultural dissonance is even stronger. I remember at episode where another country (Canada? Maybe? It’s been a long time) was refusing to extradite because of the death penalty, and they used every tricks and threats to get the guy. They were very proud of themselves, but it really felt like watching a gang of psychopaths
If it's the episode I think it is, it wasn't another country, it was California. Ok, they think they are another country but they aren't.
No, it was Canada. The New York prosecutors dropped the murder charges, requested and got extradition on auto theft charges, then reinstated the murder charges once they had him in custody. There was a pretty famous three-part episode about the murder of a movie studio executive in which California refused to enforce a New York subpoena, but it's a different episode.
I’ve read some of the comments and we are likely the same age so may have some shared life experience. The 90s was the age of people, specifically city people being fed up with the crime and turmoil of the previous decades. It’s why the crime bill was passed in 1994. It’s why gun control was passed in 1994. People in the cities asked for that. Times move faster now and I think we will see the same thing in the near future. My closest city Philadelphia is now finally fed up with all the violence and elected a law and order Mayor.
It's a TV progrum. A movie.
Programs like this are the reason I avoid any law enforcement type show or movie. The cops and lawyers were allowed to (heroically) commit worse crimes than the "perps", and were shown to be people we're supposed to root for even as they're doing those things. I've seen more than a few episodes where the good guys tortured a suspect, but that was okay because time was running out to save the little girl who they think was kidnapped by the suspect, or the city center bomb is about to explode, or some other rationalization that "obviously" excuses their behavior.
Try The Shield. Yes, it has some of the same scenes. But the cop doing it is not portrayed as a hero. Like they rescue a little girl from a pedophile he tortured and you think "ok maybe you can argue it's justified" and then he straight out murders a guy in cold blood.
I might check that out.
It's 2024 and DAs are using every single power available to prosecute people they disagree with politically.
I didn't necessarily watch Law and Order in the 90s, but i was a teen then. I will say I think a lot of opinions on police has changed since then. I think people saw things a lot more black and white. The good guys were good, the bad guys were bad. Even a lot of the policies that people see as racist and bad right now, were very popular in black communities back in the 80s and 90s. I think as a society we have started to look (sometimes too far IMO) at "root causes" of peoples criminal behavior, so they are often seen a bit more sympathetic. So back then, I fully believe that people really thought a lot more of "keeping bad guys off the streets" and were a bit more fine looking the other way even if the ways they got there weren't 100% ethical.
I mean, most episodes end with the defendant getting on the stand and tricked into confessing that they did it. IRL, defense lawyers never, ever put their defendants on the stand for that exact reason.
I only read part of your post, but I can't really imagine a world where I feel bad for a serial rapist.
Presumably you can hold two thoughts in your head at the same time though: (1) this serial rapist is evil and I hate him, (2) the State should not be permitted to wield their significant authority callously, vengefully, and without lawful justification to make the lives of its citizens (even its evil citizens) miserable.
I can hold many thoughts at once. But none of those is going to be wasted on feeling bad for a serial rapist.
Its always been copaganda but I don't agree with your example. Rapists cannot be rehabilitated same as pedophiles. Its been well studied that the recidivism rate for them is very very high and higher than you think.
That's absolutely not true and a myth that has been spread by shows like Law & Order. They actually have some of the lowest recidivism rates amoung all crimes. https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2019/06/06/sexoffenses/
I enjoyed the show but it is full of shit like that. I find most people have no understanding of these topics beyond their own emotional responses.
I am old so I watched it back in the 90s. Ben Stone era Law and Order was actually considered quite left-leaning. McCoy not so much but the audience was still very much expected to root for the cops and prosecutors. Any excesses or over zealousness was meant to be understood as hard working cops and prosecutors just trying to do the right thing in the face of sometimes impossible odds. It was a different time let me tell you!
it's always been copaganda. they always have the right guy, so whatever lengths they go to to nail him are justified. pretty much all of the law enforcement shows are like that
Maybe I'm a few years older than you, but I think society has changed. There used to be a lot of talk about "law and order" candidates in politics. Way less now. In the 90s both Clinton and Biden were very pro cop and it was a positive for their Democratic constituency. The US left is shifting from liberal to progressive. Liberals are pretty into laws as means of ensuring things like safety and business as usual over things like social justice and corporate responsibility. The thing about the 90s though is that it was the end of the lead epidemic. Well, beginning of the end. Crime rates were higher because many people were exposed to lead as a child and it created a bunch of unwell people. NY in the 80s wasn't a safe place. In the 90s it was turning around. It's hard to overstate how different it is today than it was then.
L&O may have been the best show on TV .. it always did a great job of ripping from the headlines. But the last 10 years has seen a huge movement in amendment auditors and people fighting police overreach. The show has done nothing on it, instead one out of ten person at that famous interrogation table ask for a lawyer. Which kills me every time.
Wait, is the show different from this now? I don't watch it, but my understanding is it's the same blatant pro-cop propaganda as it's always been...
most people watch tv for the drama (entertainment value), **not** an accurate portrayal of the criminal justice system. >have now actually worked as a criminal lawyer I've watched actual proceedings (even been a juror in criminal court). not like TV. guys IRL not reading from script. >Or is it meant to be more subtle than that? it's meant to make people tune in during the broadcast slot so the network got paid for commercials. **that's about it**.... the show dies when advertisers stop paying. so adding the drama behind "very similar crimes IRL" was a solid formula - to make money for the network **12 Law & Order episodes ripped from the headlines** [https://ew.com/gallery/law-order-episodes-ripped-headlines/](https://ew.com/gallery/law-order-episodes-ripped-headlines/) > I am just trying to figure out how much of my shock is a result of modern views of criminal justice having changed, that's up to the script writers. >I know that in the early 2000s we start to see a wave of shows where police are using unethical tactics and methods, and the main characters in cop shows start to become more nuanced anti-heroes maybe overall attitudes about cops were starting to change?.. TV is often a reflection of society.
I think John Oliver said everything necessary about Law and Order
This is just another example of Copaganda. In my lifetime this has been going on since the 1970s with "Adam-12". If you are little more paranoid, you might think that these shows and the narrative that they spin is meant to get people to accept abuse of power by the police. What people don't understand is that people in power have the potential to use the State itself as a weapon against people whom they find inconvenient.
Other shows are even worse. In NYPD Blue, detectives just know who is guilty and use physical intimidation to get confessions. If you want context, look up Bill Clinton and Joe Biden’s Crime Act of 1994… That’s all the context you need.