Law & Order's Jack McCoy: an American archetype, defending his country's soul
Jack McCoy, in customary grey jacket, his salt-and-pepper eyebrows beetled in concentration, stands at the back of a New York courtroom—one he prowled as chief prosecutor for fifteen years. Recently promoted to New York district attorney, he now watches as the new assistant DA steps up to defend justice. In this case, a hockey mom stands accused of reckless manslaughter for encouraging her teenage sons to chase with baseball bats a black gang who had stolen their basketball. The father of one of the gang drew his gun to defend his son, killing both one of the white boys in pursuit and a little black girl playing hopscotch nearby. He too is in the dock, for murder.
And America tunes in. For McCoy and the New York district attorney’s office stand at the centre of a television series that, since this September, has been the longest-running primetime drama in US television history: Law & Order. Now in its 20th season on the NBC network, it still gets viewing figures of nearly 9m, while its spin-off shows—Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and Law & Order: Criminal Intent—average more like 12m. The show, which first aired in 1990, has been syndicated to 40 countries, and is as much a staple of US television today as Oprah or The Simpsons. British fans, meanwhile, have around 20 episodes a week to choose from on Five, Sky 1, Sky 2 and the Hallmark cable channel. There’s even a new, specifically British spinoff—Law & Order: UK—which will air its second season next year on ITV.
The Law & Order franchise brings in about $1bn (£596m) a year for NBC and its associated businesses. But to mark the show’s 20th anniversary in numbers is to do it a disservice. For Law & Order is also the single-most important link in the recent history of American crime-driven dramas. From NCIS and CSI to The Wire, things would have been very different without Law & Order.
Understanding why this is the case begins with one man: the 62-year-old New Yorker, Dick Wolf, the show’s creator and executive producer. Wolf trained as a staff writer on the classic cop series Hill Street Blues, then as a supervising producer on Miami Vice. At some point, he arrived at a key insight—that television audiences can still be entertained by a highly cerebral drama; and that the right kind of intellectual drama could, if executed well enough, be the biggest thing on television.
Wolf borrowed his templates from two 1950s programmes—Dragnet and Perry Mason—that developed both the cop and legal genres, and took these an evolutionary leap further. In the process, he proved something that no one else had quite realised: intense procedural details can be fascinating in their own right. It’s an insight that shows like CSI (Crime Scene Investigation) have capitalised on in their on-screen technical forensics. Similarly, the street talk hailed as groundbreaking in The Wire was present from the beginning in Law & Order, which prides itself on an almost documentary level of realism.
Yet Law & Order was conceived as more than a slick slice of crime and punishment. Guided by its fidelity to New York’s daily life, the show has become nothing less than a way for America to come to terms with its modern self, and with one theme in particular—its sense of being persecuted by crime and terrorism.
For those who haven’t seen the original Law & Order, you haven’t been watching enough television. The show works on a tight formula. Every hour-long episode opens with a black title screen and a baritone voiceover: “In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the police, who investigate crime, and the district attorneys, who prosecute the offenders. These are their stories.” A “chunk-chunk” sound—somewhere between a judge’s gavel hitting its stand and a prison door closing—marks the beginning of each scene. The first scene, a prologue, will take a couple of New Yorkers going about their daily lives—grocery shopping, perhaps, or an argument over a parking space—when they discover a corpse. Two police detectives arrive. And the stage is set.
What follows is strictly compartmentalised: half an hour of the detectives trying to nail down a suspect, then half an hour after the case is handed over to the district attorney’s office. Law & Order’s tag line boasts that it is “ripped from the headlines,” and they mean it: the series will often take a case that has been in the news, fictionalise the characters and develop a plot around it. Each episode is like a miniature self-contained docudrama. The latest rumour is that they will be taking the David Letterman scandal—chat-show host comes clean about affair to foil blackmail attempt—and turn that into a plot for the spin-off Criminal Intent. In its time, the series has taken on high-school shootings, racially motivated murders, extremist groups, gangs, terrorism and culpability in the medical profession. A death in Law & Order is not just a plot device: it is also an excuse for McCoy and the opposing defence lawyer to debate topical social issues within the boundaries of a courtroom.
What makes it so gripping? Dick Wolf cites the fact that Law & Order is “the smartest drama left on television.” Its first half is “a murder mystery,” its second “a moral mystery”—and it’s here that the complexity, and the appeal, resides. The “mystery” is partly about ideas of natural justice versus the law. But it is also about how Americans choose to interpret their own constitution. And it is in this respect that Law & Order is likely to prove its significance in cultural history. Dick Wolf is know to have Republican sympathies but the programme is politically of no fixed abode, just as likely to challenge conservative as liberal assumptions about crime.
The episode mentioned earlier—entitled “Driven,” and centring on the prosecution of a soccer mom—is a classic example of a compelling moral mystery. Is a mother responsible for her sons’ actions; or the father guilty of murder for using his gun to defend his son? Is the district attorney’s office going to spark racial unrest if the jury prosecutes the black man but not the white woman, or vice versa? Both, in the end, were cleared of the murder of the white boy but convicted of the manslaughter of the little girl.
The prosecutor’s role, here, has overtones of Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird: the American archetype of a lawyer seeking justice in a racially charged trial. But what is notably absent from Law & Order is To Kill a Mockingbird’s assumption that an innocent victim is being defended from injustice. It offers no such wronged figure. Instead, it is the constitution and the soul of modern America that are defended by the fervent McCoy and his successors. It is not the victim’s pain that provokes prosecution: it is the transgression of the fundamental laws of the country. McCoy’s weekly summing up is like a sermon on the constitution—a reminder of the pure, rational values Americans must uphold, regardless of how threatened they feel.
How has a show that espouses such values managed to export itself so successfully? One reason is sheer business sense. Law & Order’s single-episode format is popular and the two halves—police and law—were designed not only for aesthetic reasons, but in case a network wanted to buy just one element.
More grandly, there’s the series’s universal themes. Murder is, of course, illegal everywhere, as Wolf himself has noted. As for Law & Order’s relationship with the US constitution—perhaps, in an age when American power has been exported via bombs and missiles, there’s an equal fascination to be found in the idea of justice that the country thinks it espouses. Watching Law & Order allows us foreigners to judge America’s ideas, and ideals, through a lens in its own courtrooms. Then again, perhaps it’s just darned good television.
Jack McCoy, in customary grey jacket, his salt-and-pepper eyebrows beetled in concentration, stands at the back of a New York courtroom—one he prowled as chief prosecutor for fifteen years. Recently promoted to New York district attorney, he now watches as the new assistant DA steps up to defend justice. In this case, a hockey mom stands accused of reckless manslaughter for encouraging her teenage sons to chase with baseball bats a black gang who had stolen their basketball. The father of one of the gang drew his gun to defend his son, killing both one of the white boys in pursuit and a little black girl playing hopscotch nearby. He too is in the dock, for murder.
And America tunes in. For McCoy and the New York district attorney’s office stand at the centre of a television series that, since this September, has been the longest-running primetime drama in US television history: Law & Order. Now in its 20th season on the NBC network, it still gets viewing figures of nearly 9m, while its spin-off shows—Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and Law & Order: Criminal Intent—average more like 12m. The show, which first aired in 1990, has been syndicated to 40 countries, and is as much a staple of US television today as Oprah or The Simpsons. British fans, meanwhile, have around 20 episodes a week to choose from on Five, Sky 1, Sky 2 and the Hallmark cable channel. There’s even a new, specifically British spinoff—Law & Order: UK—which will air its second season next year on ITV.
The Law & Order franchise brings in about $1bn (£596m) a year for NBC and its associated businesses. But to mark the show’s 20th anniversary in numbers is to do it a disservice. For Law & Order is also the single-most important link in the recent history of American crime-driven dramas. From NCIS and CSI to The Wire, things would have been very different without Law & Order.
Understanding why this is the case begins with one man: the 62-year-old New Yorker, Dick Wolf, the show’s creator and executive producer. Wolf trained as a staff writer on the classic cop series Hill Street Blues, then as a supervising producer on Miami Vice. At some point, he arrived at a key insight—that television audiences can still be entertained by a highly cerebral drama; and that the right kind of intellectual drama could, if executed well enough, be the biggest thing on television.
Wolf borrowed his templates from two 1950s programmes—Dragnet and Perry Mason—that developed both the cop and legal genres, and took these an evolutionary leap further. In the process, he proved something that no one else had quite realised: intense procedural details can be fascinating in their own right. It’s an insight that shows like CSI (Crime Scene Investigation) have capitalised on in their on-screen technical forensics. Similarly, the street talk hailed as groundbreaking in The Wire was present from the beginning in Law & Order, which prides itself on an almost documentary level of realism.
Yet Law & Order was conceived as more than a slick slice of crime and punishment. Guided by its fidelity to New York’s daily life, the show has become nothing less than a way for America to come to terms with its modern self, and with one theme in particular—its sense of being persecuted by crime and terrorism.
For those who haven’t seen the original Law & Order, you haven’t been watching enough television. The show works on a tight formula. Every hour-long episode opens with a black title screen and a baritone voiceover: “In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the police, who investigate crime, and the district attorneys, who prosecute the offenders. These are their stories.” A “chunk-chunk” sound—somewhere between a judge’s gavel hitting its stand and a prison door closing—marks the beginning of each scene. The first scene, a prologue, will take a couple of New Yorkers going about their daily lives—grocery shopping, perhaps, or an argument over a parking space—when they discover a corpse. Two police detectives arrive. And the stage is set.
What follows is strictly compartmentalised: half an hour of the detectives trying to nail down a suspect, then half an hour after the case is handed over to the district attorney’s office. Law & Order’s tag line boasts that it is “ripped from the headlines,” and they mean it: the series will often take a case that has been in the news, fictionalise the characters and develop a plot around it. Each episode is like a miniature self-contained docudrama. The latest rumour is that they will be taking the David Letterman scandal—chat-show host comes clean about affair to foil blackmail attempt—and turn that into a plot for the spin-off Criminal Intent. In its time, the series has taken on high-school shootings, racially motivated murders, extremist groups, gangs, terrorism and culpability in the medical profession. A death in Law & Order is not just a plot device: it is also an excuse for McCoy and the opposing defence lawyer to debate topical social issues within the boundaries of a courtroom.
What makes it so gripping? Dick Wolf cites the fact that Law & Order is “the smartest drama left on television.” Its first half is “a murder mystery,” its second “a moral mystery”—and it’s here that the complexity, and the appeal, resides. The “mystery” is partly about ideas of natural justice versus the law. But it is also about how Americans choose to interpret their own constitution. And it is in this respect that Law & Order is likely to prove its significance in cultural history. Dick Wolf is know to have Republican sympathies but the programme is politically of no fixed abode, just as likely to challenge conservative as liberal assumptions about crime.
The episode mentioned earlier—entitled “Driven,” and centring on the prosecution of a soccer mom—is a classic example of a compelling moral mystery. Is a mother responsible for her sons’ actions; or the father guilty of murder for using his gun to defend his son? Is the district attorney’s office going to spark racial unrest if the jury prosecutes the black man but not the white woman, or vice versa? Both, in the end, were cleared of the murder of the white boy but convicted of the manslaughter of the little girl.
The prosecutor’s role, here, has overtones of Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird: the American archetype of a lawyer seeking justice in a racially charged trial. But what is notably absent from Law & Order is To Kill a Mockingbird’s assumption that an innocent victim is being defended from injustice. It offers no such wronged figure. Instead, it is the constitution and the soul of modern America that are defended by the fervent McCoy and his successors. It is not the victim’s pain that provokes prosecution: it is the transgression of the fundamental laws of the country. McCoy’s weekly summing up is like a sermon on the constitution—a reminder of the pure, rational values Americans must uphold, regardless of how threatened they feel.
How has a show that espouses such values managed to export itself so successfully? One reason is sheer business sense. Law & Order’s single-episode format is popular and the two halves—police and law—were designed not only for aesthetic reasons, but in case a network wanted to buy just one element.
More grandly, there’s the series’s universal themes. Murder is, of course, illegal everywhere, as Wolf himself has noted. As for Law & Order’s relationship with the US constitution—perhaps, in an age when American power has been exported via bombs and missiles, there’s an equal fascination to be found in the idea of justice that the country thinks it espouses. Watching Law & Order allows us foreigners to judge America’s ideas, and ideals, through a lens in its own courtrooms. Then again, perhaps it’s just darned good television.
