I have done reviews of many episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and published some more general thoughts about it here. In that post I offer a smaller number of general thoughts about the original Law and Order show (the one that went from 1990-2010). Although I do not like L&O as much as I like the SVU version, I do like it. There’s some liberal or even progressive stuff here and there and they’re good detective stories, and they’re homicide detectives- if they were narcotics, I’d probably be a lot less fond of the show.
Although I’m not sure I have done and will do this consistently, with the original Law and Order show I will make a note and maybe offer some comments when the issues that are at the core of Law and Order: SVU appear on this show.
“Cradle to Grave” Season 2. See this for a plot summary.
At the beginning there’s one very progressive statement. The cops are looking for the parent(s) of a dead baby and are asking at child care places. A woman working at one says that they used to watch babies, but because of a cut in the federal funding they got, they had to stop. She says something about how the federal government was able to buy a couple more military aircraft because of those nation-wide cuts to child care subsidies, and implies that it was a bad set of priorities.
After about 10 minutes it became clear to me that it was about a lazy, greedy slum-lord property owner. In order to transform her decaying, low-rent buildings into something more profitable, she encourages tenants to move out- a corrupt building superintendent and a thug posing as a tenant make life very difficult for the tenants. The owner and her two helpers are charged in connection with the baby dying because the heat was turned off and there was a broken window in the apartment the baby died in.
“The Fertile Fields” Season 2. See this for a plot summary.
Initially there’s some chance that the murder was an anti-semitic hate crime carried out by Black teens. The senior police officer is reluctant to rush to that assumption, worried that it will greatly aggravate relations between NYC Jews and NYC Blacks. The way that the murder turns out to have been committed by a white, non-Jewish criminal I think says a lot about a tendency to blame black teens when they’re innocent.
“Intolerance” Season 2. See this for a plot summary.
There’s a little bit of anti-racism. The white suspects (their conviction was overturned when a mistrial was declared) brought a bit of racism to the academic competition between their loved one and his Chinese-American peer, who they probably killed.
“Silence” Season 2. See this for a plot summary.
This is basically about homophobia. It’s a little flawed but overall it’s anti-homophobic. It’s about a black-mail scam by straight prison inmates against closeted gay men outside prison (I think it might happen in reality because I first read about it in a John Grisham novel two decades ago, and now this (this episode was done about 10 years before that book, so people were thinking about it at two different times in our recent history)). If it IS real, that’s just one more reason to fight homophobia.
“The Working Stiff Season 2. See this for a plot summary.
Although it could be more pro-union and I wouldn’t call it socialist, it is in a fairly good way about conflict between the working-class and the upper-class. The union activist with an attitude toward the bosses gets along well with the cops and the Assistant DAs, so I think the viewer is sort of supposed to like him.
