April 2023 Bonus: The Law & Order IRL Case Codex
In which yet another SDB project idea turns into A Whole Thing
the true crime that's worth your time
As usual, the idea for this month’s bonus content started out relatively modestly: rank all the Law & Order: Mothership episodes based on real cases, from least to most compelling. “Yeah, there’s a gazillion eps of that show,” I said to myself, “but they can’t all be ripped from real headlines, especially not after the Ben Stone era, right?”
Wrong. So, so wrong. I have had the L&O wiki’s list of episode “inspirations” bookmarked for years, but I did not remember (or was in denial about?) just how many of the flagship show’s plots came from IRL stories…namely, almost all of them, at least as far as the wiki believes.
Granted, I could argue that not all of the “rips” qualify — that it’s possible to reverse-map almost any plot onto the particulars of a real case, because as outlandishly creative as an L&O writer could get without consulting the NYT Metro section, nobody ever went broke overestimating the creativity of vengeful (or greedy, or emotionally disturbed) defendants. But then I have to research every episode anyway if I want to rule any out, so that doesn’t shrink the size of the task.