Learning from Law and Order: TV Longevity
Television these days is getting slightly more complicated than it used to, which to me is generally a good thing. By giving shows a slew of interesting characters and exciting new storylines with halfway decent writers, the television execs have finally started to drift from the reality television and brainless sitcom plague of the 90s and early 21st century. It will never be "good" by any means, but at least it occasionally tries.
Which is why a show like Law and Order is so intriguing - with its familiar plotlines, static characters, and crimes ripped from the headlines. Law and Order is a demonstration of what so many shows do wrong these days, on both sides of the spectrum. Reality television is over saturating and ridiculous and character dramas become melodramatic and uninteresting after a couple of seasons. Law and Order lasted because it's all about the crime.
I love Law and Order. Everyone loves Law and Order. They have to. Otherwise, why would it be on every channel for at least 6 of the 24 program hours each day? You cannot flip through your channel guide without running into Law and Order at least once. Last week, or maybe last month (more likely, it was both), TNT aired a 24 hour Law and Order marathon. I watched a couple of episodes, went to bed, woke up and my roommate was still watching it.
I retreated to my room for a few hours to work and came back out....and it was still on. And yet I sat and watched it each time. And by the grace of more than two dozen seasons and 500 episodes between all three shows, you're going to stand a decent chance of catching a new one fairly often. New episodes aside though, Law and Order is the same show with different crimes. Why is it so compelling?
First off, they always take stuff from the news. Almost every episode is based on something that happened in the world and thus people are automatically invested. They throw in a couple of extra murders, and now we're gossip mongers...."ooh, what if?"
Then they use the same formula for the show every time. You might think this would kill the suspense. But no, it's a trick. It's really their way of getting you to think that the show is predictable, that you can tag along with the detectives and help them out. For you to yell at the defense attorney, "Bail?! Your client doesn't deserve no stinking bail!" in one of the least important but always present scenes in the show.
It's Law and Order being very orderly and yet opening itself up to break rules and surprise everyone when it does. Most of all, it makes every episode about the crime. It's not about the detectives, or the lawyers, the writers, or the director of the show. You could train a monkey to direct an episode of Law and Order. No, it's about the crime and the solving of that crime.
If you go back to the pulp, crime mysteries of the 20s and on, that's all you get. The literary tradition that grew from those simple slim volumes is intriguing to say the least, but the same formula worked for decades and people would read all 33 books written by a pulp writer because they knew that this particular pulp writer did his job very well. Law and Order's writers are not very different from those early 20th century scions of a new sort of popular fiction. They take stories that make people feel involved, throw in a couple of twists and turns and a familiar detective and let the crime play out.
When the show goes so far as to stray from the formula, people are shocked. It doesn't happen very often, which gives the network something monumental to work with. If they announce ever five minutes in promos that the show will be a bit different for an episode, more people will watch right? Well, not so much anymore apparently. The plague of syndication has seeped its way into the collective Law and Order faithful and when a new episode airs, no one really cares anymore. They're on all the time and there is little to no difference between episodes, save the guest stars and crime, so why go out of our ways to watch a Friday night crime drama that will be on USA next week?
Law and Order is a staple of any good couch potato, TV dwelling 20-something. Even if it only lasts another year or so, I imagine I'll spend the next ten years seeing episodes I hadn't seen before on reruns. Which returns me to my original point. Television doesn't need to be different or exciting to be engaging. It just needs to be entertaining. If I find a formula that works and makes me feel better about my hours on the couch, why change it? And NBC's stuck with that credo for almost two decades now. Here's to a few more years.
