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Why the fuck do I still watch Law and Order?


Jumbie

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I keep watching Law and Order reruns. I can't help myself.

 

The original had a great idea, to show the struggle for justice that takes place AFTER arrest. It was an approach I appreciated.

 

That said, I have to wonder why they don't get more realistic and show prosecutors acting a bit more like the do in real life, bullying the accused into plea bargains by piling up charges, pursuing prosecution for political means (I mean, L&R likes to rip storylines from the headlines, right? So when are they gonna rip the story of prosecutor Mike Nifong withholding evidence of the accused's innocence?), Prosecution of someone for murder when they shoot a SWAT cop who burst in on the wrong home without identifying themselves?

 

But the SVU spinoff as really gone to fucking hell. I think the only thing keeping them even remotely watchable is the excellent cast. The plots are pure shit though. I mean, take the last 2 episodes I watched...

 

1. 16 year old gets arrested near the end of the episode for attempted murder of his 16 year old girlfriend. Then it turns out the g/f is really 28 and masquerading as 16. Fine. I don't mind that twist into weirdness. But THEN, the defense attorney tries to have the g/f charged with statutory rape so that he can claim the boy's attempted murder was 'rape induced rage'. The only problem is that everone, including the boy himself, acknowledges that the boy did NOT know she was really 28 at the time he attempted to murder her, so that can't fuckin work!. A plothole that fuckin big is hard to miss.

 

2. Then SVU does it's usual gimmick in another episode of piling on the pervertedness for shoc value. Except they come up with this setup when the case unravels:

 

A rich real estate developer gets his mistress pregnant. He supports the mistress's kids while staying married to his wife. The Mistress's daughter grows up and ends up at the same exclusive private school as the son the rich guy had with his wife where the brother and sister end up dating!

 

Forget for a moment that this jackass was stupid enough to send both his kids to the same school...

 

The problem with this is that the way the story was setup, the mistress pretended to have a husband and would tell people that her husband was 'on assignment' for his industrial company in places like the Congo, which is why he was never around. Well, that would work with the neighbors, but what about THE KIDS? These kids have grown to age 16 without ONCE seeing their father? And it wasn't like the kids were in on the scam. The girl thought her real father was her boyrfiend's father. Again, they leave a huge plothole and hope we're too stupid to think about it.

 

See, the problem is that the writers keep trying to pile on the twists and reversals until they lose track of all common sense.

 

This show has gotten retarded.

 

On top of that, they've given up the court-side half of the show so that instead of seeing a trial we get a Perry Mason/ Murder She Wrote style confession in the last 2 minutes.

 

That's soooo lame. Especially the way they do it. The people confess when they have no damned reason to. Some of them confess with their lawyer right there and the fucking lawyer stays SILENT! (after he's spent half the show fighting the cops with all the dirty tactics imaginable.)

 

The last minute confession is seeping into CSI too. Last CSI: Miami I watched, a drug lord CONFESSED to murdering an underling when the cops tell him that they've found the dead man's blood on his boat. That it. Nothing fancier than that. Mr. Big Shot doesn't even say, "I'd like to phone my lawyer." He doesn't say, "Maybe he cut himself shaving last time he was on board" Nothing. He just says, "I had to kill him. I had no choice."

 

Give me a fucking break.

 

And I think CSI is getting waaaay too caught up in the power of forensics and starting to forget basic policework. I saw an episode of original CSI where they go through an hour]/b] of poking at carpet fibres with their blue light and metal testing etc and they come up with the surprise discovery that, 'The grandmother killed the girl in her rental car', and ONLY then, they say, "Oh yeah, looks like she had a million dollar insurance policy on the granddaughter. That's why she did it."

 

HOLY FUCK! Any cop fresh out of detective training knows that the FIRST thing you check is who gets paid from the victim's death. Any half-competent cop would have tagged the Grandmother as the chief suspect right off the bat with a simple phone call to the insurance company. Do they really need Forensic Science to figure out that one?

 

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Anyways, I hear good things about shows like 'The Wire' and 'The Shield'. I've never seen an episode. Are they worth it? Is anyone doing a sensible, watchable cop show anymore?

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Was it that the kids had never met the father in the context of their own family, or that they had never met their father in the context of their half-sibling's family?

 

As for Shield, I watched a season or two, but I need to catch up at some point. The show itself isn't so much about catching criminals as it is about the officer's lives. A word of advice, though. Don't mention The Shield to Nick. He hates that show with a fiery fucking passion. That and Björk. He thinks she's full of crazy.

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The Shield and The Wire are both fantastic television, definitely the best cop shows on today - if not ever. The Shield is less a cop procedural and more a study of the characters and their various shady ethics. The Wire is about as rich and deep as television can get. It's like sitting down and watching a novel. By Tolstoy. In Baltimore.

Edited by Silent Bob
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The Shield and The Wire are both fantastic television, definitely the best cop shows on today - if not ever. The Shield is less a cop procedural and more a study of the characters and their various shady ethics. The Wire is about as rich and deep as television can get. It's like sitting down and watching a novel. By Tolstoy. In Baltimore.

Just started watching The Wire, got season 1... it's pretty hard going

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1. 16 year old gets arrested near the end of the episode for attempted murder of his 16 year old girlfriend. Then it turns out the g/f is really 28 and masquerading as 16. Fine. I don't mind that twist into weirdness. But THEN, the defense attorney tries to have the g/f charged with statutory rape so that he can claim the boy's attempted murder was 'rape induced rage'. The only problem is that everone, including the boy himself, acknowledges that the boy did NOT know she was really 28 at the time he attempted to murder her, so that can't fuckin work!. A plothole that fuckin big is hard to miss.

this episode had so much promise and the commercials for it built it up, but it was SUCH a let down, i was upset at the end of it.

 

Last CSI: Miami I watched,

well, there's your prboblem; that show sucks.

 

the Reg. CSI is awesome, though. Every now and then you get a lame episode, but again, it's track record is pretty consistant.

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  • 11 years later...

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