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Saturday, March 12, 2005
Laws and Orders (and Oz)
I'm enjoying the new Law & Order series, Trial By Jury, for many reasons.
Unfortunately, the final performances of Jerry Orbach is not one of those reasons. While it's touching to see him one last time and his illness is clearly taking its toll, those two episodes were certainly not his finest hour as an actor. And I want to remember Orbach as a fine character actor, since that's what matters most to his fans.
So what is there to love about the show? Well, it's a Law & Order and I'm one of those who can't wait for an all-L&O cable channel to surface in a few years. We're almost at a point where you can play all the various episodes of L&O and it'd take a month of continuous viewing to get through them; Trial By Jury will speed us closer to that day.
And then there's Bebe Neuwirth: one of the hottest women in the Western world plays a surprisingly vulnerable ADA whose name I'll learn sooner or later. The fact that she is so unsure of her cases - not whether or not she's in the right, but whether she can make the case work with a judge and jury - is a wonderful move, because it's a kind of functional paranoia that ensures all her bases are as covered as they can be.
Neuwirth's character gives this Law & Order its own identity, which is important for the franchise. Law & Order is coolly professional with a slight snarky edge (what Orbach most specialized in); Law & Order: SVU is angry and sensationalistic, the grimmest of the group; Law & Order: Criminal Intent is the psychological melodrama, with Vincent D'Onofrio as a quirky, mildly schizophrenic genius. The addition of Chris Noth, who'll split episodes with D'Onofrio, will mean Criminal Intent will have two different personalities next season, depending on which leading man will star. As Noth joked in Entertainment Weekly, it'll be Sherlock Holmes one week, Popeye Doyle the next. Trial By Jury is the war in the courtroom trenches, with a wonderful emphasis on strategy and counter-strategy and counter-counter-strategy. It'll be the most engagingly political, in the broad sense of the word.
And then there's Kirk Acevedo, who plays a detective in Trial By Jury. He absolutey rocked as Miguel on Oz - something which was made crystal clear as my wife and I finish watching Season Four on DVD. (We're waiting on the last disk from Netflix.) It'll be fun to see how he handles being a cop in this new series.
Acevedo is yet another in a long line of actors who've been in both Oz and a Law & Order series, and it's a pretty strong roster of talent. Let's go through the list. First and foremost, J.K. Simmons, Oz's white supremacist Schillinger, plays the psychiatrist on Law & Order. (He also does an incredible J Jonah Jameson in the Spider-Man movies and is a voice for an M&M.) Chris Meloni was the homosexual murderer Keller in Oz and now stars as a detective in SVU. Dean Winters plays Meloni's fellow manipulator O'Reilly in Oz and was a detective as well in the first season of SVU. Kathryn Erbe - another of the hottest women in the Western world - killed her child and was put on death row in Oz, and became Detective Eames on Criminal Intent. (A recent subplot in Criminal Intent actually had Eames become a surrogate mother for her sister!) B.D. Wong was Father Mukada in Oz and the openly gay psychologist on SVU.
And there were guest stars as well. Lee Tergesen, who played Beecher in Oz, was a murderer in Criminal Intent last season. I saw a rerun of a Law & Order recently which featured an African killer, played by an actor who was an undercover cop in Oz. And in last night's Trial By Jury, the actor who played Clayton - the Oz C.O. who shot the governer and killed that aforementioned undercover cop - was playing a detective who helped out Acevedo.
I know why there's such a heavy crossover: both series film in New York and finding regular work for television means beating the same paths. That said, this ongoing connection between two favorite shows - or rather a favorite show and a favorite franchise - continues to delight me, especially since new permutations continue to pop up. One of the unintended satisfactions, given the nature of each show, is that criminals in Oz often end up working for the good guys in Law & Order. Another is to follow through a kind of meta-continuity, to find the unintended ironies that pop up when you compare one role against another, very different role.
And yet, there are some things which remain the same because those roles are played by the same actor. J.K. Simmons may be a Nazi on Oz and a shrink in Law & Order, but you can see how both characters have a similar set of responses, how their mannerisms spring from a kind of pragmatic acceptance of the situation each finds himself in. (Schillinger is the more volatile personality, of course, but it's his adaptability that makes him so dangerous to Beecher and others.) The smoldering sensuality of Meloni's Keller becomes a self-righteous scowl in SVU.
This blurring of distinctions - the way these cross-series comparisons bring out both harmonies and dissonance - only prove the Rolling Stones were right: "Every cop is a criminal / And all the sinners saints..."
Unfortunately, the final performances of Jerry Orbach is not one of those reasons. While it's touching to see him one last time and his illness is clearly taking its toll, those two episodes were certainly not his finest hour as an actor. And I want to remember Orbach as a fine character actor, since that's what matters most to his fans.
So what is there to love about the show? Well, it's a Law & Order and I'm one of those who can't wait for an all-L&O cable channel to surface in a few years. We're almost at a point where you can play all the various episodes of L&O and it'd take a month of continuous viewing to get through them; Trial By Jury will speed us closer to that day.
And then there's Bebe Neuwirth: one of the hottest women in the Western world plays a surprisingly vulnerable ADA whose name I'll learn sooner or later. The fact that she is so unsure of her cases - not whether or not she's in the right, but whether she can make the case work with a judge and jury - is a wonderful move, because it's a kind of functional paranoia that ensures all her bases are as covered as they can be.
Neuwirth's character gives this Law & Order its own identity, which is important for the franchise. Law & Order is coolly professional with a slight snarky edge (what Orbach most specialized in); Law & Order: SVU is angry and sensationalistic, the grimmest of the group; Law & Order: Criminal Intent is the psychological melodrama, with Vincent D'Onofrio as a quirky, mildly schizophrenic genius. The addition of Chris Noth, who'll split episodes with D'Onofrio, will mean Criminal Intent will have two different personalities next season, depending on which leading man will star. As Noth joked in Entertainment Weekly, it'll be Sherlock Holmes one week, Popeye Doyle the next. Trial By Jury is the war in the courtroom trenches, with a wonderful emphasis on strategy and counter-strategy and counter-counter-strategy. It'll be the most engagingly political, in the broad sense of the word.
And then there's Kirk Acevedo, who plays a detective in Trial By Jury. He absolutey rocked as Miguel on Oz - something which was made crystal clear as my wife and I finish watching Season Four on DVD. (We're waiting on the last disk from Netflix.) It'll be fun to see how he handles being a cop in this new series.
Acevedo is yet another in a long line of actors who've been in both Oz and a Law & Order series, and it's a pretty strong roster of talent. Let's go through the list. First and foremost, J.K. Simmons, Oz's white supremacist Schillinger, plays the psychiatrist on Law & Order. (He also does an incredible J Jonah Jameson in the Spider-Man movies and is a voice for an M&M.) Chris Meloni was the homosexual murderer Keller in Oz and now stars as a detective in SVU. Dean Winters plays Meloni's fellow manipulator O'Reilly in Oz and was a detective as well in the first season of SVU. Kathryn Erbe - another of the hottest women in the Western world - killed her child and was put on death row in Oz, and became Detective Eames on Criminal Intent. (A recent subplot in Criminal Intent actually had Eames become a surrogate mother for her sister!) B.D. Wong was Father Mukada in Oz and the openly gay psychologist on SVU.
And there were guest stars as well. Lee Tergesen, who played Beecher in Oz, was a murderer in Criminal Intent last season. I saw a rerun of a Law & Order recently which featured an African killer, played by an actor who was an undercover cop in Oz. And in last night's Trial By Jury, the actor who played Clayton - the Oz C.O. who shot the governer and killed that aforementioned undercover cop - was playing a detective who helped out Acevedo.
I know why there's such a heavy crossover: both series film in New York and finding regular work for television means beating the same paths. That said, this ongoing connection between two favorite shows - or rather a favorite show and a favorite franchise - continues to delight me, especially since new permutations continue to pop up. One of the unintended satisfactions, given the nature of each show, is that criminals in Oz often end up working for the good guys in Law & Order. Another is to follow through a kind of meta-continuity, to find the unintended ironies that pop up when you compare one role against another, very different role.
And yet, there are some things which remain the same because those roles are played by the same actor. J.K. Simmons may be a Nazi on Oz and a shrink in Law & Order, but you can see how both characters have a similar set of responses, how their mannerisms spring from a kind of pragmatic acceptance of the situation each finds himself in. (Schillinger is the more volatile personality, of course, but it's his adaptability that makes him so dangerous to Beecher and others.) The smoldering sensuality of Meloni's Keller becomes a self-righteous scowl in SVU.
This blurring of distinctions - the way these cross-series comparisons bring out both harmonies and dissonance - only prove the Rolling Stones were right: "Every cop is a criminal / And all the sinners saints..."
