Why is the reboot of “Law & Order” so bad?
It’s as if everyone forgot how to make the show.
Amid so many serialized shows that dominate on streaming, I still find myself seeking out something old school and episodic, that asks for only a 30-minute or hour-long investment. Maybe I’ll watch a few episodes back-to-back. Maybe I won’t. But either way, each time I’m getting a complete story.
That used to be standard. And it still remains a staple of network TV. CBS’s “Tracker” and ABC’s “High Potential” were the top two shows among viewers last season. Unfortunately, neither is very good (sorry!).
Which is how I found myself returning to the original run of “Law & Order” instead.
I’ve watched it countless times over the years. And yet with 20 seasons-worth rattling around on my DVR, the plots feel new-ish enough all over again. (Yes, I still have cable — I know, I know!)
What I didn’t anticipate is that my DVR would also grab episodes of the rebooted version of the series, which returned to NBC primetime in 2022 after a 10-year absence. Despite a surface-level resemblance, the newer episodes are nothing like the original.
I reviewed the new incarnation when it first premiered and found it wanting. I sampled a few more episodes after that and the quality remained low, so I didn’t return to the series again until now, and encountering the reboot sandwiched between older episodes is a fascinating juxtaposition. Creator Dick Wolf is still executive producer. But it’s as if everyone forgot how to make the show.
It’s baffling. Current showrunner Rick Eid has previous experience working on “Law & Order,” but it was late in the series’ first run, starting in Season 15, which was when the show began to lose some its sure footing after Jerry Orbach’s departure. (He was replaced that year by Dennis Farina; the ADA played by Elisabeth Röhm was also abruptly fired mid-season.)
I have all kinds of minor critiques of the original — it’s copaganda, after all. But for the most part, “Law & Order” is such a well-made show.
At least, it was.
The reboot has more in common with Wolf’s subsequent shows (including the various “Law & Order” spinoffs, as well as the One Chicago and “FBI” franchises), which are popular but lack wit and style, churned out by a super-producer who once knew how — or at least cared — to do better. I’m not sure that’s where his focus is these days. The shows are big money-makers for Wolf personally; Forbes reports his fee is as much as $200,000 per episode, and that’s on top of a lucrative deal that entitles him to half of his shows’ profits.
The original stands the test of time. It was often thoughtful. The reboot plays like a cheap knockoff relying on empty tension to fill in the gaps.
The difference is mostly a result of how the two versions are structured, and what’s being emphasized vs. what’s been lost.
The cold open
In the original, we see everyday New Yorkers going about their lives, only to stumble on a dead body.
Sometimes the death is discovered by a couple coming back from a date. Or a custodial worker on the graveyard shift. A maid arriving at her client’s home in the morning. A couple of guys fishing off a pier. Friends who head out to a driving range to hit a few golf balls.
Then the cops arrive, exchange preliminary details, and — especially if Orbach is in the cast as Det. Lenny Briscoe — close it out with a sardonic line. It was a specific, and specifically interesting, way to introduce the story.
The newer episodes have dispensed with this in favor of a brief scene featuring the soon-to-be-victim. Then it’s a smash-cut to their dead body, when the cops turn up. It’s dull! And a missed opportunity.
By contrast, consider an episode from 2001 titled “A Losing Season”:
An older couple, the Rosenbergs, are driving home from their nephew’s bar mitzvah, gossiping about someone at the event — “Did you see how she grabbed the centerpiece?” — when suddenly they’re rear-ended. Are you OK, Mr. Rosenberg asks? “Check the cake!” his wife responds. I laughed!
When they get out to assess the damage, the culprits have fled and the Rosenbergs discover the car that hit them has a dead body in the trunk.
It’s such a rich way to capture the everyday quality of life interrupted by the horror and absurdity of someone’s death. Take that out and the show feels flat before the opening credits.
Good writing can elevate all actors. Mediocre writing will reveal everyone’s limitations.
Do the characters feel like fully realized, three-dimensional people? Is the script structure economical but also sophisticated in how it unspools the narrative? Does the dialogue have verve or elegance? Is there room for brief asides that aren’t strictly about advancing the plot but creating a sense of time, place and character? If the answer is no to any of these questions, why are we watching?
Tackling ethical issues was one of the show’s hallmarks, but it’s just not equipped to do that with gusto at this point.
Last year, in Season 24, a ripped-from-the-headlines episode titled “Folk Hero” centers around the death of a health insurance CEO who is gunned down on the sidewalk.
The search for the culprit is the least interesting manhunt put to screen (they find the suspect within hours thanks to a drone) but the episode also shrinks from all kinds of narrative possibilities. Is violence against one health care executive worse than, or even the equivalent to, the violence said executive has inflicted upon thousands of people by denying claims and treatment? That’s the central issue, but it isn’t explored with any depth or complexity.
It’s just so dry.
Importantly, we do not hear from the character who is based on Luigi Mangione. He has zero lines until he takes the witness stand in his defense. We have no investment in him as a character because the show hasn’t bothered to write him as a character. He’s just a foil for the cops and prosecutors.
At one point, we learn his attorney is open to a deal; we find this out because the DA tells his colleagues that he extended the offer. Show-don’t-tell is an old truism when it comes to TV and film for a reason — we should see what that conversation was like! The back-and-forth could have been spiky and interesting.
The episode ends just as the jury foreperson is about to read the verdict. We never find out what it is and I actually think it’s fine to leave it ambiguous. But in this case, it’s also a punt, because the show has nothing to say anyway.
This is a problem with the writing.
There’s no intriguingly difficult push-pull. The debates are reductive. The show doesn’t even bother to put its own spin on these stories, which used to be how it handled episodes clearly inspired by real events.
In the original, the cops aren’t grim do-gooders, but just some guys trying to figure out what happened as they sort through the evidence. The cases feel varied, and sometimes the target is corrupt corporations. That means holding wealthy captains of industry to account (or at least trying to) and, even in a fictional context, it’s deeply satisfying. “Depraved indifference — shut the bastards down,” says district attorney Adam Schiff decisively in one instance.
Even the very first episode (which aired September 13, 1990) is tonally confident. That’s not always the case with a new show. Sometimes it takes a few episodes to find itself, but not “Law & Order.” A young woman dies in the emergency room because the supervising doctor was drunk (and too powerful for his subordinates to report him without risking their own careers). Well, it turns out he prescribed the wrong medication, leading to the patient’s death. The framing isn’t “Crime is rampant!” but “People make terrible decisions, often for very human reasons — their moral clarity fogged — and sometimes the results can ruin the lives of others.”
I don’t know that the newer episodes have a coherent point of view about any issues at all.
Who are these characters?
In the original run, we know almost nothing about the lives of the core ensemble outside of work. Briscoe has a trail of divorces and is a disappointment as a father; we learn that when his daughter is arrested on drug charges, which ultimately leads to her murder. But the show doesn’t overdo it. Her story isn’t the case they’re working on, but it’s there in the background for an episode or two.
Sometimes there are clunkier attempts to shoehorn in a backstory . Röhm’s prosecutor Serena Southerlyn suddenly mentions that she’s a lesbian in the last moments of her final episode. Benjamin Bratt’s Det. Reynaldo Curtis was married with kids, then he and his wife separate (he strayed!) before reuniting when she gets sick. Again, we learn all of this only through brief asides as he and Briscoe are working a case.
For the most part, though, the show understood that we don’t need to know about the characters’ home lives in order to flesh out their personalities.
The new episodes go in the opposite direction, with family members occasionally showing up as a crutch to give the ensemble depth. (Or in the first episode of the new season, it’s the assistant DA’s girlfriend, who knew the murder victim and gets sucked into the legal proceedings.) These gambits don’t work because you don’t care about any of these people to begin with; introducing loved ones isn’t going to change that.
There’s a rote quality to how things play out. It’s as if the show were assembled by aliens working from a description. Even though the reboot contains all the basic surface components, clunky writing undermines the cast.
Speaking of the cast …
The police
Wolf had impeccable taste during much of the show’s initial run, cycling through a number of different actors over the years.
(The less said about the final few years of the original run, the better, which included Jeremy Sisto, Anthony Anderson and Linus Roache, the latter of whom acquitted himself the best.)
I would consider Orbach the face of the show, with the shrugging, easygoing cynicism of a New Yorker who has been around long enough to see the world for what it is. (The only actor doing something similar these days is Natasha Lyonne on Peacock’s "Poker Face.”)
Orbach’s talent wasn’t only with one-liners — he could be vulnerable or angry, too — but no one else could take an otherwise questionable line and make it sing. Briscoe cared about the job, but it was always just a job. “Law & Order” was never the same without him.
S. Epatha Merkerson’s Lt. Van Buren is another. Here’s an actor who understands how to convey a range of energies — curiosity, authority, humor, compassion, scolding (sometimes firm, sometimes with a smile playing on her lips) — that always feel compelling in her hands. I’d follow Van Buren into battle any day and her scenes are usually the better moments of an episode.
A lot of that is Merkerson’s own talent. But it’s also how the character is written. Kristen Warner is a professor at Cornell University who I’ve interviewed over the years and she’s pointed out that “too often, the conversation about representation begins and ends with casting.” She calls this “plastic representation” — as if “just putting these actors on screen is sufficient.” I appreciate that “Law & Order” doesn’t do that here, but incorporates the specificity of her experience as a Black woman in the New York Police Department into the role.
The current cast? They might as well be unblinking animatronic figures stored away in one closet that says “cops” and another that says “lawyers” when they’re not on screen. I can’t even recall the names of individual characters after watching an episode, which is a sign that things are going very wrong.
The police are played with a dour sense of purpose by Maura Tierney as the lieutenant and Reid Scott as the detective. Mehcad Brooks played the other detective but has left the cast as of Season 25 (there’s been a lot of turnover in the ensemble, even by “Law & Order” standards, in just three seasons) and it was reported last month that Brooks will be replaced by actor David Ajala.
Listen, all the best to Ajala. Everyone needs a paycheck. But he’s joining an underwritten show, which will sink just about any actor.
I have no sense of anyone’s personalities on the reboot. They’re too busy doing serious police business, which is a deeply boring choice for a television show that should allow them to play different moods depending on the needs of a case. Sometimes a charm offensive is best. Other times, sympathy might be more effective than always playing the heavy. But there’s really no variation; the energy is uniformly “must solve case” and “suppress human qualities.” I like Tierney as an actor, but her choices here don’t work; instead of no-nonsense, her character is affectless. Also: She’s supposed to be the supervisor, but the writers have her doing the same work as her detectives, frequently interrogating suspects. (When Van Buren did an interrogation, which wasn’t common, there was a reason.) It’s a failure of imagination to write the character this way, instead of capturing something more specific about a person higher up the chain of command than her colleagues.
I wonder if some of these issues reflect Wolf’s present-day ideas about how policing should be viewed, veering away from the boredom, banal realities and office politics portrayed in the original. There used to be plenty of shoe leather work. And banter. They’d grab lunch! Or order in with Van Buren and eat in her office.
We’re lucky now if we see Tierney’s character pour coffee into her insulated cup. (No one uses plain old coffee mugs anymore, I guess.)
The prosecutors
In the DA’s office, the original remains superior as well. Sam Waterston’s Jack McCoy — righteous indignation personified (but not without moments of humor) — is up there with Orbach as synonymous with the “Law & Order” brand. He’s often so convinced of his righteousness that he isn’t above skirting the canon of ethics; I like that the show doesn’t just tacitly endorse this, but has his colleagues call him out on it — forcefully — every time, because it’s legitimately fucked up!
But watching the first few seasons again, I think I prefer Michael Moriarty’s quieter performance as Ben Stone. He was no less unyielding as a character, just less showy about it.
Both are specific people with their little visual quirks that give the actors a small something extra to play with (Stone’s reading glasses; McCoy wearing jeans to commute or that parka instead of a more traditional overcoat). I have no complaints about the succession of lower ranking attorneys paired with them, either. Richard Brooks, Jill Hennessy, Carey Lowell and Angie Harmon especially are good, and they’re playing characters with a distinctive point of view.
Steven Hill’s Schiff is the district attorney who is terse, morose and a reluctant political animal. It’s a delicious combination that means he almost always gets the best lines. “Quick, lock the door, somebody might walk in with a case we can win.” Listening to one of his lawyers lay out their case: “I wouldn’t count your chickens, your omelet just hit the fan!”
When a judge rules against the prosecution, they complain to their boss: “We had the kid dead-to-rights and now we can’t use any of the evidence, not even his name,” to which Schiff responds: “Oh, I didn’t know that the Bill of Rights was written to make your life easier!” In another episode, over lunch, his colleagues detail the uphill battle they’re facing, to which he replies grumpily: “Why do you always give me bad news when I’m digesting?”
In another episode, Lowell’s Jamie Ross walks them through a tough case she intends to bring before the grand jury and Schiff is less-than-convinced: “Throw the book at him. The grand jury throws it back, don’t get hit in the head.”
This is great, colorful, memorable writing!
In another episode, a judge rules against the prosecution because of some bungling by the police. Schiff has no words of encouragement for his team: “Cops blew it. It won’t be the last time.” It’s almost startling to remember that mild (sometimes stronger) criticism of the police used to be allowed on the show.
In an episode about domestic violence between two police officers, Harmon’s Abbie Carmichael turns to McCoy and says with a certain edge in her voice: “After six years, I still don’t know what cops are about.”
McCoy: “I grew up with one and I don’t know either.”
Carmichael: “Well, they’re real good at circling the wagons to protect themselves from the like us of.”
McCoy: “Who protects them from each other?”
Roll credits.
A terrific three-part story about a film director who murdered his studio executive wife ends with Schiff congratulating McCoy on a conviction: “Take the rest of the week off.” It’s Friday, McCoy points out. “So it is,” his boss says. “See you Monday.”
I also liked the DA’s who followed Hill — Diane Wiest’s pragmatic Nora Lewin, with her inquisitive, thoughtful approach to the role, and Fred Thompson’s Arthur Branch, who deployed a deceptively affable folksiness to deliver his conservative points.
Currently filling the role is Tony Goldwyn, who is an oddly bland screen presence: A handsome cypher with no actual character traits. Who is this guy? Narratively, what is his function in this reboot? Who knows? Who cares?
“The institutions Americans have relied on since this country was founded are under attack from both sides,” he says, and … that’s not a character with a point of view. I suppose it’s the kind of equivocating centrist gobbledygook that could tell us something about the man’s innate Gavin Newsome-esque vapidness, but the show doesn’t do anything with that.
The issues extend outward. Hugh Dancy is completely lost in an underwritten role, and is especially weak in courtroom scenes. His character comes across as a twerp who is in over his head, and I can’t decide if this is intentional or not, but no one involved with the show seems to understand this or do anything interesting with it. Odelya Halevi is indeed glamorous and beautiful (an exhausting but consistent trope for assistant DA’s on the show) but she isn’t given anything to really play beyond the false moral dilemmas the show gins up in place of actually putting a case together. She has a smart demeanor, but she doesn’t get to be smart.
Why is the main prosecutor always a white guy, anyway?
Even the defense attorneys used to be fun and richly complex adversaries with clear personalities of their own. I love when they go to Stone’s office — or ambush McCoy mid-meal at a restaurant — to bluff, ask for a deal or press their advantage. There’s an energy to those scenes, and that’s likely why actors like Patti LuPone and Elaine Strich and James Earl Jones showed up in guest roles, because there was something to play.
But no more — most of the time, those scenes aren’t even in the script. Gone too are the arraignments, which were mini commentaries all their own, about the ways in which a defendant’s fate is treated as just the next thing coming down the conveyor belt.
Modern technology is ugly
Technological advances do show up in the original run over the years. If Chris Noth’s Det. Mike Logan is stopping at a payphone while out pounding the pavement, a few seasons later Jesse L. Martin’s Det. Ed Green is pulling out a flip phone instead. But overall, these changes don’t dramatically alter the show’s aesthetic.
Now, instead of reaching into their coat pockets to pull out a photo of the victim, they just hold up their phones in someone’s face and say: Do you recognize this person? There’s something so obnoxious about it —here, look at my phone! — instead of letting someone hold the photo in their hands, stare at it for a moment, and take in what they’re looking at.
It’s the same when they’re back at the office; we rarely glimpse the detectives going through piles of paper and case files, or working the phones. Just iPads to endlessly swipe.
It’s possible this is what modern police work actually looks like. But visually? It’s antiseptic and bland. And because they always have close-captioned footage at their fingertips — and I do mean always — video evidence is how they narrow down a suspect in every case.
Again, this may reflect our current surveillance reality, but as a way to advance the plot, it cuts out so many interesting steps, rendering the show’s tableaux dull and repetitive. Even the unmarked SUV they drive seems like overkill for just two guys, compared to the sedan they drive in the original.
There’s an absence of even small details, like cops or lawyers carrying their coasts over their arms when visiting someone to gather more information. If you didn’t see the coats, you wouldn’t think twice about it. But it’s an attention to detail that subtly conveys information. This is what happens in the winter! You take your coat off if you’re going to be inside for more than a minute or so.
Remember when they used to tap phones? We can debate the ethics of these tactics, but as a narrative device, eavesdropping always has the frisson of excitement. Sometimes they would do sting operations. Or visit the medical examiner, or a tech expert. In one episode, a guy in the police audio lab analyzes a tape and rattles off some jargon about overdubbing. Briscoe: “Could we have that again in English? I cut my teeth on 45s and Fats Domino.”
But no more. These are missed opportunities in favor of yet more swiping.
Even the lighting used to be better. Everything looks fake and artificial — like a set — instead of a place where people work. Watch the verbal tennis matches that are a frequent occurrence in Schiff’s office; they’re offset by naturalistic shards of light coming in from the window.
Instead of taking us to distinctive neighborhoods (high class, working class, you name it), even the locations in the reboot offer a generic and flat version of New York. Does anyone on this show, in even small guest roles, have a New York accent? The show used to film the ensemble in the snowy conditions, or with thunder rumbling in the background (gotta get that scene wrapped before the skies open up!).
Prosecutors used to regularly have conversations on the courthouse steps, or jailhouse meetings to offer the accused a deal or extract more information. But even that’s mostly been eliminated. Too much looks and feels the same from episode to episode.
The investigation wraps too quickly
The original often has the detectives talking to as many as eight or nine people. So many bartenders! So many doormen! This gives the story a winding quality, of detectives (and often prosecutors) hauling themselves around town, meeting with all kinds of people who might have information on the case. Sometimes the leads are dead-ends. Sometimes they bear fruit. The reboot has no time for any of that. They check in with half as many people before making an arrest and you feel the absence of “the process” as a result. There’s just not enough story.
I thought I knew all the now-famous guest stars, but this rewatch was the first time I clocked Chris Messina in an episode from 1996 titled “Homesick.” Detectives Briscoe and Curtis chat with him about a young British nanny he used to date who is now suspected of killing a baby. He’s a cocky guy and isn’t particularly upset to learn that she’s accused of a crime. He tells the cops she was just some clingy chick he dumped a while back. Orbach’s deadpan reply: “And they say romance is dead.”
What I really like about this scene? It’s not just three people standing and delivering their lines. They’re walking together on the sidewalk, then Messina’s character goes over to a food cart to get a hotdog while he’s talking. The handheld camera isn’t static either, but swoops around him, giving the scene visual energy. The detectives ask if the nanny was homesick, but Messina’s character doesn’t get why she would be: “Besides the beer and music, what’s the deal with England?” And anyway, he didn’t need to be some big deal in her life. Then he takes a big bite out of the hotdog. Briscoe stares at him: “Yeah. Go figure.”
None of this is essential to the plot. (Spoiler: The nanny didn’t even do it!) But it’s fun and creates a textured fictional world, and that’s fundamentally what’s missing from the reboot: Light, droll humor and interesting camera work. The actors in the reboot don’t have these kinds of scenes to play, but their performances are wound so tight, I’m not sure they could find the right tone for them anyway. When every interaction is loaded with portent, none of it feels interesting as a fictional investigation for television.
Another great thing about the original: The detectives asking questions of people who never bother to stop what they’re doing. It’s very: “Yeah, you’re cops, so what? I got work to do.”
Where’s the humor?
In one episode, they’re investigating a physicist and visit a lab that houses a particle accelerator. The tech they speak to says this is the last place the guy would set foot. “He never drops by to borrow a cup of protons?” Briscoe says sardonically.
In another episode, searching through a suspect’s apartment, Briscoe finds a bag filled with “uppers, downers, anxiety pills, sleeping pills, painkillers, codeine, morphine … you could jump-start the 60s with what’s in here.”
The show used to make room for minor levity.
In the 2003 episode “Bitch,” the detectives learn that a cosmetics mogul and her daughter were both sleeping with the murder victim.
“Please don’t tell me at the same time,” Van Buren says, struggling to wrap her head around the information.
Briscoe: “Oh, it’s like Oedipus: The Sequel.”
Van Buren: “I’m not gonna even start to do the math on that one.”
Briscoe: “It gets better.”
Van Buren (pause): “I need to sit down …”
Banter!
It’s important that the guest roles pop, too, and that they feel like people who have lived a whole life outside of this moment. Lucie Arnaz (Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz’s daughter in real life) plays the driven cosmetics queen in “Bitch” and it’s such a powerhouse of a performance. It’s aided by a specific costume choices; in every scene, she’s wearing white-on-white. Even the fur coat she wears to her arraignment is white. It’s a great styling detail, where the costume designer was given the room (budget?) to play. We don’t see that attention to detail much anymore.
Her defense, by the way? “Menopause rage” (HRT withdrawal). Remember when a psychiatrist or psychologist — J.K. Simmons’ Skoda and Carolyn McCormick’s Olivet — would interview the suspects and weigh in with their opinions? Those moments are gone from the reboot, which doesn’t see the accused as people, just plot devices.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention another scene in the same episode. It’s not funny, but it is colorful:
Because Arnaz’s character moves in the same exclusive social circles as that of Branch — she even donated to his political campaign — her daughter tries to leverage that connection and comes to Branch asking for leniency. But he’s in no mood: “These bones have been through way too much to bend over backwards for anyone,” he tells her.
“So that’s it? We just throw her out with out with yesterday’s newspaper?”
He offers her a sad, rueful laugh: “If she killed someone, yes.”
In closing …
Season 2 is the show’s sweet spot, despite the absence of women in main cast (and the absence of Orbach, although he does show up in one episode as a defense attorney). The cases are interesting and complicated.
There’s maneuvering, both from the cops — as they bounce theories off each other and try to piece things together — and the prosecutors, who furrow their brows and strategize with each new complication.
The back half of the episodes aren’t always built around court scenes. The crime at hand isn’t always a murder. Those variations are worthwhile and keep the show from falling into a formulaic rut.
I really like the younger guy-older guy dynamic between Logan and Cerreta (Paul Sorvino) as the detectives. Ditto when it comes to Stone and Schiff’s interplay over in the DA’s office; they don’t come to loggerheads so much as have fascinating back-and-forths each episode, pushing and nudging until they figure out how the hell to proceed with a case, with Robinette’s cool skepticism the extra something that makes it feel like real people discussing real problems.
And that is woefully missing in the current incarnation of the series.