Like Elisabeth Rohm Never Happened

Admittedly, I watched the first half while writing lectures/editing overdue papers, but tonight’s Law & Order must have been the best episode in many, many years. The plot was fairly interesting, although admittedly pretty similar to the one in which Edie Falco defended a guy who looks like Don Imus (“an irony he gets to ponder for the next 30 years in Attica”). There were some classic corkscrew ethics and a nice DA/ADA conflict. But–I know you won’t believe this–no courtroom scene turned into two lawyers reading position papers about the Iraq War or something; the logic of the story actually played itself out. (They must have used a script from 1996.) And then there was the highly questionable legal manipulations to produce a nice pro-state conclusion, which as a friend notes was always the defining characteristic of the show in its great years (although admittedly the rule of law has been subverted more egregiously in the past; here, just some abuse of judicial discretion.) And, of course, The Sopranos it wasn’t, but then it never was; just good solid middlebrow entertainment, rare enough these days.

Whether this is a fluke or a portends a serious improvement, I don’t know. But the couple post-Rohm episodes I caught last year did seemed OK, so maybe it’s righted itself a bit.