The quality of TV drama has never been better than it is right now, but the ways in which people watch their favorite series have changed dramatically over the years.
From the late 1940s through the 1970s, three major networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, dominated broadcast TV in the U.S. Although PBS and local channels existed, most people planned their TV viewing and much of their leisure lives around what those three networks were showing. Then in the late 1970s the VCR was introduced, taking hold in the early 1980s. People could record their favorite programs for viewing on their own time. In the ensuing years other avenues of recording shows for viewing at one’s leisure were introduced.
Today, with the proliferation of cable TV programming, on demand broadcasts by cable providers and the internet, TV viewing choices are seemingly endless. The big three networks’ hold on us no longer exists.
A growing number of TV viewers no longer bother to record their favorite shows. They don’t even bother to watch commercial-free showings of their favorite shows available on demand or the internet. They wait for box sets of their favorite shows to hit the video stores where they can catch an entire season of 22-24 episodes of 43 minutes each in a two-day marathon. How this will effect long-term programming is problematic. NBC is now filling its third hour of prime time Monday-Friday with a cheaply produced talk show. In the meantime, however, we can catch up with the newly released tenth season of one of NBC’s few enduring dramatic shows.
NBC’s venerable Law & Order is in its twentieth season. Old episodes continue to be shown in syndication on cable TV almost daily. DVD releases, however, have been stingy. Thus far, only the first six seasons and the fourteenth, the last with Jerry Orbach, have been released. Fans of the series’ now more popular spin-off, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, however, have been luckier. All ten seasons of that series are now available on DVD.
Unlike the original Law & Order, with its almost constant cast changes, the cast of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit has remained relatively stable through the years, with only the Assistant District Attorney changing from time to time. The detectives who are the prime players in the Special Victims Unit, Chris Meloni, Mariska Hargitay, Ice T, Richard Belzer and their captain, Dann Florek, remain the key players. A newer detective, Adam Beach, who was brought in as a regular in season nine exited in that season’s finale. Tamara Tunie, the resident medical examiner since the second season, and B.D. Wong, the resident psychiatrist since the third, are also long time welcome faces.
Diane Neal, the Assistant District Attorney assigned to prosecute SVU’s cases since the third season, also exited at the end of season nine. Michaela McManus, who was brought in as the new ADA in season ten, was not very well liked by either the critics or the public and was fired halfway through the season. She is seen early in one episode but is then replaced by Stephanie March, the popular original ADA from the first two seasons, who explains that McManus was abruptly called to Washington, D.C. She is not seen again, although her name appears on the opening credits for the remainder of the season.
One thing the series has always provided is a strong showcase for guest stars. Whereas several of the leads of the original Law & Order have been nominated for Emmys over the years, only three actors, Julia Roberts, Jane Alexander and Tovah Feldhsuh, the last in 2003, have been nominated for their guest starring performances. None have ever won, although series lead Jerry Orbach did win a posthumous Emmy in 2004. Law & Order: SVU has been a far luckier venue for its guests.
Jane Alexander, Tracy Pollan, Martha Plimpton, Barbara Barrie, Marlee Matlin, Mare Winningham, Angela Lansbury, Marica Gay Harden and Robin Williams have all been nominated through season nine. Leslie Caron won in season eight and Cynthia Nixon in season nine. Series star Meloni was nominated in season seven, the year Hargitay became the first female star of a police procedural to win. It was her third nomination. She has continued to be nominated every year since.
This year, in addition to Hargitay’s by now perennial nod, three guest stars were also nominated and one of them won.
Brenda Blethyn was nominated for her portrayal of a kindly woman with a secret past. Carol Burnett was nominated for her portrayal of a black widow. Ellen Burstyn won for her portrayal of Meloni’s bi-polar mom, a wrenching performance that was the equal of any of her many film awards.
An interesting aside to season ten is that three of the actors who’ve played lawyers in past seasons, John Cullum, Lindsay Crouse and Swoosie Kurtz, have been promoted to judges. One of them, though, won’t be back on the bench any time soon as she was carted off in handcuffs at the end of a late season episode.
The feverish season finale ends with the death of one the series’ most beloved characters. I won’t tell you who, but it’s no one I’ve mentioned.
With the super modern techniques of crime solving employed in the Law & Order and C.S.I. franchises and their many imitators, it’s refreshing to find a hip, modern series that employs the little gray cells, as Hercule Poirot would say, in solving its murders.
Last year’s biggest breakout network show was CBS’ The Mentalist, the first season of which has just been released on DVD.
From the very first scene of this show we know we are in for a treat. The hero, Patrick Jane (Simon Baker), is a former phony psychic who is now employed as a consultant to the California Bureau of Investigation (C.B.I.). The pilot begins with a well-to-do middle-aged man (Steven Culp) holding a press conference about the murder of his teenage daughter. Baker walks into Culp’s kitchen, makes himself a sandwich while boiling water for tea. Culp’s wife walks in, Jane offers her a cup of tea and sits down to chat with her. He asks her if she thinks her husband is the murderer. She says she doesn’t know. He asks her if she asked her husband that question. She says no, asking what the point would be since he’d only deny it. He tells her most wives know when their husbands are lying. In walks Culp.
Baker asks Culp if he did it. The way he says “no” convinces the wife he did. She leaves the room in tears. As Culp is telling Baker to get the hell of his house, his wife comes back with a gun and shoots the bastard dead.
The characters and situations are as up-to-date as any of the competition, only the methods used to solve the crimes are old-fashioned, but old-fashioned in a good way. The writing is first-rate with lots of droll humor emanating from the banter between Baker and his associates led by his boss, Robin Tunney, who is Watson to his Holmes. There are dark undertones to Baker’s character, whose wife and daughter were murdered by a serial killer, but the darkness never overwhelms his innate goodness.
This is the fourth TV series for Baker who has been in films since the late 1980s and the one that seems to have finally made him a star. Previously nominated for a Golden Globe for the series The Guardian, The Mentalist earned him a well deserved Emmy nomination this year.
Classic film releases continue to be hard to find. Thankfully we now have the Warner Archive which continues to release fondly remembered gems. This month’s releases include Crossroads; Ice Palaceand Men Don’t Leave.
After the success of 1934’s The Thin Man, William Powell concentrated almost entirely on comedy roles. 1942’s Crossroads, directed by Jack Conway, gives him a rare dramatic role as a French diplomat who may or may not have been a thief and murderer in his earlier life.
Hedy Lamarr is his young wife; Claire Trever (in a role intended for Marlene Dietrich) is a nightclub singer who may or may not have once been his lover; Basil Rathone plays a conniving blackmailer and Margaret Wycherly appears as an old lady who may or may not be his mother. You may guess the ending but not how they get there. The acting, particularly by Powell and Rathbone, is first rate.
Edna Ferber’s novels, including Cimarron, Show Boat and Giant, had long been fodder for Hollywood. With Alaska’s entry into the union in 1959, Ferber’s Ice Palacecouldn’t have been more topical. Perhaps it was too topical. The 1960 film, directed by Vincent Sherman, was not a huge success but is affectionately remembered by those who have seen it as one of the better films derived from Ferber’s multi-generational soap operas.
Richard Burton and Robert Ryan are long time adversaries who share a granddaughter (Diane McBain) whose parents, Burton’s daughter (Shirley Knight) and Ryan’s son (Steve Harris), perished in the Alaskan wilderness when she was an infant. Carolyn Jones is the woman who secretly loves both men.
One of the most sought after films on DVD, 1990’s Men Don’t Leave, directed by Paul Brickman, is still popular enough to have gotten a major regular DVD release. It’s doubly surprising that it would be given such a low profile release considering that the film’s stars, Jessica Lange and Chris O’Donnell, are bigger names now than they were then, but let’s not quibble. It’s great to have this quirky film available on DVD at long last.
Lange plays a recent widow who moves with her teenage sons (O’Donnell and Charlie Korsmo) to Baltimore where sixteen-year-old O’Donnell has an affair with middle-aged Joan Cusack. If the concept sounds more Continental than American, that’s because it’s a remake of a French film. It’s deft and sensitively handled by Brickman whose only other film is the cult classic Risky Business.
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