“These are [Our] Stories”: Engaging Cultural Debate and Performing Contradictions in Law & Order

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Shelley Manis is a doctoral student in the Department of Theatre and Dance's “Performance as Public Practice” program at the University of Texas, Austin.

Notes

1. All subsequent Law & Order quotations come from the same episode: “Bounty.” Law & Order. NBC. 1 Oct. 2003. DVD. Universal Studios. Law & Order: The Fourteenth Year. 2004.

2. In fact, Kevin Courrier and Susan Green, film critics and authors of Law & Order: The Unofficial Companion, insist, “No other episodic drama is better at scrutinizing the moral complexities of every social issue it tackles on camera” (11).

3. Keetley offers this insight about the necessity of the District Attorney's occasional loss (other than for the sake of verisimilitude): “It is necessary to the show's predominant presentation of its protagonists’ essential morality that they occasionally lose to the ineffable authority of the law. If they did not, their private morality might risk becoming too closely identified with the law itself” (46). In other words, their value systems risk ascending to the level of hegemony, rather than being continually reexamined and negotiated.

4. Keetley explicates the pattern of shifting focus in Law & Order in her chapter of Prime Time Law this way: “At the midpoint of each episode, it appears that the culprit has been apprehended and all that remains is for the district attorney to ‘prosecute the offender’ … The second half of the narrative, however … is less a movement toward a guilty individual than a movement away from sure guilt” (Jarvis & Joseph 35). Actually, though, the voiceover says “prosecute the offenders,” which, contrary to her argument, suggests a plurality of responsible persons/apparatuses from the beginning. This seemingly minor detail, as Keetley's article demonstrates, considerably complicates Law & Order's depiction of responsibility.

5. Also in the air at the time “Bounty” premiered was the infamous battle over the University of Michigan Law School's affirmative action admissions policies. For general coverage of the battle, see for example Winter, Greg. “U. of Michigan Alters Admissions Use of Race.” New York Times 29 Aug 2003: A12.

6. For example, he cited conversations with the family of P.O.W. Jessica Lynch, when “no one in Lynch's family remembers speaking to Blair, even though he filed five of his articles, datelined from their hometown of Palestine, West Virginia, that vividly described them and their home” (CNN.com).

7. I am presuming, here, audience members’ familiarity with the Jayson Blair debacle. While the episode still works to challenge assumptions about affirmative action even without a viewer's possessing that cultural capital, for this purposes of this discussion, I'm locating the episode specifically in its historical context—at the precise moment when the “Blair Affair,” as it came to be called, was still a fresh controversy.

8. On many a crime-drama, the question of whether either of the lawyers is well-intentioned is moot. The lawyer-hero (whether he or she is on the side of the prosecution or the defense) is portrayed as the one with the best intentions, while the adversary is portrayed as simply wrong. Not so on Law & Order, as the even-handedness of the exchanges between the two indicate.

9. There's truth in this assertion. Pamela Newkirk, writing for The Black Commentator shortly after Jayson Blair's rise to infamy sparked the affirmative action debate, asks: “What do we make of Mike Barnicle who while at the Boston Globe repeatedly fabricated stories and plagiarized others’ work? … Barnicle's misdeeds were so infamous that Lamar Graham, now an editor at Parade Magazine, dedicated a Boston magazine ‘Barnicle Watch’ column to chronicling the columnist's fictitious escapades. But unlike the Times, which quickly ended Blair's career once his journalistic crimes were known, the Boston Globe continued to coddle Barnicle, even after paying tens of thousands of dollars in legal settlements to his victims … And unlike with Blair, Barnicle was appropriately viewed as an individual, not a representative of his race.”