Law & Order


Law & Order is a detective and court-room television drama on the NBC
newtork. This award-winning and popular television series is syndicated on
several other networks. Law & Order is also the basis for two other
television dramas: Law & Order: Criminal Intent and Law & Order: Special
Victims Unit as well as the reality television series, Crime and Punishment.
The producers of Law & Order have also produced an updated version of the
series Dragnet.

The show follows a small team of detectives working in New York City who
investigate a serious crime (usually a murder). Each major scene is preceded
with a subtitle indicating the location, time and date of the events
portrayed. Generally, about half-way through the program the focus shifts
from the investigation of the crime to the prosecution of people for it,
always handed over to the same small team of lawyers from the local District
Attorney's office.

The show's cast of police and lawyers are portrayed as basically honest
professionals, very rarely straying from the boundaries of accepted
procedure and usually solving crimes by hard slog and attention to detail
rather than hunches and personal whimsy. Their private lives are rarely
mentioned, and usually only in passing or if they intrude on their work.
Perhaps the scenes involving lawyers stray from reality a little more, with
a far higher proportion of cases going to trial than in real life, trial
lawyers acting as pseudo-detectives, and an unusually high number of twists
near the end of trials. In contrast to detective shows of the 1950's such as
Perry Mason, the protagonists of the program do not always win their cases,
and many of programs have resolutions in which justice is not served.

Most Law & Order episodes are self-contained, with only a few exceptions
over the many years of production.

Many of the storylines on the show, particularly in later series, have been
widely regarded as thinly-disguised fictionalizations of recent real
criminal cases that have been reported in the news media.

Law & Order is noted for its revolving cast -- an actor rarely stays with
the show for more than a few years before being replaced. This continual
replacing of actors has not appeared to harm the program's popularity. In
fact, it has been speculated that has contributed to the series' long run
since the regular turnover of castmembers has allowed cast salaries to be
kept relatively low.