Law and Order Did Involve Character Development. This is One Story

 

Like millions of Americans I grew up watching Law & Order in syndication. And while I acknowledged fairly early it was an incredible drama, it was difficult for me to get into the same way that I could other procedurals such as Homicide and The X-Files. The reason was while I was willing to acknowledge the level of the writing and performances this was the first series many viewers watched where characters seemed almost incidental to the plot.

That’s understandable considering that almost every season the show changed at least one cast member and it got very hard to get attached. For me there was another factor. I first watched the series when it aired on A & E and that network did something I’ve never seen another network do with a syndicated drama before: it always aired the episodes out of chronological order. Monday you’d be watching an episode from Season 5; Tuesday you’d see one from Season 2; Wednesday it could be from Season 6.

Because this was not a serialized drama it never mattered as much as it did other series and this pattern continued almost with every cable network it moved to for the next decade, first TNT, then Sundance. It wasn’t until fairly recently – basically within the last three years – that ever major cable network that airs in syndication started to run the series in chronological order from the pilot until the series finale after 20 seasons.

Now I still haven’t seen in nearly thirty years every single episode of the original Law & Order – there are, after all more than 450 episodes in the first 20 seasons and the show got officially rebooted on NBC back in 2021. And even after seeing a majority of the original run I’m not going to pretend that the characters on the show had arcs or even demonstrated growth the way you would see even on other long running series such as ER  or current dramas along the lines of 9-1-1. The actors were rarely allowed to show much beyond the story and it wasn’t like the nature of the show allowed them to show much from week to week.

But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t there and that it didn’t show up almost from the beginning. This was clear in one of the most iconic characters who showed up in the first season: Mike Logan, played memorably by Chris Noth for the first five seasons. Very early on, we learned that he came from an abusive home: that his mother was the kind of harridan who yelled at his father (also a cop) until he hit her and his mother was pass the beatings on to her son. Eventually we would learn that his mother beat Mike with a belt in one hand and a rosary in the other. This pattern of abuse would play out throughout Noth’s time on the series and eventually when his character resurfaced on Criminal Intent, the writers remembered it.

We saw it play out throughout many of the other characters in subtler ways: the Irish Catholicism of Max Greevey (George Dzundza) and his issues with the sex on the street, compared with Phil Ceretta’s (Paul Sorvino) and how it played out with his children. We saw it in Don Cragen’s struggles with the bottle and how he looked at in comparison with Lennie Briscoe (Jerry Orbach) once he joined the unit in Season 3. It became a bigger issue after Sam Waterston joined the cast in Season 5, first in his eventual affair with assistant Claire Kincaid (Jill Hennessy) which ended in tragedy as well as his being a child of the 1960s and how his antiwar leanings sometimes came into conflict with his aggressive prosecution.

And while the show didn’t have the same institutional memory that Homicide did, it did demonstrate over the years. Sometimes it had to do with revisiting old cases after several seasons had gone by and it other ways it dealt with it even when the characters involved had left the show. Perhaps the best example of this can be seen with one of the original cast members: Paul Robinette, played by Richard Brooks for the first three seasons.

Brooks was the first African-American cast on Law & Order  but he was also in a place that no future African-American cast member was: the District Attorney’s office. Paul Robinette was also the first character who had the role of ADA, a role that would after he left the show only be held by actresses ever since. The nature of his role was not that different from the type that Claire Kincaid or future versions would play – his job was to work to shore up the case for prosecution for the ADA; in the years Brooks was on the show Ben Stone, played with nuance and quiet by the brilliant Michael Moriarty.

There was an interesting dynamic between Robinette and Stone that with only one exception (the pairing of Jack McCoy and Jamie Ross in Seasons 7 and 8) was never played out again. There was always a pattern, starting with Claire Kincaid, of instructor and student, something that played out in a somewhat creepy fashion as Waterston aged and his second-in-command’s remained women in their early thirties. The relationship between Stone and Robinette, by contrast, was closer to that of two brothers with Stone only slightly older. I+ndeed in one episode we learned that Paul and Ben played tennis and Ben sprained his arm during a match, diving for a lob. “He finally beat you?” Cragen asked him jokingly. “He was leading 5 to 4.” Paul says with a straight face.

 There was a sense that these two men treated each other as equal in a way I honestly don’t recall any subsequent pairing in the District Attorney’s office. While Robinette never got to try a case while a regular, you got the sense these two men balanced each other out: Ben Stone was soft-spoken in his demeanor, Paul Robinette had a fire within him. Indeed there were times Robinette could be a more aggressive prosecutor than Ben wanted to be.

Ben Stone was aware of racism as it affected his job and the cases he prosecuted. Paul tried his hardest not to make it as big a focus of his job, and that would frequently lead him to be viewed as a race traitor throughout his first three seasons. And it’s one of those cases that I want to talk about when it comes to Paul’s character.

In Season 1 Law and Order aired one of its first clearly ripped from the headlines stories in an episode called ‘Out of the Half-Light’. A teenage African-American woman is found in a trash bin, covered with graffiti among them the word WHORE. She’s brought into the hospital and Greevey and Logan are called in. The girl has been missing for three days and it appears she’s the subject of immense trauma, possibly sexual assault. She doesn’t want to talk to Greevey and Logan and when she asks who did this to her, she writes down two words: “WHITE COPS”

Greevey and Logan proceed with caution, call in a rape counselor and ask for the civil rights division of the FBI to come in. They then try to find out the story about this girl and learn she isn’t popular with friends and that her boyfriend is an addict (Harold Perrineau in a very early role) who was swept up in a crack den a week earlier. He is cagey about his whereabouts and refuses to even talk about his relationship with the victim. Logan knows by the time they get to the crack den in question that even of the assault did happen here that finding evidence is impossible. “We’re going find fingerprints going back to the Civil War,” he moans, looking around it.

However when they try to revisit the victim they learn that her parents have called in Congressman Eaton, who makes it very clear that whatever investigation they make it will not be done with the cooperation of either her or the family. Eaton makes it very clear he is going to put the department on trial and begins speaking to the press in very inflammatory language.

Older readers will recognize the circumstances of this case as paralleling Tawana Brawley’s case in 1987, where she accused four white men, including two cops of assaulting her. Eaton, in turn, is clearly patterned after Al Sharpton, one of her most prominent advisors who tried the case in the media and refused to allow the cops to talk to her. (Footage can be seen of him tearing up a grand jury subpoena.) Sharpton has done much in the last twenty years to redeem his reputation (he would even appear in an early episode of Law & Order: SVU as himself!) but he was fundamentally a gadfly to law enforcement and it plays out in Cragen’s attitude towards him. He tells a story of the two of them meeting at a sit-in where he said he wanted to arrange busing to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s funeral – and where he made clear if he didn’t get it, he would ‘burn the city down’.

By the time the case gets to the District Attorney’s office, it is already a circus. The evidence makes it clear that the rape allegations are false and the behavior of the girl (when we see her) makes it clear she’s being manipulated by larger forces, pushed by Eaton. Stone tries to give Eaton the benefit of the doubt but when the two meet, Eaton makes it very clear that his eyes are on bigger fish. “Who’s heads do you want?” Stone asks seriously. Almost humorously Eaton says: “Cragen’s. The Commissioners. Yours.”

Eaton continues his grandstanding both before the grand jury and when both the girl and her family are held in contempt. When he gets up to speak before an African-American judge, she makes it clear that she believes he’s pulling the strings and is infuriated by him.

Paul finally decides that there might be a way to turn down the heat and works behind the scenes with another African-American religious leader who acts as a go-between with Robinette and the family. Without revealing the details (I believe you should see the episode yourself) he gets them to drop the charges. However when Eaton meets with him in an empty restaurant, not only does he not seem repentant he calls Robinette a ‘house n---er” and that a false peace is no peace at all. Robinette loses his cool. “King walked with the angels. You slither in the slime on your belly.”

In the final minute of the episode Robinette admits to Stone he has doubts about his role. Stone asks one of the great questions in TV history: “Are you a lawyer who’s black or a black man who’s a lawyer?” Robinette tells him it depends on the day. The viewer forgets the question – but the show doesn’t.

At the end of the third season Brooks was written off the show because of pressure from the network. Law and Order in its first three seasons had no female regulars and NBC believed that for the show to continue, it needed two female characters. Both Brooks and Dann Florek (who played Donald Cragen) were written out of the show and unlike every other character before or since, no explanation was given at the time. Later on the show would retcon the series to see that Cragen left to run the Anti-Corruption Task Force and in 1999, he was named the official head of Special Victims Unit. The series never gave an explanation as to what happened to Robinette – until Season 6.

In ‘Custody’ Briscoe and his new partner Rey Curtis are called into investigate the murder of a Family Services bureaucrat named Lawrence Bellow. They learn that Bellow was taking kickbacks and eventually sold the information of one of the foster children he placed to a white family to her birth mother. Jenny Mays is an African-American teenager who was addicted to crack and when her son Jamal was taken from her she was living in her own filth. She has since cleaned herself up after going to rehab and has manipulated her boyfriend into bribing Bellow for the information of where her son’s whereabouts were. Bellow upped the ante before the meeting took place and we eventually learn the boyfriend was told to get the address whatever it took.

After Jenny Mays is found with her son on a bus about to go out of state, Paul Robinette represents her. He is amicable to Jack McCoy saying that “unless they changed the rules when I was on the other side of the aisle, this doesn’t make the context of felony murder.”  McCoy argues that Mays was kidnapping her son and that resulted in a homicide. Paul tries to put a shine on Jenny’s halo but it becomes clear very quickly that Jenny’s intentions were not pure: she was planning on leave New York to parts unknown and letting her boyfriend take the wrap.

When the judge denies Paul’s motion to dismiss the indictment and sets up a trial date Paul asks if they can go off the record. He tells the judge he intends to place a motion to have him recused because one day during a conversation with him and Ben Stone, the judge said that he believed all drug addicts should be rounded up and sterilized. “You can either recuse yourself now or have your views known to the public.” When McCoy says he wants a hearing, the judge thanks him but says: “For the record, I won’t be able to hear this case.” When Jack tells Paul he bullied a judge Paul’s attitude is nonchalant:

“I’m the bully? I don’t have a hundred-million dollar war chest and the power of the state to prosecute or a police department to enforce it. That leaves you. You’re the biggest bad-ass on the block.”

When Adam Schiff hears this he’s actually proud of Paul. He knew Ben Stone was touring Europe and wouldn’t have been able to testify at a hearing. “Pure poker,” he says. Schiff asks Jack if he offered Paul a plea and he says he turned it down. “Somehow I think a trial is what Paul wants.” And he does.

Paul makes his opening argument with the following statement:

“The people’s case rests on one word. Kidnapping. They could use other words. Custodial interference. Restitution. Justice…Justice. But they’re stuck on kidnapping. They say Jenny Mays stole her son from his parents. They’re right. But it doesn’t matter. Because the real kidnapper is the State of New York. Now over the next few weeks, I’m going to talk about black children lost in White America. How cross-racial adoption has become the code word for cultural genocide…The other side won’t tell you this because they’re part of the same racist system. I know because I worked in that system for three years. I’ll lay out the facts for you. You’ll decide.”

 

This is much the attitude Eaton had but its far more toned down. Robinette isn’t trying to burn the system down; he wants to paint a picture. And he makes it very clear when he cross-examines Jamal’s white foster mother and when she uses her argument about Jenny being a crack baby points out the hypocrisy when he argues that his mother was arrested with a DUI when she was high on painkillers.

McCoy demands to see the judge in chambers and Paul points out the hypocrisy about his client: his white foster mother went to a cushy rehab facility, his real black mother had to wait weeks for one to become available. He also tells the judge that Jack knew this knowledge but didn’t submit for discovery – a trick that McCoy has played before and actually seems pissed to be called out on. When he objects and demands the statement be stricken, the judge denies it.

In a conversation between Claire and Paul before a critical moment in the trial, the former and current EADA have a fairly friendly, almost flirtatious conversation. Claire tries to say that race is an excuse and Paul says not an excuse: “A mitigating factor. Look at the two of us. A black man and a white woman in a bar late at night. You think every white man in the room isn’t looking at us right now.” Claire tries to dismiss it: “You think that’s a problem in Manhattan?” Paul tells her in the Manhattan he lives in, he has to take it seriously. “It’s a school night, Claire go home,” he says fondly. Claire looks at him and says: “All right, but this conversation’s not over.”

The final scene of the episode takes after three days of deliberation have past. The forewoman asks the judge a question about the law: “Can we convict on the murder count if we don’t convict on the kidnapping” The judge says that due to the rules of felony murder, they can’t convict on the murder charge without the underlying felony. “Then your honor, I don’t think we can break the deadlock.” The judge declares a mistrial and demands a new trial date be set.

The final scene is between Paul and Jack and its one of my favorites in the entire series. Paul makes it clear that he will convince Jenny to take the original plea. “I didn’t want it to go this far,” Jack says to him. “I wanted the jury to send a message,” Paul says. “They sent us both a message.” Jack pauses. “You’ve come along way from the District Attorney’s office,” he says with the kind of admiration Jack doesn’t usually say to those who’ve bested him in court. Paul pauses:

“Ben Stone once asked me if I was a lawyer who was black or a black man who was a lawyer. All those years I thought I was the former. All those years I was wrong.”

This is a superb episode in its own right but its emotionally satisfying because of how the series shows that character growth is possible even on a series where its not front and center. Paul Robinette has managed a way to square both sides of his identity but unlike Eaton he doesn’t want to burn the system down in the name of the accused but rather use the system to show the flaws in it. He still believes in justice but he wants to point out the inequities in it. We’ll see Brooks in two future episodes much later in the series but he is still pursuing civil rights and the flaws in our system in his own way. And he believes in the right to a defense without meaning to destroy the whole system.

I acknowledge the arguments for Law & Order being a propaganda piece to whitewash the malfeasance in the criminal justice system are not without merit. But particularly in the first few seasons it tried harder than necessary to look at all sides of the equation. And looking at Robinette’s character arc, particularly in the two episodes I’ve sited here, you can see that there is a middle ground between wanting to burn down the whole system and just showing its flaws for the world to see. Law & Order could do that very well and it deserves credit for that as well as being an extraordinary TV show.