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 hey say babies remember and enjoy sounds they hear in the womb, which means my child will thrill to one sound more than any other: the buh-dum-dum of the Law & Order interstitial.
For years, I've been surrounded by people who are addicted to the show and its infinite spin-offs. I never understood it, exactly. All the episodes I flipped past seemed the same — melodramatic, predictable and violent. Living in New York, I'd also been inconvenienced by the show's on-location shooting enough times to develop a grudge. So while my co-workers drooled over Mariska Hargitay and my mother and father-in-law bonded over their obsession with Jerry Orbach, I looked on ignorantly.
Then I got pregnant. Suddenly my craving for tortilla soup and green apples was matched only by a nightly longing for Sam Waterston's raspy voice. It started when my husband was out of town for a week on tour. I was alone with the cats and an intense first-trimester malaise. Crawling into bed at eight that first solo night with take-out, I caught the beginning of a Law & Order re-run on TNT and, too lazy at first to change the channel, found myself watching three episodes in a row. By the time my husband returned, I had watched more than twenty hours. It was only thanks to the modern miracle of DVR that I was able to turn the TV off long enough to greet him at the door and say that if we have a boy, it's a shame Dick Wolf is the worst baby name of all time.
So far, my pregnancy has been easy physically, but emotionally dramatic. I've cried when we ran out of cereal, elbowed people who blocked subway doors and spent whole days with the puzzle game Sudoku. Law & Order is the television equivalent of everything I've most appreciated during my pregnancy so far: cleanliness, fairness and logic.
It's not hard to see where that craving comes from. Even the friendliest pregnancy guides have huge chapters on miscarriage; we're told the fetus is threatened from all sides by secondhand smoke, raw oysters and all those vodka tonics you had before you knew you were pregnant. So much about being pregnant is scary and magical and totally out of our control that it feels good to manage what's manageable. I don't know why there's so much online about whether or not deli meat carries listeria and so little about being clobbered by a sense of duty and fear — two feelings addressed expertly in each sixty-minute episode of Law & Order. People say when you're pregnant it's common to avoid scary or gory shows or movies. Murder, rape and drug trafficking don't befit such a delicate state, they say, and anything about child abduction will hit too close to home. But I'm more than happy to fill my pre-sleep evenings with Law & Order's blood spatter patterns and corpses — bodies, many of them New York women, thrown up against a wall by the bullet from a Mauser, strangled in front of a Hell's
| Conviction gives us workaholic young New Yorkers, hopelessness incarnate. |
Kitchen bar, bludgeoned to death in a vestibule. It's not that I want to see death; I want to see wrongful death avenged, swiftly.
Conviction, the newest Law & Order spin-off, provides no such satisfaction. Instead, it gives us angsty, workaholic young New Yorkers, hopelessness incarnate. Foxy Stephanie March, formerly of SVU, stars as Alexandra Cabot, now the hard-ass bureau chief for a bunch of hot young assistant DA's. Essentially wasted by the show, she appears every once in a while to tell her underlings not to plead out, or to encourage them to make sure a fourteen-year-old gets life in prison. She's just there to be the sexy proctor, occasionally showing up to scold a classroom full of hapless, slutty students. It's amazing they let her wear her hair down rather than in a tight bun; at least she has the black-rimmed glasses.
The innuendo-glazed dialogue is similarly cartoonish. The womanizer and gambling addict Brian walks in on the neurotic Christina changing in her office and says, as she slowly pulls jeans up
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The characters are really cartoons dwelling on a spectrum between naïve and cynical.
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over her panties, "You should go like that." The stony Deputy DA Jim Steele and skilled but increasingly jaded ADA Jessica Rossi are fuck buddies — "no commitments, no obligations, no feelings." Nick Potter, the fresh-faced rich kid, has a one-night stand before the pilot's opening credits. Everyone assumes a practiced gaze of smoldering sincerity; they all look like models pouting in businesswear for the camera, maybe a Rolex ad.
Dick Wolf is calling Conviction a "charactercedural," but the characters are really cartoons dwelling on a spectrum between naïve ("You'd think she might want to nail the punk who raped her") and cynical ("She's a hooker, Jess. Getting attacked is an occupational hazard"). Aside from Jim Steele, who has a certain chiseled, grumpy appeal, they're pretty much all shallow, deeply flawed twentysomething carreerists alternately jumping on each other and then whining about it. If you want to see that, just step outside at five p.m. and follow the parade of sling-backs and striped ties to any Irish pub.
Stephanie March's character on SVU was only twenty-six when she started and yet so much stronger and fully realized than anyone on Conviction. What would be nice is if in this show she could encourage her charges to stop setting each other up on blind dates and get a little more involved in those stacks of cases perched precariously on their desks. Maybe these ADA's love lives would be better if they spent a little less time blowing off steam over drinks and a little more time staying late at the office and getting those unspeakably hot crow's feet Sam Waterston has around his weary eyes. n°
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR: |
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Hooksexup editor Ada Calhoun has written about theater and books for The New York Times, been a contributing editor at New York magazine and appeared in various essay anthologies. She lives in Brooklyn. |
©2006 Ada Calhoun and hooksexup.com.
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