Welcome to Season 2 of Law & Ordocki! If you’re wondering why this particular moment sparked the return of this feature to Rhymes With Nerdy, you have no one to thank but Fred Thompson. When news of his death at age 73 from lymphoma disseminated, I won’t lie: my first thought was “how can I make fun of him on the Internet”. Yeah, I know, I’m a real mercenary nightcrawler type person. News of his death left me conflicted: I enjoyed him as a character actor yet detested his politics, his reverse mortgage hawking and especially didn’t like what he did to Law & Order. Since only the last of those are within the purview of this column, I’ll focus on that. Thompson’s emergence occurred while the show was in decline; 9/11 repositioned the show farther to the right than it had ever been for reasons that are understandable but no less irritating, especially in hindsight. Serena Southerlyn was Jack’s hot assistant du jour, her one-dimensional liberalism contrasting Fred Thompson’s one-dimensional conservatism. The more polemical the show gets, the worse it is, because writers of Law & Order aren’t exactly contributors to CounterPunch. It’s a testament that Jack McCoy’s politics are the least obnoxious, and his beliefs are largely contingent on how much whiskey he’s had that day or who comped him a bottle of Daniels last. The episode I’m covering today doesn’t feature as much of the badly written partisan shrieking as it does a thinly veiled Martha Stewart who counts Fred Thompson’s Arthur Branch as a friend. Remember when Martha Stewart was relevant? Yeah, I know, I had that issue of MAD Magazine too!
Brad Oosterhouse is found dead with a massive headwound not caused by the tumble down the stairs. The faithful hound sits by the corpse and is the reason the cops are alerted to the murder: it’s a classic case of Law & Order bystanders (dog maintainer with a Russian inflection and his banter partner) walking in on a body. The crime scene guys determine he was killed from a golf club bludgeoning, leading Lennie to quip “so that’s what a one iron is for”. This moment, and others littered through the episode establish that if you want flippant remarks in the vicinity of murder scenes, you ought to either come to the best or not bother at all. Oosterhouse was a stockbroker and a ladies’ man (Brad was “warm like a down comforter”, one says, prompting me to wonder if you could make his corpse into a comforter), often taking the wives of clients out for dinner, to shows, he danced with them – the man had an answering machine full of messages from hot to trot sounding women. Personally, I don’t get it, because the dead body they use at the beginning of the episode looks like a Chris Noth stunt double in a shitty tracksuit. Whoever wears a tracksuit indoors kinda deserves to die. Briscoe and Green dutifully run down the debutantes and find two suspicious pals of Oosterhouse: Lindsay Tucker the photographer and Jackie Scott the Martha Stewart/Jennifer Lawrence as Joy in Joy. (This episode could’ve used a woman taking 35 minutes to say a single statement that could be in every TV spot.) They also happen to be child and parent!
I’ll bet you it took the writers three days to come up with that fake business name.
Tucker is clearly in love with Oosterhouse, brushing away all those other women he took to plays and concerts because hey, those bitches didn’t have a little girl that Oosterhouse adored. That’s how she knows they’re to be together forever. There you have it, single moms: the key to finding a good mate is whether or not they’re really interested in your prepubescent child. Wait a minute, this is Law & Order, not SVU. Pedophiles aren’t allowed on Law & Order, not anymore. Sorry for the error. Tucker uses Scott as an alibi, neither of them acknowledging their relation until pressed. It’s only when Green and Briscoe realize that, in Briscoe’s words, Oosterhouse was “schtupping” mother and daughter, the latter ignorant of this. (“It’s like Oedipus, the sequel”, Lennie muses.) I gotta say, no one says forms of the word “schtup” quite like Jerry Orbach; it’s like Danny DeVito and “whores”. It’s only when Lindsay receives some lingerie meant for her mother that she realizes Brad indulged in the ultimate fantasy (as codified in pornography) and immediately confesses to killing him.
“Where are you walking, sir?” “Nowhere in particular. I just wanted you to walk with me so it looked like I had something better to do than field questions from the police, like all the characters on these shows.”
You might say to yourself “well, that’s stupid and unexpected, if she found out he was fucking fake Martha Stewart now why would she have killed him earlier?”. Daughter’s taking the rap for mom, as the motive becomes a lot more complicated than lover’s quarrel. Lindsay going down obscures the financial improprieties going on with Jackie Scott. That’s where the Martha Stewart comparison comes in, and indeed her crime was insider trading and not murder, at least until Ryan Murphy does a bullshit season of American Crime Story centered on her. (Lady Gaga as Martha Stewart? Sure, why the fuck not! Maybe Jessica Lange can be Samuel Waksal? If Ghostbusters can be women, so can male biopharmaceutical company CEOs!) But here’s where things get messy on the lawyers side of the episode. Jackie Scott, turns out, is Fred Thompson’s sugar mama of sorts. When he questions her decisions, she responds by mentioning how she helped him out with financing a campaign for district attorney, getting into a country club, and getting season tickets to the MET. So basically Fred Thompson’s entire political career has been propped up by a bargain basement version of Martha Stewart. I would’ve liked for there to be a flashback in which Jackie took a ragamuffin bootblack and gave him a free ride to law school and Foghorn Leghorn speech therapy (only one of them was successful). In fact, he used to be known as Arturo Branco and when not bootblacking he was the first human participant in Tijuana cockfights.
“I’m the spokesman for Old Glory Insurance and don’t you forget it, robot.”
Besides being in hoc to a cosmetics queen (who rose the ranks from cosmetics duchess), the other thing “Bitch” establishes about Arthur Branch is that he speaks mainly in homespun, barely coherent metaphors. He claims to Jack McCoy that Jackie Scott wants him to “jump down, turn around and pick a bale of cotton” and after giving the legal team some information he says “that’s my two cents, see if you can turn it into a buck”. I swear at one point a character asks where a particular metaphor is going. I guess being bankrolled by the cosmetics kingpin (queenpin?) explains how the fuck a bourbon and grits hillbilly became DA. While the first half is fine, it’s the legal end where things become a bit askew. Approximately 96% of Elisabeth Rohm’s lines are questions, often ones that restate information she just heard. This is troublesome because she dominates until it comes time to go to court, so one’s left with several scenes that are basically a fucking episode of Dora the Explorer. “Do you see the problem with erroneously claiming a stop-loss on a stock?” She’s mighty pretty, this season especially, but she’s no Jill Hennessey. Could you even imagine her as Crossing Jordan? Didn’t think so.
*beep boop*
Although the police have her on tape confessing to murder, and also a bloody handprint at the vic’s place, Jackie Scott and her lawyer decide on the ol’ “not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect”. It’s such a common defense it earns the “’ol” appended to it. Jackie’s been off her meds, those being hormone replacement therapy. Menopause made her murder! It’s as flimsy an excuse as Steve Billings’ attempt at a lawsuit. Nonetheless, the prosecution has to deal with it.“Bitch” pulls an interesting trick that I can’t recall Law & Order doing before: dueling shrinks. Usually when the legal team requires a doctor’s opinion/testimony, they tap either Elizabeth Olivet or Emil Skoda. This time out they get both to perform a joint interview of Scott. Once finished, Olivet dismisses the concept out of hand while Skoda tentatively sides with “bitch be crazy” working as a defense. He doesn’t think she did commit murder because of hot flashes and sleep deprivation, but he’s cynical enough to believe the jury might buy it. So the prosecution goes with Olivet and it turns out to be their undoing.
It’s a rough cross-examination, with veteran defense attorney actress Maria Tucci first mocking Olivet’s profession as just someone lying on a couch describing their feelings. Things get worse from there, and for a psychologist who’s trying to put to bed the conception that women can get so worked up with emotions and hormones they can explode, her level of decorum in court is less than satisfactory. Things get worse when the defense calls Skoda to the stand. When Blonde German Robot asks how the defense got him on the witness list, McCoy solemnly replies that he was on their list. So it all comes down to no one bothering to take him off the list when the decision was made not to use his expert testimony. Remember when Law & Order had interesting complications when prosecuting a case? That’s out the window. Next episode the case will be in jeopardy when Jesse L. Martin slips on a fucking banana peel and breaks Exhibits A-H. Skoda confirms that, yes, “bitches be crazy” and the introduction or sudden deprivation of hormones will have an affect on a person and that he’s on retainer by the DA’s office. The scenes with Skoda are worthwhile if only to showcase the sheer range of J.K. Simmons’ smirks. They can be anything from “I don’t know what to tell you” to “whaddya gonna do?”. No wonder he won that Oscar for Spider-Man 3.
At Warner Brothers, Fred Thompson was the model sheet for Michigan J. Frog for years.
Things are at an impasse (despite Jack reasoning she was lucid enough to wipe clean the golf club and leave a voicemail that covered her tracks), and we now see Fred Thompson’s version of Steven Hill’s grumbly “make a deal, it’s an election year and I have to return to my trash can”: he figures Man 1 is better than the possibility of not guilty verdict or a mistrial. He then sets up a meeting with Jackie Scott and her attorney, at which he threatens to take over the prosecution himself and air out all the dirty laundry he knows about her over the course of the trial if she doesn’t take the deal. I think the writer meant for the final scene to be an impressive display of the kind of power Arthur Branch has, and the lengths to which he’s willing to go to secure a conviction, but neither Fred Thompson nor Lucie Arnaz (yes, she’s the daughter or Lucy and Desi) play it to be this powerful, unsettling thing. I do like to speculate on what the dirty laundry might be. Secret abortion, nose job, she knows where Jimmy Hoffa is, what does she know about Natalie Wood, maybe she forced Michael Jordan to retire from basketball. A mediocre denouement to a mediocre episode as she obviously takes the deal and Branch says he hopes for the prison’s sake they have her preferred color jumpsuit. Women, right?
smug like a mug
“Bitch” flirts with trying to be about something, like how a woman in a man’s world of business has to do things to survive, or the validity of fuck-y hormones (the technical term) as a criminal defense and what it would do for women’s rights and equality if it was deemed as such, but the episode never coheres enough for any of those angles to succeed. I don’t need an episode to have a message, but I do want it to raise interesting, thoughtful questions as opposed to shitting out an issue and having it lay there. The sloppiness and half-assed exploration of an issue is typical of episodes of the Fred Thompson/Aryan Robot Lesbian era. Jackie Scott never shows an ounce of likability, being the type of person who says to cops “do you have any idea what I pay in city taxes?”. She tears up in the ending, but who gives a shit at that point. Melissa Erico’s daughter character is likewise thin and weak, becoming a stupid cheerleader for her mother in the second half. Oh, one time her mom bought her an expensive sled and when little girl crashed she cared more about ensuring her only child didn’t die rather than mourn the wasted money on the sled, yeah, she’s fucking Mother of the Year. I kinda love the story because it’s so shitty, as though the writers couldn’t think of some way to shade Jackie Scott into being a multidimensional character, said “fuck it” and came up with a shitty sled tale. “Uh…whatever, she could show her compassion by not letting her daughter die instead of going back to the store and trying to return the decimated sled!” “Sounds maternal to me, though the nicest thing my mom did for me was occasionally wash the wooden spoon she sodomized me with.”
She’d much rather be embroiled in candy factory shenanigans. Fun fact: Jeffrey Dahmer also got into candy factory shenanigans, meaning Lucille Ball has something in common with one of our most influential comedy voices.
So this isn’t a strictly good episode of Law & Order, but the fact that it didn’t somehow become about Sri Lankan labor disputes or cloning sheep makes it refreshing after largely covering Special Victims Unit‘s descent into madness in Season 1 of Law & Ordocki. If nothing else, “Bitch” is bearable because of Lennie’s wisecracks. Jerry Orbach was and still is a national treasure, and he sells the shit out of exchanges like “have you ever actually read a pre-nup?” “No, but I should’ve” and the glimpses into the man’s rather pathetic social life (“I don’t think I ever met a size two”). I also liked how Green had to preemptively defend his participation in a race benefiting breast cancer research (“don’t ask, it was for a friend”), as though Briscoe would lay into him. “What, are you some kinda person who doesn’t want women to die from breast cancer?! Fag!” Great chemistry can compensate for a dodgy script, which is why the detective side of the show does well in “Bitch” and the legal side flounders. I don’t know if Thompson/Rohm/Waterston ever “clicked”, but if they did, it certainly wasn’t now. Thompson’s a character actor who can only play one character, Rohm was commissioned in 1973 by the last of Hitler’s science division to infiltrate America’s greatest concentration of Das Juden, and Waterston just seems bored. Even his cross-examination of fake Martha Stewart resulted in no explosive moments.
If there’s such a thing as a Fred Thompson showcase, this episode is a poor one. Thompson has two big scenes and doesn’t distinguish himself in either of them. While his down home, real American, so what if it’s mixed you some kinda INTELLECTUAL metaphors are novel at first, they wear on you. Once you’ve heard one thing involving a (ra)coon or a hound dog and their relationship to grits and a spittoon, you’ve heard them all. Yet he doesn’t even get the worst piece of dialogue in the show, that goes to Lt. Van Buren, who says when the detectives go talk to Jackie Scott “if she’s giving out free samples, holla” complete with phone receiver hand gesture. Fuck you, Van Buren, that’s why you aren’t in the article until now.
While I don’t consider Fred Thompson a favorite actor of mine, it is unfortunate he died. (Now he definitely won’t be in Sinister 3.) It’s unfortunate whenever someone who’s not Scott Walker dies! Wherever he is in the universe now, Fred Thompson can take this as consolation: of everyone on Law & Order he didn’t have the craziest political beliefs. I know, I know! But Michael Moriarty….man.
Hope you enjoyed the season opener to the next cycle in making jokes about America’s true fifth column. Next week I shall be back in the SVU ghetto, but with a “grounded” episode, meaning no one turns into a vampire and the suspect isn’t one of the detectives from an alternate dystopian future.
Law & Ordocki Season 2 #1 (#12): Drop Dead Fred Thompson
Welcome to Season 2 of Law & Ordocki! If you’re wondering why this particular moment sparked the return of this feature to Rhymes With Nerdy, you have no one to thank but Fred Thompson. When news of his death at age 73 from lymphoma disseminated, I won’t lie: my first thought was “how can I make fun of him on the Internet”. Yeah, I know, I’m a real mercenary nightcrawler type person. News of his death left me conflicted: I enjoyed him as a character actor yet detested his politics, his reverse mortgage hawking and especially didn’t like what he did to Law & Order. Since only the last of those are within the purview of this column, I’ll focus on that. Thompson’s emergence occurred while the show was in decline; 9/11 repositioned the show farther to the right than it had ever been for reasons that are understandable but no less irritating, especially in hindsight. Serena Southerlyn was Jack’s hot assistant du jour, her one-dimensional liberalism contrasting Fred Thompson’s one-dimensional conservatism. The more polemical the show gets, the worse it is, because writers of Law & Order aren’t exactly contributors to CounterPunch. It’s a testament that Jack McCoy’s politics are the least obnoxious, and his beliefs are largely contingent on how much whiskey he’s had that day or who comped him a bottle of Daniels last. The episode I’m covering today doesn’t feature as much of the badly written partisan shrieking as it does a thinly veiled Martha Stewart who counts Fred Thompson’s Arthur Branch as a friend. Remember when Martha Stewart was relevant? Yeah, I know, I had that issue of MAD Magazine too!
Brad Oosterhouse is found dead with a massive headwound not caused by the tumble down the stairs. The faithful hound sits by the corpse and is the reason the cops are alerted to the murder: it’s a classic case of Law & Order bystanders (dog maintainer with a Russian inflection and his banter partner) walking in on a body. The crime scene guys determine he was killed from a golf club bludgeoning, leading Lennie to quip “so that’s what a one iron is for”. This moment, and others littered through the episode establish that if you want flippant remarks in the vicinity of murder scenes, you ought to either come to the best or not bother at all. Oosterhouse was a stockbroker and a ladies’ man (Brad was “warm like a down comforter”, one says, prompting me to wonder if you could make his corpse into a comforter), often taking the wives of clients out for dinner, to shows, he danced with them – the man had an answering machine full of messages from hot to trot sounding women. Personally, I don’t get it, because the dead body they use at the beginning of the episode looks like a Chris Noth stunt double in a shitty tracksuit. Whoever wears a tracksuit indoors kinda deserves to die. Briscoe and Green dutifully run down the debutantes and find two suspicious pals of Oosterhouse: Lindsay Tucker the photographer and Jackie Scott the Martha Stewart/Jennifer Lawrence as Joy in Joy. (This episode could’ve used a woman taking 35 minutes to say a single statement that could be in every TV spot.) They also happen to be child and parent!
I’ll bet you it took the writers three days to come up with that fake business name.
Tucker is clearly in love with Oosterhouse, brushing away all those other women he took to plays and concerts because hey, those bitches didn’t have a little girl that Oosterhouse adored. That’s how she knows they’re to be together forever. There you have it, single moms: the key to finding a good mate is whether or not they’re really interested in your prepubescent child. Wait a minute, this is Law & Order, not SVU. Pedophiles aren’t allowed on Law & Order, not anymore. Sorry for the error. Tucker uses Scott as an alibi, neither of them acknowledging their relation until pressed. It’s only when Green and Briscoe realize that, in Briscoe’s words, Oosterhouse was “schtupping” mother and daughter, the latter ignorant of this. (“It’s like Oedipus, the sequel”, Lennie muses.) I gotta say, no one says forms of the word “schtup” quite like Jerry Orbach; it’s like Danny DeVito and “whores”. It’s only when Lindsay receives some lingerie meant for her mother that she realizes Brad indulged in the ultimate fantasy (as codified in pornography) and immediately confesses to killing him.
“Where are you walking, sir?” “Nowhere in particular. I just wanted you to walk with me so it looked like I had something better to do than field questions from the police, like all the characters on these shows.”
You might say to yourself “well, that’s stupid and unexpected, if she found out he was fucking fake Martha Stewart now why would she have killed him earlier?”. Daughter’s taking the rap for mom, as the motive becomes a lot more complicated than lover’s quarrel. Lindsay going down obscures the financial improprieties going on with Jackie Scott. That’s where the Martha Stewart comparison comes in, and indeed her crime was insider trading and not murder, at least until Ryan Murphy does a bullshit season of American Crime Story centered on her. (Lady Gaga as Martha Stewart? Sure, why the fuck not! Maybe Jessica Lange can be Samuel Waksal? If Ghostbusters can be women, so can male biopharmaceutical company CEOs!) But here’s where things get messy on the lawyers side of the episode. Jackie Scott, turns out, is Fred Thompson’s sugar mama of sorts. When he questions her decisions, she responds by mentioning how she helped him out with financing a campaign for district attorney, getting into a country club, and getting season tickets to the MET. So basically Fred Thompson’s entire political career has been propped up by a bargain basement version of Martha Stewart. I would’ve liked for there to be a flashback in which Jackie took a ragamuffin bootblack and gave him a free ride to law school and Foghorn Leghorn speech therapy (only one of them was successful). In fact, he used to be known as Arturo Branco and when not bootblacking he was the first human participant in Tijuana cockfights.
“I’m the spokesman for Old Glory Insurance and don’t you forget it, robot.”
Besides being in hoc to a cosmetics queen (who rose the ranks from cosmetics duchess), the other thing “Bitch” establishes about Arthur Branch is that he speaks mainly in homespun, barely coherent metaphors. He claims to Jack McCoy that Jackie Scott wants him to “jump down, turn around and pick a bale of cotton” and after giving the legal team some information he says “that’s my two cents, see if you can turn it into a buck”. I swear at one point a character asks where a particular metaphor is going. I guess being bankrolled by the cosmetics kingpin (queenpin?) explains how the fuck a bourbon and grits hillbilly became DA. While the first half is fine, it’s the legal end where things become a bit askew. Approximately 96% of Elisabeth Rohm’s lines are questions, often ones that restate information she just heard. This is troublesome because she dominates until it comes time to go to court, so one’s left with several scenes that are basically a fucking episode of Dora the Explorer. “Do you see the problem with erroneously claiming a stop-loss on a stock?” She’s mighty pretty, this season especially, but she’s no Jill Hennessey. Could you even imagine her as Crossing Jordan? Didn’t think so.
*beep boop*
Although the police have her on tape confessing to murder, and also a bloody handprint at the vic’s place, Jackie Scott and her lawyer decide on the ol’ “not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect”. It’s such a common defense it earns the “’ol” appended to it. Jackie’s been off her meds, those being hormone replacement therapy. Menopause made her murder! It’s as flimsy an excuse as Steve Billings’ attempt at a lawsuit. Nonetheless, the prosecution has to deal with it.“Bitch” pulls an interesting trick that I can’t recall Law & Order doing before: dueling shrinks. Usually when the legal team requires a doctor’s opinion/testimony, they tap either Elizabeth Olivet or Emil Skoda. This time out they get both to perform a joint interview of Scott. Once finished, Olivet dismisses the concept out of hand while Skoda tentatively sides with “bitch be crazy” working as a defense. He doesn’t think she did commit murder because of hot flashes and sleep deprivation, but he’s cynical enough to believe the jury might buy it. So the prosecution goes with Olivet and it turns out to be their undoing.
It’s a rough cross-examination, with veteran defense attorney actress Maria Tucci first mocking Olivet’s profession as just someone lying on a couch describing their feelings. Things get worse from there, and for a psychologist who’s trying to put to bed the conception that women can get so worked up with emotions and hormones they can explode, her level of decorum in court is less than satisfactory. Things get worse when the defense calls Skoda to the stand. When Blonde German Robot asks how the defense got him on the witness list, McCoy solemnly replies that he was on their list. So it all comes down to no one bothering to take him off the list when the decision was made not to use his expert testimony. Remember when Law & Order had interesting complications when prosecuting a case? That’s out the window. Next episode the case will be in jeopardy when Jesse L. Martin slips on a fucking banana peel and breaks Exhibits A-H. Skoda confirms that, yes, “bitches be crazy” and the introduction or sudden deprivation of hormones will have an affect on a person and that he’s on retainer by the DA’s office. The scenes with Skoda are worthwhile if only to showcase the sheer range of J.K. Simmons’ smirks. They can be anything from “I don’t know what to tell you” to “whaddya gonna do?”. No wonder he won that Oscar for Spider-Man 3.
At Warner Brothers, Fred Thompson was the model sheet for Michigan J. Frog for years.
Things are at an impasse (despite Jack reasoning she was lucid enough to wipe clean the golf club and leave a voicemail that covered her tracks), and we now see Fred Thompson’s version of Steven Hill’s grumbly “make a deal, it’s an election year and I have to return to my trash can”: he figures Man 1 is better than the possibility of not guilty verdict or a mistrial. He then sets up a meeting with Jackie Scott and her attorney, at which he threatens to take over the prosecution himself and air out all the dirty laundry he knows about her over the course of the trial if she doesn’t take the deal. I think the writer meant for the final scene to be an impressive display of the kind of power Arthur Branch has, and the lengths to which he’s willing to go to secure a conviction, but neither Fred Thompson nor Lucie Arnaz (yes, she’s the daughter or Lucy and Desi) play it to be this powerful, unsettling thing. I do like to speculate on what the dirty laundry might be. Secret abortion, nose job, she knows where Jimmy Hoffa is, what does she know about Natalie Wood, maybe she forced Michael Jordan to retire from basketball. A mediocre denouement to a mediocre episode as she obviously takes the deal and Branch says he hopes for the prison’s sake they have her preferred color jumpsuit. Women, right?
smug like a mug
“Bitch” flirts with trying to be about something, like how a woman in a man’s world of business has to do things to survive, or the validity of fuck-y hormones (the technical term) as a criminal defense and what it would do for women’s rights and equality if it was deemed as such, but the episode never coheres enough for any of those angles to succeed. I don’t need an episode to have a message, but I do want it to raise interesting, thoughtful questions as opposed to shitting out an issue and having it lay there. The sloppiness and half-assed exploration of an issue is typical of episodes of the Fred Thompson/Aryan Robot Lesbian era. Jackie Scott never shows an ounce of likability, being the type of person who says to cops “do you have any idea what I pay in city taxes?”. She tears up in the ending, but who gives a shit at that point. Melissa Erico’s daughter character is likewise thin and weak, becoming a stupid cheerleader for her mother in the second half. Oh, one time her mom bought her an expensive sled and when little girl crashed she cared more about ensuring her only child didn’t die rather than mourn the wasted money on the sled, yeah, she’s fucking Mother of the Year. I kinda love the story because it’s so shitty, as though the writers couldn’t think of some way to shade Jackie Scott into being a multidimensional character, said “fuck it” and came up with a shitty sled tale. “Uh…whatever, she could show her compassion by not letting her daughter die instead of going back to the store and trying to return the decimated sled!” “Sounds maternal to me, though the nicest thing my mom did for me was occasionally wash the wooden spoon she sodomized me with.”
She’d much rather be embroiled in candy factory shenanigans. Fun fact: Jeffrey Dahmer also got into candy factory shenanigans, meaning Lucille Ball has something in common with one of our most influential comedy voices.
So this isn’t a strictly good episode of Law & Order, but the fact that it didn’t somehow become about Sri Lankan labor disputes or cloning sheep makes it refreshing after largely covering Special Victims Unit‘s descent into madness in Season 1 of Law & Ordocki. If nothing else, “Bitch” is bearable because of Lennie’s wisecracks. Jerry Orbach was and still is a national treasure, and he sells the shit out of exchanges like “have you ever actually read a pre-nup?” “No, but I should’ve” and the glimpses into the man’s rather pathetic social life (“I don’t think I ever met a size two”). I also liked how Green had to preemptively defend his participation in a race benefiting breast cancer research (“don’t ask, it was for a friend”), as though Briscoe would lay into him. “What, are you some kinda person who doesn’t want women to die from breast cancer?! Fag!” Great chemistry can compensate for a dodgy script, which is why the detective side of the show does well in “Bitch” and the legal side flounders. I don’t know if Thompson/Rohm/Waterston ever “clicked”, but if they did, it certainly wasn’t now. Thompson’s a character actor who can only play one character, Rohm was commissioned in 1973 by the last of Hitler’s science division to infiltrate America’s greatest concentration of Das Juden, and Waterston just seems bored. Even his cross-examination of fake Martha Stewart resulted in no explosive moments.
If there’s such a thing as a Fred Thompson showcase, this episode is a poor one. Thompson has two big scenes and doesn’t distinguish himself in either of them. While his down home, real American, so what if it’s mixed you some kinda INTELLECTUAL metaphors are novel at first, they wear on you. Once you’ve heard one thing involving a (ra)coon or a hound dog and their relationship to grits and a spittoon, you’ve heard them all. Yet he doesn’t even get the worst piece of dialogue in the show, that goes to Lt. Van Buren, who says when the detectives go talk to Jackie Scott “if she’s giving out free samples, holla” complete with phone receiver hand gesture. Fuck you, Van Buren, that’s why you aren’t in the article until now.
While I don’t consider Fred Thompson a favorite actor of mine, it is unfortunate he died. (Now he definitely won’t be in Sinister 3.) It’s unfortunate whenever someone who’s not Scott Walker dies! Wherever he is in the universe now, Fred Thompson can take this as consolation: of everyone on Law & Order he didn’t have the craziest political beliefs. I know, I know! But Michael Moriarty….man.
Hope you enjoyed the season opener to the next cycle in making jokes about America’s true fifth column. Next week I shall be back in the SVU ghetto, but with a “grounded” episode, meaning no one turns into a vampire and the suspect isn’t one of the detectives from an alternate dystopian future.
Ronnie Gardocki
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