I'll never forget the first time I watched Law & Order. It was on at 10:00 p.m., in the middle of the week in the early 1990s. I was working very, very long hours, establishing a new business, and I arrived home, turned on the TV, and couldn't believe what I was seeing: a cop show with all of the fat cut out. This was the anti-Miami Vice: no Ferraris, no fun in the sun, no cops wearing silk suits, no wall-to-wall Jan Hammer soundtrack, no extraneous background B.S. from the characters. Heck, no extraneous B.S., period.

And then there was the structure! A half hour of cops, followed by a half hour of lawyers--Dragnet meets Perry Mason.

I think it was the structure that sucked me in at first. Being an obsessional Stanley Kubrick fan, I read numerous interviews where he talked about trying to change the three act structure of motion pictures--and backed that talk up with films with truly radical movies structures (at least when compared with almost everything out of Hollywood). And here was a TV show that did something really unique with structure!

Knocking Down the Dominos

Of course, it wasn't truly unique; nothing on television ever is. Hill Street Blues especially in its early years, was also designed to look harsh and gritty, to create a pseudo-documentary feel, as Todd Gitlin documented in Inside Prime Time. Hill Street also did away with transition shots--no wasting 30 seconds or a minute while the squad car rolls down the street, pulls up to the high rise, the cops jump out, the camera pans up and zooms into the window of the office building--a standard television cliche that wastes time and takes away from moving the plot forward.

Of course, in some respects, compared to Hill Street Blues, Law & Order is a dramatic swing backwards: back to the days of "police procedurals" such as Jack Webb's original, "just the facts, ma'am" Dragnet. Hill Street was all about the inner lives of its characters; what they felt and thought about what was going on around them was paramount. Law & Order is all about the plot--each scene pushes it relentlessly forward, like a series of dominos being knocked down, as Dick Wolf describes it in the box set's documentary.

The Gradual Loss of Grit

Wolf, who created Law & Order, preceded it by experimenting radically with the cop show genre in the 1980s. He wrote for Hill Street Blues, then co-produced the glitzy Miami Vice, and then produced a little remembered 1988 TV series for Universal called The Street, which starred Stanley Tucci as a cop patrolling the streets of Newark. Shot on videotape, it was Wolf's little known bridge between the glitz of Vice and the grit of Law & Order.

Of course, any dramatic TV show that starts off looking harsh, gritty and "authentic" eventually loses those attributes--it's just the nature of television. "Everybody's Favorite Bagman", Law & Order's pilot episode (and included on this DVD), was shot on 16mm, for a deliberately crude, grainy and streetwise look. As Wolf explains on the DVD's documentary, when it came time to run the pilot on national TV, executives at NBC thought its image quality was below their standards, and it took a direct OK from Brandon Tartikoff for it to air. Tartikoff consistently backed L&O during its low rated first season, just he had backed earlier NBC shows that showed promise, but had low ratings during their early runs, such as Hill Street and Cheers. It didn't help matters (as Dick Wolf takes perverse pride in saying on the DVD's documentary), that in their first season, Law & Order held the NBC record for sponsors dropping off of a TV show, due to its controversial plots.