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Some would argue that I'm useless WITH anything with strings, keys..
Ahem. "Law And Order", as everyone knows, is a staple of modern american culture. Like a crime comedia dell arte, the characters -- archetypes without homes, personal lives, refrigerators, or weekends -- doggedly weave their way through the flawed alleyways of the american justice system. With a gritty New York sensibility, they get the job done as best they can. Half an hour for the cops, half an hour for the lawyers. We zip in and zip out. Right?
Nowadays, not so much. I'll admit, the fact that my dad starred on the show for 12-odd years makes me a little biased. I'll also say that hanging around the set of a TV show has a way of taking some of the magic out of it. Once you've seen with your own eyes that the sunlight streaming into Jack McCoy's office is in fact a big old 10k soundstage lamp, a hole that can never close gets poked in the illusion. But for me, the kicker was R. Hudson...
I don't know if it's still there, but back when I was visiting my dad at the studios there was a set where they did all of the morgue scenes. Like every functional morgue, there was a wall of steel, clamp-secured doors, behind which were presumably sliding deep-freeze trays where bodies would be kept. One day, a crew member helped me to discover that there no sliding trays behind a majority of those doors. It was mostly a flat wall of doors. And, behind one door of a fictional corpse labeled "R. Hudson" was a window....it had a clear, unobstructed view of the Hudson River.
I now knew where the magician kept the rabbit. The show, after that moment, even at its best, was harder for me to take seriously.
Of course, the fact that I had a bit-part on a spinoff and was canned after a season is liable to make me just a hair more biased. But I don't think it's jilted shit-slinging to say that "Law And Order" really doesn't pack the punch that it used to. Why? Here's one theory of mine:
The prosecutors got TOO HOT!!
This wasn't always the case. Jill Hennessy was a perfect ADA. Now, I'm not saying for one moment that she isn't hot. I mean, my god! Have you seen her?? She's a knockout. But she was a good enough actress to get into the role she played. I was on a grand jury for 4 weeks. I know what your average ADA looks like. They aren't glamorous. They DON'T have perfect make-up. They don't walk with the poise of a greek statue (or a Czech runway model). They slouch, they don't sleep, they have too many cases. They're NORMAL. And that's why Jill was so good. Even though she's a very attractive woman in real life, she slipped on the glasses, hunched over her paperwork and she was BELIEVABLE. She WAS that harried, state-employed worker bee, unglamorously toiling in the name of justice. And she radiated a lawyerly sense of intellect, despite being cute.
Cary Lowell was much too glamorous, but on balance she had a cool, reptilian way about her that just managed to hold the line between the real and the fantastical.
It was Angie Harmon who struck the death blow. At least in the realm of logic. A decent actress, certainly, but NO ada was EVER that hot. And, as nice a gal as she was, Liz Rohm was also just too hot to be an ada.
I began to wonder if Dick Wolf was starting to go a little booty-crazy -- hiring girls he thought were cute, and letting logic be damned.
Dick's always been a type-A, Iron-Balls McGinty sort of guy. It's his-way-or-the highway, and god bless him. To his credit, He did dream up a great idea which has given him enormous wealth and success, which he certainly deserves. But perhaps time hasn't been kind to his sense of judgement. Maybe the show has become almost like porn to him. "Mmm....MUST hire the hottie! MUST!!!!"
This would by no means be the first time in human history that hiring decisions were based on such criteria. On one level I can hardly blame him, and who's to say that if I were in the same position, I wouldn't end up doing the same thing?
I'm probably wrong. For balance, HE probably thinks I'm a talentless schmuck who had NO business on his set. He'd have probably been right, at the time (12 years ago?). I was just getting sober, I couldn't tell my ass from a plate of fries. I was in over my head, though I tried my best with what I had -- YOU try saying the line, "Designer Vaginas: Is this health care?"
Which brings me to this little, SVU-related detour..
One time my character got a big speech which solved a case. This stunned me. I'm pretty sure Ted Kotcheff thought I barely spoke english, but someone had taken leave of their senses and gave me a shot. It was a long speech -- a solid page --It was almost all facts: "At 1030PM so-and-so signed out. At 1105PM.." etc. Now, I'd seen some messing around on that set. Takes being blown, hot-dogging, etc. But I was being thrown this bone, and I wasn't going to fuck around. I may not BE Jerry Orbach, damn it, but I'd seen his work ethic. To NOT try as hard as I could would have meant more than a blown take. It would have meant personal disgrace on the genetic level.
I was going to nail the shit out of it, or die trying.
I got that son-of-a-bitch in ONE TAKE (we did a second as a safety). And two weeks later, I was canned. Go figure.
Nepotism. Yes, it happens. I felt unprepared, underqualified, and just a LITTLE pressure about the fact that my old man was such a badass in the same field. A lot of people there were very nice to me, but I still felt "tolerated". I felt like a bad joke in a suit and tie. The unspoken undercurrent of "Huh. Wonder how he got THIS job?" was something that felt pretty shitty...
But you know what? I needed the bread! Plain and simple. That one season of bit-part work helped me through a very tough year, during which I'd gained a foothold in the very tight voiceover business. In the end, I was actually glad I was "not asked back" to SVU. I mean, if you PLAY the guy who gets the coffee, you FEEL like the guy who gets the coffee. I now do quite well in voiceovers. Most of you haven't SEEN me, but I know a lot of you have heard me. And every time you do, I get a few bucks. I may never be a star like my father was, but I'm cool with that. I'm not missing any meals.
I will say nothing else about SVU, except this: Richard Belzer is, without question, the luckiest man in show business.
Anyway, back to the main event. I have another theory on the mothership's decline: the whole "ripped from the headlines" thing..or, as I prefer, "ripped OFF from the headlines".
If something is well-told in the realm of fact and not as well-told in the realm of fiction, why watch it? We've already SEEN it, and have already been saturated by it. Some of the story choices seemed to be almost verbatim from the news, like a Led Zeppelin sample in a hip-hop tune. I'll apply my same question to this idiom as I do to that one -- it's all very clever, but can't you dream up anything on your own?? Does all of our cultural life have to be sampling? Remake? De-collage?
The "ripped from the headlines" thing worked a lot better a decade and a half ago. The news cycle was slower. The internet was still dial-up. But now, when something happens in the news, it gets beaten to death within three days. By the time the "Law and Order" take on it makes it to the screen some 8 to 16 weeks later, even WITH the now compulsory "twist", who cares? We've already been inundated with so much other DATA in the interim that we need REMINDING. In the world of Twitter, this doesn't really fly. "What was that again? Oh, yeah.."
Look. They put a lot of actors to work in my home town, New York, and that's great. Jeremy Sisto is a brilliant actor. Seeing him week after week as the crazed brother on "Six Feet Under" will always stay with me. He's really something. They still have Sam Waterston, who's wonderful. And Linus Roache, another fantastic actor. It's just that when something still doesn't work despite all of these good elements, you have to start wondering..
As for the neighboring factions, "Criminal Intent" was always interesting, and has had a good run. I definitely think that Vincent Dinofrio, whatever people may say about him, is one hell of an actor, and can carry any show. Also, breaking from "the mothership" in terms of both character and point of view, has been refreshing.
L & O -- you've had an unprecedented run. But it's time to hang up your gun and go fishing in Florida.
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