The Writers Guild of America-East is trying to reason with the Occupy Wall Street crowd.

Let’s see how that works out.

The WGA hearts the scruffy protesters, but the guild’s Eastern branch got into a snit after OWS members shut down the filming of a new “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” episode dealing with the hard-left movement.

So the guild took paper to pen, as it is wont to do, and asked that future protesters refrain from such activity in the future.

“The demonstrators’ actions were as misguided and inappropriate as the City of New York’s response – revoking ‘Law & Order’’s permit for the shoot and directing the dismantling of its set,” the union wrote. “Presumably the protesters and police did not set out to achieve a common end but together they prevented the scene from being filmed and the story from being told.”

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The show known for its “ripped from the headlines” plots – like stories blasting the Tea Party movement – got a bit too close to reality this week.

NBC’s “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” was shooting a new episode in New York City when those Occupy Wall Streeters swarmed the set and halted production. The story in question involved OWS, and the TV set was littered with faux OWS signage.

That didn’t sit well with the real OWS types:

More than 100 Occupy Wall Street demonstrators stormed the set for “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” across from the Manhattan State Supreme Courthouse, shutting down production of an OWS-themed episode.

“We made it so that they could not exploit us and that’s awesome,” said Tammy Schapiro, 29, of Brooklyn.

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The Red/Blue state divide doesn’t just involve politics. Turns out television watching habits are sharply influenced by how people pull the voting levers on Election Day.

A new survey conducted by Entertainment Weekly shows that Democrats prefer sarcastic comedies and morally entangled heroes, while Republicans gravitate toward workplace scenarios.

Yet both the Left and the Right adore “Modern Family,” a pro-gay comedy with plenty of Emmy appeal. Sounds like a media meme takes a hit with that news.

There’s some unintentional comedy packed into the intriguing report, too. Consider this description of why “The View” fares better with liberals:

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The Chicago Black Sox might appear to be about as American a corruption as possible.

Highly recent testimony to Chicago’s immortally blackened reputation, however, is here.

God bless Ann Coulter!!

Furthermore, after having channel-hopped two of the United States’ greatest film noir classics – 1954’s “On The Waterfront” and 1957’s “Sweet Smell of Success” – there is something misleadingly American about the disease still infecting the United States.

Both Chicago’s Unionized Obama Nation and New York’s Bloomberg Occupation on Wall Street?

To coin a relevant movie title, they are “The Swampy Smell of a Waterfront Success!” A “triumph” born of the string-pulling games played by pecking orders in power. A Grand Revival of Political Malevolence in the American Bloodstream is erupting out of the possibly inner-party, Republican opposition to Herman Cain. It not only smells of racism, according to Donald Trump’s accusations, but also of a political desperation that will eventually solidify Cain’s integrity and endurance.

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An old TV show called “Perry Mason” set the tone.  A taut three-act play which culminated each week with justice prevailing as the real guilty party to a crime (invariably murder), confessed tearfully on the stand during an incisive cross-exam by the intrepid Raymond Burr.  Grim, post-trial quips, cue that stirring theme, and the public can rest easy as the scales of Justice are once again set right on their gimbals.

Fast forward to today, with such shows dominating the TV viewing audience.  “CSI” (and its many incarnations), “Law & Order” (and its many incarnations), and a myriad of homicide and courtroom dramas have conditioned us all to a few extremely misleading and dangerous mandates regarding the quest for justice.   There is an ever-growing and alarming trend in this society.  With such an increase in daily TV viewing, coupled with more and more reality-TV afoot…it is becoming more and more difficult for people to discern reality from fiction.

Thanks to television, we now have the following rules for court justice:

1)    As in a TV drama, the first and most obvious suspect NEVER is ultimately the guilty party.

2)    It’s always the one you least suspect.

3)    Police, with their erroneous and suspicious motivations, are never on target with their investigation. (more…)

“Objection, your honor.” - Jack McCoy

Law & Order devotees have subconsciously felt this moment coming for some time, but now that the axe has finally fallen, many of us are grappling with television-induced heartache.

NBC confirmed Friday that it had canceled the original “Law & Order,” bringing an end to a 20-year-old television drama that jump-started an era of television production in New York City.

“Law & Order” was on the verge of becoming the longest-running drama in prime-time television history, surpassing “Gunsmoke.” But it appears that the “Law & Order” executive producer, Dick Wolf, has settled for a tie. The final episode of the series will be shown on May 24, NBC confirmed in a news release Friday.

As I ponder the unwelcome reality that one of my favorite shows is, well, done-done,  I’m struggling to get past the unsatisfying fact that one of television’s longest running programs was unceremoniously dropped–with neither fanfare nor closure.   As the process shook out, the final episode ended up being shot before NBC decided to pull the plug.  The end result: What was initially written and produced as a season finale (which was excellent, especially S. Epatha Merkerson’s moving performance and Sam Waterson’s epic rant) became the de facto series finale.  Law & Order’s cast, crew, and fans deserve better. (more…)

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I’ve noticed a lot of my brothers and sisters on the right are up in arms at Law & Order: SVU after last week’s episode. I did not see the whole episode in question but did see a clip where a character played by John Larroquette mentions three well know conservative talk show hosts and calls them a cancer on the land.

Before I get rolling, in the spirit of full disclosure I will admit to being a Law & Order junkie. My DVR is full of my favorite Law & Order: Criminal Intent episodes, which is by far the strongest of the three series. I will also admit that in my mind Law & Order: SVU is to the Law & Order brand what Deep Space Nine was to the Star Trek brand. It is a weak cousin that may have been spreading the brand a little too thin. (more…)

[Editor's Note: This is a small portion of a comprehensive interview that  originally appeared in the Irish Examiner on Monday, November 24th. You can read the full piece here.] 

Recently I was sent an email complaining about the season premier of the TV Show, “Law & Order.” My correspondent asked what I thought about the plot in which the local Manhattan district attorney Jack McCoy prosecuted a former Justice Department lawyer for “depraved indifference murder” following the lawyer’s memo on the techniques which could be used on terrorists. An astonished “Executive Assistant DA Michael Cutter says, “Jack, you want to prosecute a member of the Bush administration for assaulting suspected terrorists?” To which, a cocksure “McCoy” declares: “The word is torturing. And, yes, it’s about time somebody did.”

The increasingly leftwing comments injected into the plots of this once fine show had turned me off many seasons ago and I answered my reader, “I haven’t watched that show much since they replaced Michael Moriarty as the lead in 1994.

Mr. Moriarty has always been one of my favorite actors and given that he is an Irish American, I thought he’d be the perfect lead off to a series of interviews with notable Americans of Irish ancestry. I was thrilled to be able to connect with Mr. Moriarty, who now lives in Canada, and he graciously agreed to this Q&A interview. (more…)

NBC’s venerable crime procedural, “Law & Order,” has endured a fair amount of deserved criticism around here lately.  Big Hollywood’s thoughtful critiques of the show’s leftward slide and irksome predictability are, sadly, valid.  Like many L&O fans, I’ve been forced to admit that recent seasons have been quite disappointing.   The word “cancellation” has cropped up in my mind more than once.

That being said, this season has been refreshingly solid.  Aside from the atrocious “Let’s prosecute Cheney!” season premiere, each successive episode has been vintage “Law & Order.”  The most recent episode (“Dignity,” October 23) bordered on spectacular.  *Spoiler alert*

It did not begin auspiciously.  The opening sequence set the stage for yet another warmed-over episode wherein an abortionist is murdered, and the rest of the program consists of detectives trying to determine which anti-abortion nutter did the deed.  The show’s writers usually permit one character to utter a single token pro-life line (“Just because you might disagree with abortion doesn’t justify this violence!”), while the oh-so-reasonable pro-choice characters get the last word.  Having seen this template before, I almost flipped channels.  It seems as though at least one of the L&O spinoff series airs a “new” abortion-doctor-murder episode every year.  One wonders if more abortionists have been slain on this fictional television franchise over the past 20 years than in real life. (more…)

When “Law & Order” first hit the airwaves in September of 1990, I was an immediate fan. The concept, the ignoring of the personal lives of the lead characters, the wonderful acting and especially the endless plot twists hooked me a few seasons before the public would catch on and make the show a regular ratings hit. The first four seasons are among four of the best ever produced for dramatic television, thanks mainly to Michael Moriarty’s exceptional work as Assistant District Attorney Ben Stone, a resourceful, Robert F. Kennedy-style hard-nosed prosecutor determined to see justice done (though the whole cast was top-notch).

After 88 episodes Moriarty left, Sam Waterston (one of my favorite actors) took his place, and while the show was never quite the same, it remained regular viewing until around 2002.

The program’s eventual deterioration was a case study in the boiling frog theory. The quality of the production and acting remained, but the politics slowly shifted to the far left almost without my noticing. And it wasn’t the actual politics that first became apparent; it was the negative effect of those politics on the quality of the storytelling. (more…)

The only surprising thing about hearing that Law & Order was going to take on the Bush administration over “torture” is the realization that Law & Order is still on the air.  This car-wreck of a series has been bouncing around NBC’s schedule since the first Bush administration doing the impossible – making lawyers look even worse.  Thanks, guys.

Law & Order’s mysteries are as unpredictable as where the sun will come up tomorrow morning.  In a typical episode, when the cops arrest a gang member you can safely bet the climatic trial denouement will reveal the real killer to be either the wealthy corporate executive,  the ambitious conservative politician or the hypocritical Christian preacher.  You know, kind of like in real life. (more…)

The US Department of Justice released a very important report in January, but it got little attention. The report found that 80 percent of crime in the US was gang related and that the vast majority of that was drug related.

Those of us who have worked with crime data have long understood this problem. For example, 50 percent of counties in the US have zero murders in any given year and another 25 percent have just one murder. Over 70 percent of murders take place in just a little over 3 percent of the counties, but even that exaggerates the picture because anyone who has seen a picture of murders in a major city know how heavily concentrated they are in specific areas within the city. (more…)