Law & Order
This week I sealed my financial doom by buying the first season of Law & Order. As some of you know, I pretty much gave up on TV altogether somewhere around the start of my stay at Tech, abandoning my regular television habits in favor of sitting in front of a computer all day, but I still enjoyed a Law & Order rerun or three on TNT once in a while. I started with Season One instead of a more familiar later season with Detectives Briscoe and Green on the Law side and McCoy and the hot assistant on the Order side partly out of an overarching drive for completion and partly out of a sense of curiosity, since I didn’t see many of the very early episodes on TNT. I recognize a lot of the characters, like that cop who later got transferred to Staten Island, that lawyer who wasn’t as cool as McCoy, and the DA who stayed on the show through Season 10, but I can only remember ever seeing them, with the exception of Steven Hill, in a couple of episodes.
I watched the first episode tonight, and one thing that really struck me was the intensity of the pacing. This is one of the things that endears the show to its viewers, of course, with the interrogation-a-minute and all the unexpected twists in the courtrooms, but holy crap, maybe they should include some commercial breaks on the DVD. Law, especially, was very dizzying. There was the Pakistani doctor who they thought did it and who falsified some documents and then all the interns and the chief of medicine who put me off from the start when he poured the water into that lowball glass and slumped down in his chair and they found out that he was really a raging drunk and there was a catering company and the old cop used to be an alcoholic too and why does that black guy seem to have such odd intonation and oh, we’re in Order now. Man. I need to remember to watch for good places to hit pause.