I suppose that I am somewhat unusual in never having liked the lead characters of the crime drama Law and Order: Criminal Intent, nor thought the performances of lead performers Vincent D’Onofrio and Kathryn Erbe particularly appealing or praiseworthy. D’Onofrio, of course, was known for his excessively exaggerated performing style in his portrayal of the show’s lead character, Detective Bobby Goren, and in my opinion Kathryn Erbe did a good but unimpressive job of depicting an essentially unappealing and uninteresting character in lead detective Alex Eames over the course of the show’s ten seasons.

Both characters annoyed me in essence, I suspect, because they were such perfect specimens of a particularly common and grating type of contemporary American: the Priggish Urban Liberal-Progressive Busybody Knowitall Pseudointellectual Snob. And in doing so, the show conveyed a point of view firmly based on authoritarianism, exemplifying the contemporary worldview that the political writer Jonah Goldberg calls liberal fascism.

I imagine that the unappealing character type at the center of Law and Order: Criminal Intent hardly requires any further description for most readers, as it thoroughly infests current-day TV news and talk shows, newspaper columns, Slate and the Huffington Post and other fashionable politico-cultural websites, contemporary art shows, your neighborhood Starbucks, and other such locales made repellant by their presence.

Sunday night’s episode on the USA Network, the last in the series, had a story line typical of the show’s ten-season run. Several people fighting over profits from a highly popular website are the suspects in the murders of two of the parties in the legal dispute over ownership of the site. Once again, that is, the culprits are big-business bigwigs, which makes for more interesting settings than the usual domestic violence or street crimes that most murders result from, but it is of course ludicrously fanciful for a show that has been fairly realistic in its depiction of police procedures (and which the producers seemed to take a good deal of pride in). In that way Law and Order: Criminal Intent was a thoroughly conventional example of the mystery-crime genre.

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A sports film that is almost entirely about losers?!

About that oft forgotten and abandoned piece of real estate called Indiana?!

It’s shot in a landscape-portrait, documentary style that memorializes a smaller than small town high school, basketball team?!

A movie suspended in a repeatedly evangelical universe that counts prayer as the major source of miracles?!

That set of profoundly un-Hollywood ideas had me thanking God for them as I watched ‘Hoosiers’ today.

Hadn’t I seen it before?

Well, portions of it.

That, however, was when I was merely on my way to one of the great fast-tracks for losers, full-blown alcoholism.

At that time, I was in too much of a hurry to contemplate even the possibility of being a loser. (more…)

Earlier this week, Rene Balcer, the Executive Producer of “Law and Order,” had some obnoxious and demeaning things to say about one of the show’s former stars, Sen. Fred Thompson:

I wasn’t on the show when he was on the show.  In fact, when they brought me back on the show I said I’m not coming back as long as that guy is on the show.  I didn’t think much of his acting or the character.

Never mind the fact that a simple IMDB search shows that Balcer and Sen. Thompson share credit on a handful of “Law and Order” episodes, facts like this get in the way of a good, bitchy attack like that.

Sen. Thompson, for his part, has always maintained a level of discretion whenever discussing any behind-the-scenes conflicts with the notoriously left-leaning creative staff.  He has never referred to any individuals by name and only that “one writer in particular” was always butting heads with him over storylines and bias injected into the show.  But, now that Balcer has shown himself to be so classless and obnoxious, Thompson confirmed with me that indeed, Balcer was the writer.

“He was the guy who I busted on several different occasions and made him change his script” he told me during our one-on-one interview this week in Los Angeles.  “So, I think it’s fair to say he’s not very happy.” (more…)

If cable is the place where the best shows get made, Damages is the proof. It’s third season started with a bang and continues to surprise its viewers with tightly written, clever stories acted by some of the best talent out there.

Glenn Close stars as Patty Hewes, a high-powered trial lawyer who takes on big corporations for massive damages. For the first couple seasons you couldn’t tell if she was a villain or a hero. Patty’s a legal shark and a world class poker player without the cards. Her manipulations and schemes are Machiavellian to the extreme, which is why Patty is at the top of her game.

In season one she hires Ellen Parsons (Rose Byrne), a young attorney out to make a name for herself by working with a top law firm. Her relationship with Patty is reminiscent at first of the John Grisham classic The Firm. What seems like a plum job soon becomes dangerous and you can’t tell if Patty’s out to murder her or it’s one of the defendants they’re trying to bring down.

Patty’s loyal lieutenant is Tom Shayes (Tate Donovan). Shayes gets things done for Patty but even he finds tackling the biggest game in town can put your life at risk. (more…)

I met Sidney Poitier for the first time in the summer of 1994. He was starring in the television film, Children of the Dust. I played a supporting role in that project, a character who just happened to be married to Sidney’s co-star, Farrah Fawcett.

As some say, there are times when acting beats working for a living.

In company like that, filming in the foothills of Alberta and staying at one of the best hotels in Canada, Calgary’s Palliser, it could only have gotten better if I’d been on my honeymoon.

In spite of the fact that I had the extreme pleasure of having a bedroom scene with Farrah Fawcett as my wife in the film, Ms. Fawcett’s character in Children of the Dust, though a bit “round the bend” … like some North American, pioneer Ophelia … had the profoundly healthy instinct of falling in love with Sidney Poitier.

Who could blame anybody for falling in love with Sidney Poitier?!

At that time in my life, however, I was not in love but seriously in trouble with a lot of things, mainly New York City itself … and I was seriously considering my eventual move to Canada. (more…)

Despite the darkening clouds of increasingly Marxist/Islamic sympathies in the White House (“This is no longer just a Christian nation …”, said the President) and regardless of the Obama Nation’s success at “fundamentally transforming the United States of America” into the Obama Nation … Americans are still celebrating both Christmas and Hanukkah.

Such a time of profoundly important Judeo-Christian sacredness, with our pride in its significance increasingly muzzled by “Progressively political correctness”, should and, I believe, will be honored more deeply because of the inferential shame our New World Order leadership would like to immerse it in.

Apparently, and for the entire history of America, its Judeo-Christian roots have been, in the eyes of Progressives, one of our nation’s incessant problems, and the main reason the United States has found it impossible to join the … uh … “community of nations”.

“Is this another diatribe, another imbecilic slap at the United Nations, Mr. Moriarty?!”

Yes … among other shots at the Progressive certainty over the apparently incontestable New World Order. (more…)

Dick Wolf has fallen from the heights as a writer on “Hill Street Blues,” a supervising producer of “Miami Vice” and the creator/producer of the once-excellent “Law and Order” trilogy.  The flagship of the “Law and Order” series is “Law and Order,” the two other shows being “SVU” (Special Victims Unit) and “CI”(Criminal Intent). Perhaps 20 years is too long for any series, but “Law and Order” has devolved into the cheapest form of left-wing paranoid delusion. It is so obvious, it gives left-wing propaganda a bad name. Maybe Karl Rove planted a mole.  I now watch it for its comedic satirical value, as one would watch “Saturday Night Live.”

Dick Wolf

The last episode was “Fed.” It’s a story about an ACORN-like community organizing group called “Rights Alliance.” The founder of the Rights Alliance has a conservative infiltrator murdered to “cover up a cover-up.” The cover up is an affair the founder was having with one of its members. The “cover up of the cover-up” was the money being paid by the founder to his mistress’s husband to keep the affair quiet. The right-wing infiltrator was murdered because he had been secretly video taping a sting he was arranging unrelated to the affair–clearly meant to be reminiscent of the O’Keefe/Giles real life ACORN investigation. The founder feared this tape would open the organization up to scrutiny, thus exposing his affair and the subsequent monetary extortion to his girlfriend’s husband. We are not supposed to be shedding too many tears for our murder victim, given he was “tricking a few dumb kids in an ambush video.” (more…)

Well, I think I’ve been fairly calm and forgiving of Law and Order for about fifteen years. Living outside of the U.S. has certainly helped in more ways than one. Out of sight, out of mind. Law and Order has, for years, been just a press of the remote away from non-existence.

However, recent events have Law and Order just begging for my reassessment. I hardly expected my old television series to be the clown act that leads the American viewing audience into an increasingly predictable pile of hard left propaganda.

Why?

Dick Wolf

Dick Wolf is basically a follower of usually high-level talents such as Joe Stern, Robert Nathan and Ed Sherin.

Those men, I believe, are no longer regulars on Law and Order.

The guy who apparently wears the pants in that family is now Rene Balcer.

That’s clearly the hypnotist in whose deep pink trance Dick Wolf is irretrievably drowning. (more…)

Perchance, just a few days after posting this piece about “Law & Order’s” jumping of the shark or nuking of the fridge — whatever the term is now — I came across the first five seasons of this once great television drama on DVD  for a mere ten bucks each at – cover your eyes lefties – Walmart. Not having seen a single episode since their first run in the early nineties, there was no way to know how well it would hold up. But I bit the bullet, took a chance and for the next six weeks every free moment was devoted to devouring a hundred-plus episodes that told the story of the police who investigate crime; and the district attorneys who prosecute the offenders.

dun DUN

Those early seasons aren’t as good as I remember, they’re better.  Not every episode’s a home run, the first dozen or so struggle in search of the tone and pace that will eventually define the series, but afterwards nothing but a few drop below a standing triple — easily better than 99% of movies produced this decade. 

Not to take anything away from the excellent work done by the rest of the cast, but the heart and soul of those first four seasons, what elevates the series into something truly unique and special, is Golden Globe and Emmy Award winner Michael Moriarty’s outstanding portrayal of Executive A.D.A. Ben Stone — a brilliant and fascinating character whose moral center anchors the show. (more…)

NBC’s “Law and Order” is in its 20th season. The economy is weak, so they have devolved to converting White House talking points into weekly shows. Last week, “Doped” was a farcical equivalent of “Damien Thorn meets Karen Silkwood.” Pharmaceutical companies and Doctors are worse than drug cartels. The killers in the previous week’s episode on such cartels were more sympathetic than the health professionals. 

In the opening scene, a woman with 4 children is driving the wrong way down the West Side Highway (like the Diane Schuler Taconic Parkway horror this summer). Speaking on her cell phone erratically (no “hands free!”), the kids get concerned. She decides it is time to use nasal spray for her allergies, which had been spiked without her knowledge. Flash forward and viewers see two mangled vehicles resulting in seven deaths.  (more…)

Speaking truth to power was supposed to be heroic – like yelling at your parents over their lapses in recycling.

But then something funny happened: people started speaking truth to power to people who speak truth to power. And now the man who once inspired, starts to perspire. The king of cool begins to lose his. And the side that normally champions freedom of speech, is asking America to pipe down.

Check out our nation’s high school paper, USA Today, where House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer called the town hall protesters un-American. How odd that in a different context, with different protesters, these disruptions would be seen as brave.

But it’s not brave at all, according to the media. That’s because, for once, the media is not on the protesting side. Instead, the media is the “power” that’s being spoken to – and that confuses them. And so they mock. (more…)

Mormon church leaders are criticizing HBO for including a private, sacred ceremony in its show Big Love, the drama about a polygamous Mormon family in Utah. Apparently only church members “in good standing” are allowed to enter temples and either witness or take part in the rite called the “endowment ceremony.”

HBO, of course, apologized for offending Mormons but defended its use of the ceremony because its depiction is “critical” to the show’s story line. Ah, the quintessential non-apology apology, used frequently by politicians: We’re sorry if we offended anyone, but we’re not going to do anything that will actually rectify the situation. Be sure to tune in, though, and boost our ratings! (more…)

The first episode of “Law & Order” UK has just ended on British television. Spreading the franchise across the pond does have difficulties because of the differing legal systems but it still stays close to the setting and pacing of the US original.

Unfortunately, they have not escaped the predictability of the US show when it comes to the identity of the killer. The moment we saw the dead black child and later met his white businesswoman landlord it was fairly clear where the “mystery” was headed. (more…)