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Television Law & Order
By RAYMOND A. SCHROTH
The decomposed corpse of a young
woman, a student intern from the U.S. Congress, missing for four months, bobs
to the surface of the East River. Hands outstretched. Clink! the cuffs are on.
"You have a right to remain silent." "New York congressman arrested in intern
case," scream the headlines. A Harlem Pentecostal minister not realated to the
corpse, who had first charged that the congressman had had an affair with his
daughter, retracts his story Then he retracts his retraction.
The congressmans wife, reported to be in ill health, is in
seclusion in Chappaqua, N.Y. The citys two tabloids, battling for
circulation and survival, have been lambasting the New York police for taking
so long to nab somebody. Now they yell, Resign! and Give him
the chair! on Page One.
The scene shifts to New York Criminal Court. The prosecution
meticulously builds its case on circumstantial evidence. Then, third day of the
trial, the Fox News Network reports that the congressmans wife, wearing
dark glasses and a wig, was seen walking in Central Park with the intern the
evening she disappeared. The judge calls a recess. The wife has confessed to
the defense attorney and wants to make a deal. The DA huddles with his
assistants. The prosecutor wants to stick to his guns: The congressman is a
sleaze, and the prosecutor wants to punish him.
Perhaps this is not how the Congressman Condit-Chandra Levy case
will resolve itself in real life, but surely it would make a good script for
Law and Order at 10 p.m. EST on Wednesday nights.
If Law and Order is not the best program
on TV -- the best is the reruns of the BBCs Sherlock Holmes -- it is the
most consistently satisfying. With its taut script, split structure of half
detection, half trial, its only slightly predictable plot twists, and its
dedicated, passionate ensemble of law enforcement characters, its a
reassuring balance to the other picture we sometimes get of the New York Police
Department -- as a sullen hoard of malcontents who lie, cheat and shoot black
people at the least excuse.
Law and Order, is now, as everyone knows, after 11
years, TVs longest-running current drama series, at the peak of its
popularity, with 16 million viewers, and has inspired a successful spinoff,
Special Victims Unit, and another spinoff scheduled for the fall.
Last fall, the creator, Dick Wolf, floated a companion series,
Deadline, about a salty, rumpled newspaper columnist who used
journalism students to help solve crimes.
It flopped, in my judgment, because its central character was a
bum: Hed get drunk at a party and sleep with a pick-up he was supposed to
be writing about, and wake up in the morning on the floor. To hold an audience
-- at least a mature audience -- viewers need a character whom, to some degree,
they can admire. A flawed eccentric, yes -- like the neurotic Sherlock Holmes,
the fastidious Hercule Poirot and the bibulous Inspector Morse -- but basically
honorable and idealistic.
Wolf, in Law and Order, has decided to hold his
viewers without violence, car crashes or explosions, without nudity or
so-called adult language. Over the years, and in following the
nightly reruns on A&E, viewers have watched the cast evolve from mostly
Irish and Jewish males to an ethnic mix of Italians, women, blacks, and
Hispanics as diverse as the streets of New York where it is filmed. Yet it is
diversity unsullied by political correctness: Black characters can be just as
crooked and arrogant as whites.
As Michael Moriarty gave way to Sam Waterston as the executive
assistant district attorney and the long-time male district attorney was
replaced by a woman (welcomed into the office in a cameo appearance by New York
Mayor Rudolf Giuliani himself), viewers stayed confident that the law was
enforced by men and women who may get a little rough and cut a few corners from
time to time but who dont deserve to get indicted themselves.
But what holds us is the stories, inspired by the headlines and
played out in a way that allows the imagination to grant us the closure that
events themselves deny us so often in life. In them the guilty
characters are clearly developed individuals, some driven to their first crime
by desperation and to some degree worthy of compassion; others are
representative of social and political forces responsible for the rot in our
civilization.
An antiabortion fanatic, in her devotion to
life, induces a young woman to deliver a bomb to an abortion clinic
where she herself is killed in the explosion. It turns out that the girl was
pregnant, so the bombing has killed an unborn child as well.
An insurance agent, a subsidiary of a giant U.S.
company, sold a thousand life insurance policies during World War II to
European Jews and recorded the transactions in a ledger. The agent is murdered
and the ledger stolen. Many of the clients have died in the Holocaust leaving
no record of their policies. Actually, the insurance company has obtained and
hidden the ledger. In court, stonewalling an investigation, the white-haired,
pompous CEO prattles on about his companys obligation to our
stockholders.
An insurance company, he reminds us, is not a
charitable organization. Besides, he concludes, During the war we
were all doing business with Germany. Right.
A college student is found unconscious and raped in
the bushes at the edge of campus. This episode was filmed on the Columbia
and City College of New York campuses, but it seemed clearly inspired by a
recent Columbia case where civil libertarians criticized the punishment of a
male student according to internal procedures that denied him basic civil
rights. In this version of the story, the actual sex act, as it turned out, was
not condemned as decisively as the fraternity-sorority system with its drunken,
puking, drug-laced, promiscuous, back-stabbing, party culture, and the dean of
students office, which, rather than treat the rape like the crime it was,
refused to cooperate with the police, and chose to deal with the incident
internally. Besides, the accused males father was a major
benefactor.
Finally, one of the finest moments in recent TV
drama came at the climax of a show called Via con Dios. An old
mans body is found on the stairs of an apartment house. He is the father
of an idealistic American young radio journalist murdered by the Chilean army,
with the cooperation of U.S. Naval Intelligence, during the overthrow of
President Salvador Allende. The father has spent his whole life tracking his
sons killers and has been beaten to death by the killers son.
It happens that Gen. Pantoya (a Pinochet look-alike) who arrested,
tortured, and killed the young man, is in a New York hospital and that, the day
of the murder, the naval officer sent a telex from New York to Chile informing
Pantoya of the young journalists whereabouts. Under New York law, argues
Waterstons Jack McCoy, this is conspiracy to murder, and the Chilean
general can be arrested and tried in New York. And so he is.
Pantoyas conviction is appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court,
and the Justice Department backs the general. The administrations
advocate paints the murdered youth as a communist, a dangerous radical, and
argues that if Pantoya can be tried in New York then Kissinger can be tried in
Cambodia for his illegal Vietnam War bombing raids. That would be
chaos, and we cant have that.
McCoy, Lincolnesque, his righteous rage steaming beneath a
disciplined exterior, tells the court that the right to life is so basic, so
absolute, that it transcends national boundaries. Presidents can be and are
tried as war criminals. Every act of murder, in Rwanda or Chile or New York,
demands a punishment. If we refuse to protect this right, we will lose it:
Man has only those rights he can defend. The end. I think I could
watch and cheer that speech as often as I could listen to Beethovens
Third.
We do not learn the Supreme Courts response -- though the
administrations attorney has told us that this right-wing court
would never go against the Chilean government, which has given the killer
general immunity.
This fall, cop-show fans are going to have to make a choice. ABC
is moving NYPD Blue, a tougher, grittier, more sensational show,
into Wednesday night to run against Law and Order.
I know where Ill be. Im looking for the story about
the New York Jesuit priest who comes forward after 13 years of silence about
the teenager who confessed to him, outside the seal of the sacrament, that he,
not the two boys convicted of the crime, had murdered another boy. The killer
agreed to confess to the authorities and started to, but was ignored. Now the
guilty boy is dead and the innocent men are still in jail. What will McCoy do
with this one?
Jesuit Fr. Raymond A. Schroth, the Jesuit Professor of
Humanities at St. Peters College in Jersey City, N.J., is author of
Dante to Dead Man Walking: One Readers Journey through the Christian
Classics (Loyola Press).
National Catholic Reporter, August 24,
2001
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