Law and Order.

I am, and I admit it, a bear of rather little brain, which may be why it took a stint of jury duty for me to realize what a really good show--and what an unusual one--is "Law and Order," now beginning its fifth season on NBC. (As usual, of course, my wife Celeste got it before I did, remarking at least two years ago that "the only thing wrong with "Law and Order" is that it should be two hours long.") Five seasons for a series is the equivalent of the Biblical three-score and ten for a person; and early episodes of "L&O" are now being rerun in syndication. So this is a good time to talk about a rare bird: a TV series that starts with a brilliant premise, delivers with class and style, and--for sure rare--stays strong.

I call creator Dick Wolf's originating concept "brilliant," but it is rather slyly so--the way all real innovations in genre fiction at first appear to be just variations on established themes. Our obsession with the literature of crime--and by "our" I mean Western culture's--takes one of two seemingly inevitable forms. One is the detective story: as in "Who brought this terrible plague upon Thebes?" (Sophocles) or "Who killed Laura Palmer?" (David Lynch). The other is the trial narrative: "Has Socrates corrupted the youth of Athens?" or, say, "Did Captain Queeg's actions during the hurricane justify relieving him of command?" That's not exactly a Manhattan-Project-level secret, I grant you. But it's not often remarked that, in popular and so-called "high" culture alike, the two forms are not only complementary, but mutually exclusive.

In other words the detective story assumes that once the investigator--private or official--has reconstructed the events of the crime so as to point to a single perpetrator, the story is over, chaos has been controlled again, and the business of a trial--if the "perp" hasn't already been killed--is superfluous. Now anybody with the slightest knowledge of law enforcement realizes that this is only slightly less realistic than tales of Hobbits, elves, and dragons. Even more bemusing, perhaps, is the assumption of most trial stories that the crime is not really solved until the trial has finished. Think about "Perry Mason," "Matlock," or most of the trial scenes in "L.A. Law"; the trial is a pressure-cooker confessional in which, sooner of later, to the gasps of the jury, one of the witnesses will break down on the stand and confess that he, not the defendant, did it. Any lawyer will tell you that this is Hobbits, elves, dragons, plus Vulcans, Klingons, and the Kilgore Rangerettes.

We'll get to why we need to reinvent again and again these inexhaustible fictions. For now the important point is that Brother Wolf--I repeat myself, TV is a producer's medium--had the splendid idea that "Law and Order," for once, would combine those two incommensurable stories. Simple? You bet. I'll meet him in heaven somewhere near the guy who first thought oysters and Tabasco might do nicely together. Because by putting them together, he redefined--and helps us understand a little better--both.

Every episode of "L&O" contains two stories, or actually, two tellings of the same story, one a detective narrative, the other a trial. A crime has occurred: Rex Stout once said that the damned hard thing about writing detective fiction is that the most interesting event in your tale has happened before the tale can start. The first half-hour follows the cops--always--with cast changes--two detectives working under a lieutenant--as through interviews and forensics they center upon their perp. The second half-hour follows the prosecutors--two assistant DA's working under a DA--as they bargain with the defendant's lawyers and consider among themselves precisely what charges, and what penalty, they can reasonably propose. But that only begins to describe the formulaic quality of the show--and, of course, if you think "formulaic" means "bad," then you shouldn't read Shakespeare's comedies or listen to the blues.

The special quality of "L&O," the quality that sets it apart from even such fine shows as "Homicide" or "NYPD Blue," is, I think, its deliberate and bracing coldness. Cop shows and lawyer shows are mainly melodrama--they want us to care about, not just the crime, but the investigator-heroes; they want us to like Columbo or Matlock or Andy Sipowicz. "L&O" doesn't. Every shot opens with a black screen and the place and date of the scene displayed at bottom left. Any reference to the private lives of the detectives or the prosecutors is relegated, at best, to throwaway dialogue. The cops talk the way cops do talk about awful crimes, with defensively smartass irony that can seem, to outsiders, brutally cynical. And the prosecutors, for all their commitment to the idea of "justice," find themselves again and again forced into compromise, into moral diminution, by the very system of proof to which they are committed. Even the camera work brilliantly enforces chilliness and distance. The "detective" scenes are mainly city-street shots, quick-cuts, and documentary-style handheld, while the "trial" scenes tend to be longer takes, dark interiors, with lots of tight close-ups--film's version of the introspective. The writing, the cinematography, and the brilliant ensemble acting have this final effect: we are never allowed to forget that what is going on is the reconstruction and judgment of a single awful event.

And that's what I mean by the show's coldness. If you've read this column before, you know that I think literary theorists a rather sorry lot, on the whole. But they have invented the term "metafiction"--by which they mean "a story about storytelling"--and though they don't use it very intelligently, it applies here. "L&O" is about the fictions of detection and judgment that we use to throw nets of meaning over the unspeakable or the incomprehensible when it erupts into our lives. It is about our "rage for order" (Wallace Stevens's phrase) that impels us to make up a story--any story--to account for the unaccountable.

It's what I learned on jury duty, though I should have known it before. The jury trial is a kind of storytelling also, no less than the investigation of the detective or the army of detectives. But the trial is an act of collective storytelling; we twelve--actually, the whole community--agree to agree upon a version of the tale we can all live with: asking not, like the detective, "who did it?" but, rather more complicatedly, "under what circumstances did he do it?" I'm tempted to say that the detective story is ethical, while the trial story is moral: the one concerned with "grievous offense" and the other with "sufficient reflection and full consent of the will." And I am further tempted to observe that those two stories are not necessarily the same one, but between them are the confusion and glory of our conscious life. Surely, since we have been either privy or subjected to the William Kennedy Smith, Rodney King, and now O.J. Simpson real-world trials--we ought by now to realize that "Law" is "Order" only because it is a commonly sustained fiction, and that fiction is what we have as our stab at the truth. (Kierkegaard would have been one helluva media critic.)

Not that "Law and Order" is Dostoevsky. But it has maintained a consistently high level of intelligence and has, with wit and grace, in scores of episodes, raised just the kinds of concerns I've mentioned. Its ensemble cast has varied greatly, but, perhaps just because the major players are kept so oddly peripheral to the action itself, its general tone has not changed in five years. The only original cast members still there are Chris Noth as the brash young detective Mike Logan, and Stephen Hill as the thoughtful, old-man-of-the-mountain DA Adam Schiff. And this season, the show runs with perhaps its most important cast change. From the beginning, the main prosecutor was played by Michael Moriarty, as Assistant DA Ben Stone.

But last year Moriarty had the courage and intelligence and bad sense to tell Janet Reno that her ideas about government censorship of TV violence were silly and fascist. (This is especially grand since "Law and Order" is, itself, considerably less violent than any given episode of "Married...with Children.") He subsequently left the show. He is replaced by Sam Waterston (of the wonderful "I'll Fly Away") as Assistant DA Jack McCoy.

It will be fascinating to watch "L&O" this season, since that may be the one

personnel change that could change the exquisite balance of the show. Moriarty is one of our most underappreciated actors, and perfectly incarnated the coolness, the intellectual distance, that is so much a part of "L&O": he is, almost glacially, without affect--"cold as only the Irish are," the Sicilian-derived Celeste tells me on every possible occasion. And Sam Waterston, immensely gifted, is quite other. A kind of Montgomery Clift in middle age, he can telegraph violent emotion violently reined-in by picking up a paperweight from his desk.

If NBC, losing nerve, turns "L&O" into a crusading-prosecutor series, nothing will be lost but the original genius of the show. After five seasons, as I said, syndication--and decades of income--is guaranteed anyhow. But the show itself is just too brilliant, and Waterston is too talented a man, to be squandered like that. Here's hoping the writers keep faith with the concept, and that this brittle, clever metafiction stays on a while.

I'm sure Soren would agree.