Law & Order and the Rise of the Pop Cultural Prosecutor

Years before Law & Order ended its incredible twenty-year run on May 24, 2010, the series had staked its claim to being the longest-running primetime series featuring lawyer characters. In addition, the series included an important change in how the heroic pop cultural lawyer is represented. In earlier lawyer shows with especially lengthy runs, such as Perry Mason in the 1950s and ‘60s and Matlock in the 1980s and ‘90s, the lawyer hero was customarily a criminal defense lawyer. Even the fictional firm of McKenzie, Brackman, Cheney & Kuzak in L.A. Law had a department devoted to criminal defense work. In Law & Order, by contrast, the heroic lawyers are always prosecutors.

What explains this very popular shift in imagery? Part of the reason is the general sense that crime has run amuck. Starting in the 1980s, a commitment to crime control replaced the drive for racial and economic justice as the preeminent domestic policy. Any politician on the local, state, or national level who seems “soft on crime” is doomed at the polls. More generally, the Reagan Presidency marked a national turn to the right, and in subsequent decades even the Democrats who have occupied the White House have been moderates. The heroic pop cultural prosecutor is well suited to crack down on crime and to embody conservative values.

Over the years, Law & Order became a genuine cultural phenomenon. The series’ popularity led to spin-offs and to countless reruns of both the original episodes and the spin-offs. In the end, Law & Order in all its forms not only reflected a public sentiment and emergent politics but also powerfully reinforced that sentiment and politics.

This Post Has 7 Comments

  1. Nick Zales

    Good article. It is ironic that “law and order” president Reagan’s white house ended up becoming a hot bed of criminal activity. The Iran-Contra scandal was a revelation to people who thought Reagan was an honest man. The sad legacy of all this is a country which locks up a greater percentage of its citizens than almost any other and the rise of politicians attacking criminal defense lawyers as evil people.

    Our legal system is out of whack and TV shows like Law and Order perpetuate a perverse system of “justice” which is more reminiscent of the USSR than the American values the law and order crowd promote.

  2. Gordon Hylton

    It is interesting that Gunsmoke, the only other live action, prime time television show to last for twenty years, also dealt with the arrest and conviction process. The show centered around Matt Dillon, a United States Marshall based in post-Civil War Dodge City, Kansas.

    Although Dillon was regularly engaged in the process of tracking down and arresting wrongdoers, the Gunsmoke stories rarely reached the courtroom.

    In retrospect, Gunsmoke was remarkably free of lawyers and judges, particularly for a show about bringing justice to a disorderly land. According to the Internet Movie Data Base, there were 635 episodes of Gunsmoke but it appears that judge characters appeared in less than 30 of them.

    Lawyers, at least in the form of characters with names, appeared even less frequently. Gunsmith Newly O’Brien, a sympathetic character who appeared on the show in a recurring role during its last eight years, was studying on his own to become a lawyer, but so far as I know never made it to the bar (other than the one at the Long Branch).

    When lawyers did appear on the show, as in the 1965 episode “Breckenridge,” they were normally more of a nuisance than a help. (In that episode, a new lawyer in Dodge City is constantly questioning the legitimacy of Marshall Dillon’s approach to his job until he finally learns that Dodge would be a much less safe place to live were it not for the Marshall’s gunning down three or four bad guys each week.)

    Like his fellow wild west process server Rooster Cogburn, Dillon ended up shooting the individual he was trying to bring to justice. While the Marshall did genuinely try to apprehend wrongdoers and bring them back for trial, the obligations of self-defense and protection of the innocent normally prevented him from doing this.

    The biggest difference between the two shows related to the members of the cast. There were four principle parts in the Gunsmoke story, and over the course of twenty years the four roles were assumed by only five actors. James Arness, Amanda Blake, and Milburn Stone played their parts for 20 years while Denver Weaver and Ken Curtis split the part of the Marshall’s hillbilly sidekick. Law and Order, in contrast, had about 100 different actors in lead roles over the course of the 20 years.

  3. Tom Kamenick

    In the big criminal defense shows, how often did an episode focus on a defendant who was guilty? I’m not familiar with the shows at all, so I’m curious.

  4. Nick Zales

    Interesting. Both Gunsmoke and Bonanza often dealt with criminals in their story lines. The difference between now and then was how easily it was to define who the “bad guy” or gal was. Both shows focused on compassion, not for criminals but for people in difficult straits who turned bad.

    The days of the “heroic” defense counsel have been replaced by bumbling, incompetent and corrupt defense counsel such as “Lionel Hutz” on The Simpsons. A show on the air for 21 years now. Bashing lawyers who represent criminal defendants became popular under Reagan and reached its zenith under Bush. I believe this is a sign of desperation in American society as people being crushed by the weight of misguided policies seek to take out their anger somewhere and in TV DAs they found their outlet. Alas, reality often takes its lead from TV and here we are today in one sorry mess.

  5. Gordon Hylton

    In regard to Tom Kamenick’s question, I am fairly certain that neither Perry Mason nor Ben Matlock ever had a client who was actually guilty.

    There is one memorable Perry Mason episode where Perry informs a distraught female client who is convinced that no one believes her claims of innocence that he is representing her “only” because he believed that she was innocent and that he would not represent a client that he knew to be guilty.

    The same was true for Matlock, who once managed to convince the trial judge to confess to a murder for which his client was wrongly charged. Now, that was lawyering.

  6. Rob Speer

    If only that were the case. The contrast between the legal system on television and in real life couldn’t be much greater. How many times have you heard people in court reference how it happens on tv?

  7. Guy Chambliss

    There was also another series about lawyers and court scenes, but it took the funnier route. It was called Ally McBeal, which aired from 1997 to 2002. The title is named after the lead character, and the show is about her life as she turned from a prospective to a full-blown lawyer. However, Law and Order is still the longest running court-scene T.V. series.

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