The Final Gavel?

After 20 years, NBC has canceled police/courtroom procedural institution Law & Order. In one sense, it's a year too soon. Had the show been renewed for the fall, its 21 seasons would have broken the record set by Gunsmoke, which ran from 1955 to 1975.

In another sense, the cancellation comes years too late. TV years may be something like dog years, in which one calendar year is roughly equal to seven years of lifespan, because the show had been a creaking Jurassic-Park refugee for some time. Its height of popularity centered on the 12-year reign of Jerry Orbach as Detective Lenny Briscoe, the "experienced one" of the show's investigative team. He followed Paul Sorvino and before him, George Dzundza, in being partnered with Chris Noth's Mike Logan. Orbach outlasted Logan, working later with Benjamin Bratt's Rey Curtis and Jesse L. Martin's Ed Green. Briscoe was always good for some kind of acid observations on human nature as well as a dark-humored quip about the murder victim whose discovery would open the episodes. Orbach's acting skill made Briscoe well-loved in spite of the character's frequent displays of misanthropy.

Orbach's departure in 2004 signaled the acceleration of the downward trend of the show. Most of the other characters had pretty much done whatever could be done with them at least a season or two earlier. The courtroom side of the series was saddled with Sam Waterston's 70th trip through righteous indignation as DA Jack McCoy and the robotic line readings of Elisabeth Röhm as Serena Southerlyn, whose strangely-spelled last name was the only interesting thing about her. Although the presence of the mighty Dennis Farina -- a former real-life Chicago cop -- as Detective Joe Fontana added some flavor for awhile, he left after three seasons. Several new cast members were quite accomplished actors, but since they were doing the same things quite accomplished actors had already done on L&O, there were few reasons to watch.

Viewers were more drawn to the soapy, titillation-driven stories of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, where lead detectives Elliot Stabler and Olivia Benson wielded self-righteousness thicker than any Kevlar vest and more suffocating than tear gas. They were also initially lured to the quirky Robert Goren of Law & Order: Criminal Intent, at least until Goren's character went from quirky to irritating (about thirty minutes into the second episode by my watch, but others, I am sure, disagree). Chris Noth returned to the L&O franchise by playing Logan again for a few seasons on Intent, but it only served to highlight how long of a way a little of Vincent D'Onofrio's Goren went.

Producer Dick Wolf has given NBC a sixth L&O show, Law & Order: Los Angeles. No word on whether or not attorneys Michael Kuzak or Arnold Becker will appear. Sebastian Stark is probably waaaay too much to hope for.

The fourth show, Law & Order: Trial By Jury, bombed and was yanked after a few weeks. The fifth is Law & Order: UK, which airs in England and features Jamie Bamber, lately Lee Adama of Battlestar Galactica and Freema Agyeman, lately Martha Jones of Doctor Who and Torchwood. According to the English producers, the show re-uses some of the original L&O's episodes for its own scripts. Which is fine, because the original show over here has been re-using them for...nah, that's too easy. The major differences center on English law as opposed to U.S. law and the fact that attorneys (barristers) in England wear powdered wigs and robes in court.

Wolf, according to one item I'm not linking to because it seems mostly gossip and also features some free-range vocabulary to boot, was taken by surprise by the cancellation and may shop the series to a cable network. I don't know about the wisdom of that move; scheduling it so it's even easier to forget when an episode is on doesn't seem like a good send-off to an iconic show. Unless he decided to shake things up and make them really interesting, that is.

Like hiring Buffy Summers as an assistant DA, and every now and again make the defendant a vampire that she has to stake with a very sharp No. 2 pencil. Or inserting the Blue Collar Comedy group as cast members: Larry the Cable Guy stuns the perpetrator by pointing out that people really do pay to see him onstage, Ron White drinks him into a confession, prosecutor Jeff Foxworthy closes the case with, "If you think that the defendant committed the crime beyond a reasonable doubt...he might be a guilty redneck" and judge Bill Engvall hands down the sentence: "Here's your sign!" Stupid? Sure, but we're talking about television here. Stupid is its common currency.

Law and Order started in a time when scripted dramas were the heavyweights of television programming and no one had ever heard the oxymoron "reality show." It predates MTV's The Real World by two years and Survivor by a decade. A resurgence of those kinds of dramas, like Burn Notice, Monk, Mad Men or even The Sopranos could have given it a wave to ride to a resurgence of its own, but Wolf's vision couldn't encompass enough change to allow it to take advantage of the opportunities they represented. So if Law & Order is really over,  I'll miss what used to be a must-watch show. But I -- along with quite a few other former viewers -- seem to have been missing it most of the time for awhile now anyway.