Can NBC's Law & Order shows be saved?

[TMC]

https://www.avclub.com/can-the-law-a...ved-1851189771

The franchise's three series, which kicked off new seasons last week, each have glaring problems.

By Michael Martin
Published Yesterday

As an NBC programmer, you don’t renew the three Law & Order shows to worry about them; you expect Dick Wolf and his army of showrunners to keep the melodrama flowing in a pleasingly pressurized stream. (The network’s Chicago dramas, particularly Fire, do this incredibly well, with formulas that are so tight that cast members are basically interchangeable. Knock an eight-season veteran or two off Fire’s heavy-breathing roster, and viewers hardly notice.)

Unfortunately, it’s time somebody rang an alarm. Last season, all three Law & Order shows became the low-key delinquents of NBC’s primetime schedule, suffering from a lack of basic guardianship. Comprising one full evening and a giant chunk of the network’s scripted programming, Law & Order, SVU, and Organized Crime—which kicked off their new seasons last week—are all, to varying degrees, flailing in basic matters of character and storytelling. The saga has been going on for so long (Organized Crime has been foundering for three full years) that it’s hard not to wonder when the ax will fall on the whole blighted neighborhood.

So, in that spirit, we present a look at the three shows that comprise NBC’s “Law & Order Thursday” and dig into where they’ve been and where they need to go.

Law & Order

The reboot of Law & Order, now in season three, has underperformed from episode one. The biggest issue is the writing, which has ranged from weak to atrocious. Original recipe Law & Order never had a reputation for subtlety—in the ’90s, characters basically recited USA Today headlines back and forth—but the reboot has somehow managed to forge bigger hammers for application to our craniums. The show experimented with the wrong things (originally dropping the classic everyday-New-Yorker-discovers-corpse cold open, which is like reviving Dragnet without anyone referring to facts) and showed no ambition to elevate the cultural conversation. Provocative and timely hints of racial tension between original reboot detectives Anthony Anderson and Jeffrey Donovan were clumsily handled and quickly dropped.

Direction is also a problem: A churning cast of talented actors are giving oddly constipated performances. As captain, The Practice veteran Camryn Manheim seems barely engaged, as did returning L&O vet Anderson, who left after season one. No one bothered to tell Donovan that his NYC patois sounded more like Boston, and Hugh Dancy—so effective as the moral center of Hannibal—comes off oddly lightweight here, seemingly concentrating more on maintaining his American accent than finding a character. The sole bright spot has been Odelya Halevi as the Lebanese millennial ADA who doesn’t mind going insubordinate. Last season, her character drove the story that’s come closest to genuinely emotionally affecting, when she convinced an Arabic immigrant to turn informant and promised her protection, only to see ICE deport the woman and her young daughter.



The first episode of the new season revealed that Donovan is out, replaced by Veep veteran Reid Scott. This is a promising and curious decision: Scott has a natural, devious comic spark, and it could be a sign the show is trying to recapture a Lenny Briscoe-type seen-it-all wisecracker who’s less abrasive than Donovan. Yet in the season premiere, Scott’s character seems green, revealing his lack of experience after a shooting.

We need to see that someone on this show knows what they’re doing. The writers would be a good start. Unfortunately, the premiere showed little sign of improvement. It dealt with a Palestinian-sympathizing college professor who coerced a starry-eyed white student into murdering a Jewish college president. The thuddingly obvious script was garish slop, neither suspenseful nor thought-provoking. We had to resist switching over to the Australian Open. At least there, the moves were unpredictable.

[king of comedy]

No. It should be put to sleep.