The Real McCoy

I have absolutely no business writing a blog post right now; I've got a talk to finish for tomorrow night and notes to write for a presentation next week, but I couldn't let the day pass without saying something about the passing of Law & Order. If you know me, and if you happen to be a reader of this fine but lately neglected blog, then you know that one of my favorite pastimes is passing the time with my favorite fictional New York City detectives. In fact, my personal concept of God - if I am indeed created in Her image - is a vision of a vibrant, full-figured, thoughtful and creative woman who often retires to the couch with a carton of cold lo mein and a DVR full of Briscoe and Green.

I was a regular from the beginning. Mainly because I found myself, in 1990, away from New York and everyone and everything I loved. I was one of those kids who went away to college because everyone else was doing it. But I was homesick as hell, and hating every moment of my academic and social life at Delaware. Law & Order gave me a chance to go home for an hour every week. Even more so, because my dad, as many of you know, was a retired NYC detective. Every Thursday morning of the regular season (and even some repeats) from the show's premiere until his death in 2005, my dad would call me to discuss, recap and rate the episode.

Some of them were direct plot links to cases he worked on (the one featuring the murder of a violinist from the "Manhattan Symphony Orchestra" comes to mind), while others were cases that his friends worked. And some, as he said, were just plain bullshit, made up by writers who didn't know jack about police procedure. "If you're going to write, Ann," he'd say the morning after a particularly unsatisfying episode, "get your facts straight. Don't make it up. Ask people who know." My dad always chuckled at Adam Schiff, remembering his own days working for Robert Morgenthau in the DA's office on the Detective Task Force, his last assignment. And there was plenty of insider language that made the show real to us both. Whenever I heard terms like DD-5, Jade Squad, Molyneux and Miranda, it felt like home.

As a matter of fact, one of the reasons I was homesick at Delaware was because after I expressed an interest in applying to NYU, my father, that very Detective First Grade from Manhattan South, whose stint as a member of the Sixth Precinct put him smack in the middle of Greenwich Village in the late 70s, gave me my own personal tour of the campus. "Yeah, I investigated five or six murders here," he said confidingly, as we walked together through Washington Square Park, munching hot pretzels from the vendor cart. "One of them was a castration with pliers. That was pretty bad. Then there was the serial rapist on Jane Street. He got more than twenty women before we were able to make an arrest. Then you've got the drug dealers on West Fourth. And of course, the underground bomb factory on MacDougal. Yep. Tough town," he said, brushing the salt from his fingers. And before I knew it, I was a freshman in Newark, Delaware, on a campus known more for its chemistry labs than its meth labs.

As the years progressed, and changes were made to the cast, my dad usually had a comment or two about it. DA Nora Lewin (Dianne Wiest) was a bleeding heart liberal loser who'd never get re-elected. Serena Southerlyn (Elisabeth Rohm) was an idiot who wouldn't have lasted three minutes in the DAs office. Fontana? Guy's a crooked cop. And the plot line about McCoy and Kincaid was too much of a soap opera. He just wanted to see good cases in the hands of competent actors. The passing of Jerry Orbach, just a few months before his own death, was hard for us both. Faced with seeing the names of his friends, one by one, appearing in the obituary column of The Gold Shield newsletter he got every month, the departure of Detective Briscoe was a reminder of times gone by, of an era that had passed - of the institutional memory of a department he served giving way to a new era of detectives who were younger, tech-savvy, and sometimes even female.

I'd always been a loyal viewer, but following the events in the fall of 2001, I became something of a junkie. My dad didn't love the 9/11 story lines all that much. "Too political," he'd say on the phone on Thursday morning. "I don't mind Fred Thompson, but Dick Wolf is trying too hard." I, on the other hand, loved seeing my own experience of the city where I worked and commuted and panicked on a regular basis. The 9/11 story lines never felt exploitative to me. They made me feel as if I wasn't alone.

One night in 2005, a few months after my father died, when I still wasn't quite used to the sound of the silent phone on Thursday morning, I was having dinner on the West Side with a friend of mine, when Sam Waterston walked into the restaurant. He looked exactly the same as he did on the show: jacket slung over one shoulder, heavy brows, kind smile. He was seated with three other people at the table next to mine. Now, I'm not a fangirl, but my heart was seriously palpitating at the sight of one of my character heroes. I remember wanting to say that I loved the show, that it was, in many ways, what had gotten me through 9/11, what was getting me through the loss of my dad. That it was a comfort to me to know that the fight for justice still went on, even if it was fictional. But I didn't say anything at all. As we got up to leave, I looked back at him just as I was about to walk out the door. He looked up at me and smiled. It was enough.

I know that the show will live on in reruns, and that the sixty seven episodes on my DVR should be well enough to keep me going for quite some time. I even know that I haven't been the most loyal viewer for the past couple of seasons. Once it left the Wednesday 10PM time slot, it was hard to find; I didn't know these new detectives; I was baffled by some of the story lines. And I knew I could always find the comforting ones - the old school episodes - on TNT. As the show slid into jepoardy every season, and the press picked up the story, I became aware that I was part of a coterie of smart, cool women who were completely addicted to L&O. And I always knew that the cancellation was coming. Even I, for so many years a regular in the squad room, thought that it was going downhill fast.

And now the time has come. As the prayer book - and George Harrison - tells us: all things must pass. All that lives must die. My father's L&O seasons - fifteen in all - still remind me of what it was like to be a child of the NYPD, of what those stories and cases and trials meant to him and to me. That the people were represented by two separate, but equally important groups - the police, who investigate crimes, and the district attorneys, who prosecute the offenders. That their stories were our stories. And that "justice, justice, you shall pursue" wasn't just a hollow saying. That pursuing justice is serious business, no matter what sort of wisecracks got cracked in the process. That doing the right thing wasn't a joke. "If I were joking," said Detective Lenny Briscoe, "I'd be wearing a fez, and no pants."