Until this week, it had been 12 years since Law & Order, the crime procedural that spawned a world of spinoffs and entrenched the perspective of police and prosecutors on television, aired a new episode.
A lot has changed since the flagship show, which premiered on NBC in 1990 and returned to the network for its 21st season on Thursday, went on hiatus in 2010. (For one, the 20th season finale was about a menacing blog.) Crime procedurals – shows in which law enforcement solve a case over the course of a single episode – remain popular; they composed six of the top 10 most-watched scripted broadcast shows in 2020. Law & Order’s most successful spinoff, Special Victims Unit, is now the longest-running live-action primetime series in history with 23 seasons. But a decade’s worth of video evidence of racist police brutality, particularly against Black Americans, has put TV shows where police are always the protagonists under fair scrutiny.
Given the gaping discrepancy between the fantasy of policing on-screen and the inequitable, often racist, highly fallible institutions off it, some have called for the end of crime procedurals altogether. That was always unlikely; crime procedurals are enduringly popular and often entertaining. Law & Order’s consistencies – the two-part structure, the suits, the unforgettable dun-dun, the light sexual tension, the professionalism, the endurance of format over cast – is familiar, comforting and addictive; anyone who has ever turned on a L&O marathon and found themselves still on the couch five hours later can vouch for this, myself included.
But the return of its flagship series marks another notch in the franchise’s ongoing identity crisis, and begs several questions. How can a franchise which has always seen law enforcement as the flawed good guys adapt to the times and the responsibility of its influence? Can the reboot of arguably the most iconic and influential crime procedural of them all justify its existence in 2022?
Shows such as Law & Order, created by super-producer Dick Wolf, have played an outsized role in sanitizing police work, perpetuating harmful stereotypes and establishing false narratives about the efficacy and fairness of the criminal justice system. For instance, the ironclad structure of Law & Order – cops find a suspect, then district attorneys work to convict them – suggest that defendants almost always get a trial. In reality, most criminal defendants (according to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, 97% of criminal cases), especially people of color, are pressed into often discriminatory plea deals.
The show is also a bedrock of crime procedurals which promote fantasies of hyper-competence, in which law enforcement are almost uniformly the heroes solving crimes at far above the national average, and in which all uses of force or bending of the rules is justified. The Law & Order franchise has long had an issue with the popular SVU character Elliot Stabler (Christoper Meloni), the archetypical “ends justify the means” hothead cop whose return to SVU last year launched his own spinoff, Law & Order: Organized Crime. Stabler’s return prompted gentle critiques from new superiors (his record includes six shooting deaths!) but Organized Crime has doubled down on Stabler as a crusading, outside-the-lines cop fighting a seedy criminal underbelly in New York.
The new flagship Law & Order, also a Wolf creation, seems more interested in addressing heightened scrutiny for its role in glamorizing law enforcement than its siblings. Early in the 21st season premiere, Detective Frank Cosgrove (Jeffrey Donovan), a white cop, gets rebuffed by a black teenager whom he’s trying to question in public. Agitated, Cosgrove causes a scene, and a crowd of onlookers immediately whip out their cellphones to start filming.
Cosgrove gets flustered. “I’m white, he’s black, if I say the wrong thing I lose my job!” he tells his partner, Detective Kevin Bernard (Law & Order veteran Anthony Anderson), who is a black man. Bernard, who in the previous season finale is self-assured to the point of smug, isn’t sympathetic: “Maybe you should’ve treated him a little more polite, like a law-abiding citizen minding his own goddamn business,” he retorts.
This dialogue, like much of the premiere episode (no others were made available in advance), is heavy-handed, to say the least, but it’s still a step forward. It’s an in-show rebuke of tradition for a show whose moments of snappy humor often relied on contempt toward those accused of committing a crime – or, depending on the cop, anyone who came under suspicion at all.
The main story, in Law & Order tradition, is ripped from the headlines. The episode centers around the murder of a Bill Cosby figure – a well-known black entertainer accused of drugging and raping over 40 women – released from prison on a prosecutorial error. #MeToo protesters circle the courthouse and fill the trial of a victim accused of shooting him to protect other women. The plot line is uncomfortable and confusing; the show introduces a surprising amount of ambiguity (you can supply plenty of outside discomfort with curdled social media movements) but then wraps it tidily in a pat and hyper-competent closing argument by assistant district attorney Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi).
You can make bones about lines like Bernard’s line “first time in 20 years people actually care about a Black man getting shot” or its handling of a rape victim pushed to vengeance. (I have issues with both.) But these concerns were less interesting to me than the implications of mistakes at several turns, and the fallibility of policing tactics once lionized for toughness. In the interrogation of a prime suspect, Cosgrove blatantly lies about immunity to prompt a confession, a manipulation of a rape survivor that’s upsetting both to the audience and to Bernard, who grimaces but does not stop it. District attorney Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy), the idealistic upstart to Sam Waterston’s beloved veteran Jack McCoy, does stop it; he tosses the confession on the basis of impermissible questioning.
“Cops are allowed to lie,” McCoy, skeptical of Price’s decision to hamper his own case, tells him. “They are!” Price responds, “but it makes the confession less reliable, less ethical.”
To be clear: Law & Order has not solved its fundamental bias. Price is, ultimately, the good guy trying to do right within the system. But it’s a thornier conversation about a knot of optics and ethics – and a straightforward acknowledgement that the rules don’t make it right, that police business as usual can unfairly exploit – than many crime shows allow.
This is not an endorsement of the law enforcement perspective on-screen, as entertaining as it can be (and the premiere of Law & Order 2.0 locked me on the couch). But if we’re going to have crime procedurals on TV – and they’re profitable and reliable enough that we’re going to, for now – it’s worth thinking about how they redraw the lines, what shades of grey they incorporate, the contours of their considerable influence. The new Law & Order could go the way of Organized Crime, but its premiere suggests a more thoughtful, considered, meatier approach to depicting “the criminal justice system”, one that could be and has been worse.
