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Jul. 21st, 2011 01:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionWe realized after watching Law and Order season 8, where people kept referring to events and characters we'd never heard of, that we must have missed 7, so now we're watching that one. The one we watched last night, guest starring Burt Young of Chinatown, was quite good compared to any of the others we've seen these last weeks. Since it's been a couple years since we watched this show it had been hard to compare seasons in terms of writing, but the Young episode contained, like, ambiguous elements, which made me dimly remember that that was one of the strong points of Law and Order at its best, its permitting ambiguities, however controlled. Whereas most of what we'd been watching had felt like mere bad television, or anyway little better. And I think the problem is Benjamin Bratt.
He's a pretty weak presence compared to Noth or Martin, his predecessor and follow-up, but that's not really it - the problem is that he's showcased: for 'sexiness' ad nauseam, but also his personal life comes in, a violation of order and law. Law and Order is a show that more than most is based on in-house rules, which make it easy to parody but also help act as a firewall against the stupid-making forces of television. For murder episodes the body is discovered by random people, then the two cop leads arrive and establish what seems to have happened, then the credits roll, then we jump from location to location as leads are followed up, evidence analyzed, suspects are interrogated and once somebody's charged it switches to the lawyers and how they put together their case. The show is fine with repeating itself, fine with all kinds of cliches, but for the most part you know so much of where you are in the process at any point that you don't mind novelty even if you're an idiot - whatever rhythms of met expectation you need as a television zombie get satisfied by the in-house how, leaving the what free to be interesting. And the characters play a huge part in this by being almost exclusively their jobs, thus freeing time up for what isn't them - their personalities matter, yes, but mostly for presenting different styles of competence, different varieties of mistakes. A plausible enough variation of both to keep the handling of murder new.
It's inevitable with rules that strict that breaking them will start to get tempting, will tingle the spines of both writers and viewers when allowed to happen. Mostly because of cast turnover, a tradition got established where at the very end of each season the protagonists would become involved in murders personally, so as to kill them off or provide them with other reasons for leaving. These bled into midseason - I guess sweeps week? - at some point, and by the Bratt years I'm assuming there was new leadership in NBC programming because the writing starts to behave like it's being leaned on 1. to help us find out who these people are, 2. to make it sexier, with 2. coloring 1. So in the Bratt years everyone gets their own special thing - the lieutenant sues the department, the new assistant to McCoy has issues with her ex-husband, Briscoe's daughter has drug problems and Benjamin Bratt does a whole mess of crap, usually sleeveless. Julie points out that the 'sex it up' order is just funny because the writers interpret it in various ways, as though confused about what's expected of them: the crimes become more sex-based, people start being randomly crass, we start to see stains on beds, and no one stops talking about how sexy Bratt and the Carey Lowell, the Claire replacement Julie calls Claire II, both are. Flirtation between cops and the various people they interview achieves surrealistic regularity - for some reason they decide to have all women over sixty throw themselves at Orbach.
It is very silly, and whether because they were too busy meeting these new requirements or were drinking themselves to death in despair, the writers weren't often able to reconcile the new practices with decent work. The worst of it is the show became more popular. I know it mostly through the DVDs, and since they released the c. 2004 season experimentally early on I know things bounce back from the Bratt low. This despite the fascinating trainwreck Elizabeth Rohm, who consistently gives line readings so awful you pause to try to reconstruct what she was thinking. It's a pretty famous miscasting - she was right, if annoying, in season one of Angel when that show was dabbling with heavy-breathing Red Shoe Diaries type material, which she swims in natively. I dimly recall television passing through a kind of curtain in the late '90s, a period of which the Bratt stuff probably comes near the start of, after which pretty much everyone has to be attractive, heavily made up, perfectly coiffed and lit with aquarium lighting. It got to the point where even in Breaking Bad, which is clearly trying to be gritty, even ugly, merely gorgeous rather than drop-dead gorgeous actors are hired when the show wants to present someone realistically loserly. In these two seasons makeup is still applied mostly to get faces lit evenly: the show wants people to have bumpy, craggy features.
Maybe I remember the 2004 one as better than it was, but I don't remember villains hissing like Satan or any of these other cliches - maybe a writing threshold was passed along with the prettiness one. At any rate greater demands on the audience were made later, maybe because of HBO raising the bar - McCoy loses almost half his cases, for one thing, an immeasurable aid to suspense. And he's more often wrong. I can't remember seasons 1-6 of the show as vividly, probably because that late one was my first real exposure, but I think they must have been better than 7 & 8 or we wouldn't have bothered with them. Season 1 possibly excepted, as the show was very silly before it got on its feet. E.g they repeated the plot twist of having someone be put into a coma at the beginning, then die at some dramatic moment so the DA can up the charge to murder, at least five times in first ten episodes. And everyone constantly used the phrase 'screw the pooch.' They still seem to use it about once a season, an auto-homage.
He's a pretty weak presence compared to Noth or Martin, his predecessor and follow-up, but that's not really it - the problem is that he's showcased: for 'sexiness' ad nauseam, but also his personal life comes in, a violation of order and law. Law and Order is a show that more than most is based on in-house rules, which make it easy to parody but also help act as a firewall against the stupid-making forces of television. For murder episodes the body is discovered by random people, then the two cop leads arrive and establish what seems to have happened, then the credits roll, then we jump from location to location as leads are followed up, evidence analyzed, suspects are interrogated and once somebody's charged it switches to the lawyers and how they put together their case. The show is fine with repeating itself, fine with all kinds of cliches, but for the most part you know so much of where you are in the process at any point that you don't mind novelty even if you're an idiot - whatever rhythms of met expectation you need as a television zombie get satisfied by the in-house how, leaving the what free to be interesting. And the characters play a huge part in this by being almost exclusively their jobs, thus freeing time up for what isn't them - their personalities matter, yes, but mostly for presenting different styles of competence, different varieties of mistakes. A plausible enough variation of both to keep the handling of murder new.
It's inevitable with rules that strict that breaking them will start to get tempting, will tingle the spines of both writers and viewers when allowed to happen. Mostly because of cast turnover, a tradition got established where at the very end of each season the protagonists would become involved in murders personally, so as to kill them off or provide them with other reasons for leaving. These bled into midseason - I guess sweeps week? - at some point, and by the Bratt years I'm assuming there was new leadership in NBC programming because the writing starts to behave like it's being leaned on 1. to help us find out who these people are, 2. to make it sexier, with 2. coloring 1. So in the Bratt years everyone gets their own special thing - the lieutenant sues the department, the new assistant to McCoy has issues with her ex-husband, Briscoe's daughter has drug problems and Benjamin Bratt does a whole mess of crap, usually sleeveless. Julie points out that the 'sex it up' order is just funny because the writers interpret it in various ways, as though confused about what's expected of them: the crimes become more sex-based, people start being randomly crass, we start to see stains on beds, and no one stops talking about how sexy Bratt and the Carey Lowell, the Claire replacement Julie calls Claire II, both are. Flirtation between cops and the various people they interview achieves surrealistic regularity - for some reason they decide to have all women over sixty throw themselves at Orbach.
It is very silly, and whether because they were too busy meeting these new requirements or were drinking themselves to death in despair, the writers weren't often able to reconcile the new practices with decent work. The worst of it is the show became more popular. I know it mostly through the DVDs, and since they released the c. 2004 season experimentally early on I know things bounce back from the Bratt low. This despite the fascinating trainwreck Elizabeth Rohm, who consistently gives line readings so awful you pause to try to reconstruct what she was thinking. It's a pretty famous miscasting - she was right, if annoying, in season one of Angel when that show was dabbling with heavy-breathing Red Shoe Diaries type material, which she swims in natively. I dimly recall television passing through a kind of curtain in the late '90s, a period of which the Bratt stuff probably comes near the start of, after which pretty much everyone has to be attractive, heavily made up, perfectly coiffed and lit with aquarium lighting. It got to the point where even in Breaking Bad, which is clearly trying to be gritty, even ugly, merely gorgeous rather than drop-dead gorgeous actors are hired when the show wants to present someone realistically loserly. In these two seasons makeup is still applied mostly to get faces lit evenly: the show wants people to have bumpy, craggy features.
Maybe I remember the 2004 one as better than it was, but I don't remember villains hissing like Satan or any of these other cliches - maybe a writing threshold was passed along with the prettiness one. At any rate greater demands on the audience were made later, maybe because of HBO raising the bar - McCoy loses almost half his cases, for one thing, an immeasurable aid to suspense. And he's more often wrong. I can't remember seasons 1-6 of the show as vividly, probably because that late one was my first real exposure, but I think they must have been better than 7 & 8 or we wouldn't have bothered with them. Season 1 possibly excepted, as the show was very silly before it got on its feet. E.g they repeated the plot twist of having someone be put into a coma at the beginning, then die at some dramatic moment so the DA can up the charge to murder, at least five times in first ten episodes. And everyone constantly used the phrase 'screw the pooch.' They still seem to use it about once a season, an auto-homage.
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Date: 2011-07-22 10:32 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-22 04:41 pm (UTC)