L&O Franchise, NYT Sept 2003 Part 1

[Sirenna]

This was a four-page spread in NYT. It's general info only, I'm afraid, but the writer is good. I'm posting it in two parts due to space limitations


Law & Order & Law & Order & Law & Order & Law & Order ...
By CHARLES McGRATH

Published: September 21, 2003

To an impatient channel-surfer not so long ago, it sometimes seemed as if there were only three choices: ''American Idol,'' the war in Iraq and ''Law and Order.'' ''Idol'' and the prime-time war are over, thank goodness, but ''Law and Order'' and its two spinoffs, ''Law and Order: Special Victims Unit'' and ''Law and Order: Criminal Intent,'' are still there, holding down the fort for NBC -- on Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday evenings, respectively. There are also several hours of ''Law and Order'' reruns every day on TNT, and weekly reruns, on USA, of ''S.V.U.'' In any given week, you can easily watch 24 hours of ''Law and Order'' product, an entire day's worth, and in some weeks the total reaches 30 hours or more.

All three shows ''win their night,'' as TV people say -- each is the most-watched on its particular evening -- and all three rank in the Top 20 shows overall. ''Law and Order,'' the flagship, is in the Top 10. Even the reruns do well. During the doldrums this summer, some of the TNT episodes actually ranked higher than competing network shows, and the same thing happened when NBC dropped reruns of all three ''Law and Order'' shows into the wasteland of Saturday night: in certain demographics they beat original episodes of competing shows on CBS.

The shows' immense audience -- perhaps as many as 90 million viewers a week -- has made the creator and producer of ''Law and Order,'' Dick Wolf, the most powerful person in television; he rules an empire with an almost science-fiction-like ability to replicate itself. Wolf has already talked about a fourth, and possibly a fifth, ''Law and Order,'' and meanwhile Barnes & Noble is about to bring out a ''Law and Order'' coffee-table book (bound with rivets, so it looks like a police blotter), which will be on sale with a special DVD. And let's not forget the two ''Law and Order'' computer games, which, according to Wolf, have already shipped 180,000 units.

Lately, the tentacles of the Wolf empire have reached even to Wall Street. In June, with the contract for ''S.V.U.'' coming up for renewal, the owner of the ''Law and Order'' franchise, Universal, proposed a three-year package deal to NBC: all three shows for a price that was reported at the time to be $550 million a year but was probably even higher. ''I'd say that's in the ballpark,'' Dick Wolf told me recently, ''but a ballpark that needed renovation. That's the low end of the ballpark.'' Even at the low end, this was the most expensive negotiation in the history of television.

To complicate matters, Universal itself was on the block, as part of the fire sale of assets caused by the breakup of its parent company, Vivendi. In view of what has happened to Time Warner, General Electric, which owns NBC, has been famously reluctant to embark on a Hollywood merger. But earlier this month, with NBC barely clinging to its top spot in the ratings and facing an upstart challenge from Fox and the fold-up, a year from now, of the mighty ''Friends'' sitcom, G.E. reconsidered and agreed to fork over an additional $12 billion or $13 billion, on top of the ''Law and Order'' asking price, and buy the whole shebang. For its investment, G.E. also gets some theme parks, movie and television studios and three cable networks -- USA, Bravo and Sci Fi -- but ''Law and Order'' was clearly the deal-maker. Without it, G.E. would have walked away.

The show that has occasioned all this high-stakes wheeling and dealing is not a hot, state-of-the art innovation like ''The Wire'' or ''Six Feet Under,'' and it's not nearly a cultural landmark on the order of ''The Sopranos.'' It's a relic. ''Law and Order,'' which will begin its 14th season on Wednesday evening, is one of TV's longest-running dramatic series. That tinny-sounding Mike Post theme music that introduces each episode was probably cutting-edge in 1990, when ''Law and Order'' started; now it's as old-fashioned as a fiddle tune. The same is true for those white-lettered addresses that -- announced by a ker-ching! -- precede each scene change. What was probably the height of graphic style back then now has the feel of those Roman-looking inscriptions that are incised on the walls of banks and post offices.

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The show has been around for so long that every one of the six principal characters has been replaced at least once, and some, three or four times. In 1994, Michael Moriarty, who played Ben Stone, the original executive assistant D.A. on the show, quit (or was fired) during what proved to be an extended public meltdown. (He claimed that the network was censoring him for criticizing Janet Reno and exiled himself to Canada.) Moriarty said at the time that the show couldn't get away indefinitely with just recycling actors, but the show has proved him wrong. Wolf called up the tousle-haired Sam Waterston, who had already worked as a D.A. (as Forrest Bedford, over on ''I'll Fly Away''), and ''Law and Order'' went on without a hitch.

Over the years, S. Epatha Merkerson has replaced Dann Florek as the police supervisor (he recently reported back to duty, on ''S.V.U.''); Jerry Orbach has taken over from George Dzundza (remember him?) and Paul Sorvino as the lead detective, and he has gone through three assistants -- Chris Noth (who switched from law enforcement to high finance and became Mr. Big on ''Sex and the City''), Benjamin Bratt and Jesse L. Martin. Over in the D.A.'s office, the turnover has been even greater, with a steady stream of great-looking assistants (including Jill Hennessy and Angie Harmon) high-heeling in and out. The avuncular D.A. is now played, in a stroke of casting genius, by Fred Dalton Thompson, who prepped for the role with a stint as minority counsel to the Senate Watergate committee and then a term in the Senate itself.

All these actors and characters happily co-exist in reruns. You can watch Sorvino lead the investigation one night and Orbach the next, or the next hour even, and the chronology can run backward, with Waterston preceding Moriarty, who, if he sticks around for the next episode, might seem to have grown younger over the commercial break. Fred Thompson and Steven Hill, who played the head prosecutor for the show's first decade, so resemble each other you can't keep them straight anyway.

Somehow none of these alterations is distracting or disconcerting, the way it is, say, when you suddenly come upon Jimmy Smits in an ''N.Y.P.D. Blue'' rerun and think to yourself, No, it can't be -- he died several seasons ago. On ''Law and Order,'' no one ever dies -- none of the good guys anyway -- and cast changes are never explained or accounted for in the plot. The show has achieved what amounts, in television terms, to a kind of timelessness.

''It's like a ritual,'' Jerry Orbach is fond of saying of ''Law and Order,'' ''like the Latin high Mass.'' Nothing on the show ever changes; every episode of ''Law and Order'' is just like every other one. Some are a little better than others, some a little worse, but in the end they're all interchangeable, and that's precisely what makes them so valuable.

In many ways, Dick Wolf fits the classic profile of the contemporary TV creator. He grew up in New York, went to blue-chip schools (Andover, Penn), majored in English and tried for a while to write the Great American Novel. Or rather, like so many English majors of his generation (he's 56), he thought a lot about writing the Great American Novel, even if he didn't produce all that many actual pages of one. He tried his hand as a screenwriter for the movies, and like so many successful TV people, he came under the seminal influence of Steven Bochco, whose ''Hill Street Blues,'' back in the 80's, transformed everyone's notion of what television could be.

But Wolf also worked for seven years in advertising, turning out copy for Procter & Gamble. (We have him to thank for ''Scope fights bad breath -- without medicine breath'' and the Braniff slogan ''I'm Cheryl. Fly me.'') A lot of creative TV people think of themselves as artists. Wolf thinks of himself as a businessman. He's confident, imposing and very quick-witted, and you sense that he expects things to be done his way. Wolf dresses like a network executive -- in suits so well tailored that if he were to turn up as a character on one of his shows, he would immediately be fingered as a white-collar perp -- and he talks like one.

''We're in show business,'' he's fond of saying. ''No show, no business -- but it is a business.''

[Sirenna]

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Wolf came up with what became the concept for ''Law and Order'' in 1988, when he was working on ''Miami Vice,'' and he did it to solve a particular business problem -- how to generate more revenue from reruns, which is how people who create shows (as opposed to those who broadcast them) make their money. ''Back then,'' he explains, ''we couldn't give away our shows in syndication. There was no syndication of hourlong shows; the only thing people wanted was half-hours.''

So with the encouragement of Kerry McCluggage, then the head of Universal Television, he set about coming up with an hourlong show that could be split apart into stand-alone half-hours: a cop show and a lawyer show. By the time ''Law and Order'' actually got into production, the resistance to syndicated hourlong programs had disappeared, and Wolf says now that it was just as well, because there was a fundamental problem with the pull-apart scheme. ''Monday-Tuesday, fine. Wednesday-Thursday, fine. But then Friday-Monday? There was kind of an essential flaw in the math, which I never told anyone about.''

The ''Law and Order'' pilot had almost all the now-classic elements already in place: the solemn opening voiceover (''In the criminal justice system the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups. . . . ''); the address labels and the ker-ching; the New York City location shots; the staccatolike succession of close-up interview scenes that begin in media res. Most important, the original episode, like almost every one that has followed, was entirely self-contained, with no loose ends, no continuing plot threads. This is the key to the Wolfian philosophy -- stand-alone episodes that can be rerun over and over; shows that, as he likes to point out, are ''worth as much after they're off the air as they are when they're on the air'' -- which is to say, shows that continue to fetch a high price even after the original seasons are done.

''Law and Order'' was slow to be picked up. Both Fox and CBS were interested at the beginning but eventually passed because there were no ''breakout'' characters, as there were, for example, on crime shows like ''Columbo,'' ''The Rockford Files'' and ''Murder, She Wrote.'' And after the show was first broadcast on NBC in September 1990, it was even slower to catch on with the audience. That first year, it not only sank to the ratings basement; it set a record for advertiser dropout. There were two turning points. The first happened in 1992, when Warren Littlefield, NBC's head of programming, threatened to cancel the show unless Wolf introduced some female characters. (At that point, both the squad room and the D.A.'s office were all male.) Wolf resisted a little and then yielded, replacing Dann Florek with Merkerson and Richard Brooks with Jill Hennessy. Littlefield, he says now, was ''absolutely right'' and taught him ''a huge lesson -- women like to see other women on TV.'' The ratings went up the following season, proving Littlefield's point, and then in 1994 they suddenly leaped into the Top 20, proving a point of Wolf's, because that was when the first three seasons of ''Law and Order'' went into syndication on A&E cable. Far from dragging the show down, the reruns seemed to spur it on, and vice versa.

Wednesday's season premiere of ''Law and Order'' was supposed to have been about affirmative action (at the last minute it got bumped for a story about a bounty hunter), and this, too, has been a hallmark of the show from the beginning: episodes that incorporate contemporary, real-life issues and events. As the NBC promo ads used to say, ''It doesn't get more ripped from the headlines than this!'' Over the years ''Law and Order'' has done shows involving abortion, assisted suicide, pedophilia in the church, I.R.A. terrorism, bias crimes and female circumcision. There have been stories that were thinly (or not so thinly) disguised versions of the Mayflower Madam story, the Robert Chambers case, the Central Park jogger assault, the Tailhook incident, the Menendez brothers, the Malcolm X assassination, the Sara Jane Olson arrest, the Crown Heights riot, the Tonya Harding attack on Nancy Kerrigan, the Martha Moxley murder and the killer dogs in San Francisco. If you see something juicy in The Post, chances are it will turn up on ''Law and Order'' seven or eight weeks later.

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When asked the secret of the show's success, Wolf likes to repeat, ''It's the writing, stupid.'' But it's writing of a very specialized sort -- one that allows for few variations. The current head writer of ''Law and Order'' is Michael Chernuchin: New York, Dartmouth, Michigan grad school, failed attempt at the Great American Novel, time served with Bochco, etc., etc. He also practiced law for a while, as did several of the writers who work for him. What makes their background valuable, Chernuchin says, is not so much their legal knowledge but their familiarity with how lawyers think and act, which is of particular importance in the show's second half. This is the crucial half, Chernuchin says, because ''the show grabs the headlines but not the body copy.'' All the show's timely references are in many ways just a tease or a pretext, that is, that gives the show the illusion but not necessarily the substance of urgency. The interesting plot twists typically come in the courtroom scenes -- which means, as many people have pointed out, that you can begin an episode of ''Law and Order'' without being certain whether you've ever seen it before, or even if you have, without remembering how it turns out.

So you can watch it again -- and a couple of months later, yet again. You don't have to worry about keeping track of the back story -- the details of the characters' personal lives, as you do on ''N.Y.P.D. Blue,'' say -- because there is none. Even longtime viewers of the show know next to nothing about the characters, except that Lennie Briscoe (the Jerry Orbach character) used to be an alcoholic, and that's practically obligatory on a cop show these days.

This kind of stunted character development means no star turns -- no arialike speeches -- for either the actors or the writers, and there are lots of both who either can't or don't want to work this way. ''On other shows, I used to riff on character stuff for five or six pages,'' Chernuchin says. ''You can't do that here. You have to dish out the character stuff in an eye-dropper. Jerry Orbach is always saying, 'Why can't you write a scene where my partner dies in my arms, so I can get an Emmy?' Sorry, it's never going to happen.''

There are some famously fanatic viewers of ''Law and Order,'' but in my experience the show tends to inspire less a passionate following than a contented one. It's a known, reliable quantity, and it's there all the time, whenever you feel like watching something. It offers many of the satisfactions, in fact, of certain kinds of genre literature -- mysteries and romances and the like. It's predictable, satisfying and not too taxing. It will never thrill you, the way the great stuff does, but rarely will it disappoint you. All this, you suspect, is exactly as Dick Wolf would wish. It's the reruns, stupid.

Wolf is fairly uncomprehending, in fact, when it comes to the recent trend toward shows with long narrative arcs -- critically acclaimed cable shows like ''The Wire,'' ''The Sopranos,'' ''Six Feet Under'' and even such network staples as ''E.R.'' and ''N.Y.P.D. Blue,'' which are the equivalent of old-fashioned serial novels and derive much of their interest and excitement from propelling the viewer forward from one episode to the next, and where the hourlong plots are just an excuse for delving deeper into the characters' lives.

The business model makes no sense to Wolf, because such shows typically do poorly in syndication. ''It's great the first time,'' he says, ''but would you stay home five nights in a row to watch it again?''
And he adds, ''Name the single most worthless great hour show ever done.'' He pauses. '''Wiseguy,' a great show with six-episode arcs. You can't give it away. You're supposed to watch an entire week and then the following Monday? It's hopeless. What were the five highest-rated hour shows all summer? 'Law and Order' and 'C.S.I.' I don't think there was another drama in the Top 10 all summer. 'E.R.' does nothing -- it's an embarrassment.''
''Extend the brand'' is one of those tiresome business slogans that turn up on PowerPoint presentations all the time, but Wolf has actually made it work.

Except for a few stylistic traits, ''S.V.U.'' and ''Criminal Intent'' bear only a passing resemblance to the parent show (the former is mainly concerned with sex crimes; the latter features Vincent D'Onofrio in a kind of Columbo role), and yet the ''Law and Order'' prefix has clearly been crucial to their success. ''I learned about this 33 years ago, when I was working at Procter & Gamble,'' Wolf says. ''It's not accidental that there are whatever it is, seven different brands of Crest toothpaste. The reason they keep calling it Crest is that there is a built-in advantage to a brand that's well known.'' The slow, inexorable spread of Crest from one medicine cabinet to the next may make it difficult, of course, for a new or different kind of toothpaste to find shelf space, but that's not Dick Wolf's problem.

Over on ABC, he is already incubating another breeder, ''L.A. Dragnet,'' a remake of the old Joe Friday series. The show has yet to become a hit, but as far as Wolf is concerned, it's already ''prebranded.'' ''If 'Dragnet' survives and flourishes,'' he says, ''it's not nuclear physics that the next show is 'Dragnet-colon-something.'''

Charles McGrath is the editor of The New York Times Book Review.

[trisha]

A nice article, Sirenna, thanks for sharing. Need I say again that I heart Dick Wolf?

"It's the writing, stupid!"

[jaquetta]

Yes, thanks for sharing the article! There's a little more backstory than he seems to think, but not by much.

[Sirenna]

You're welcome, ladies. I just wish there was more directly related criminal intent stuff available.