‘Law & Order’ Is Aging Poorly

On ‘Last Week Tonight,’ John Oliver knocked down a common claim: It’s just a TV show.

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I went to college because of my high-school friend John. A second-generation immigrant from an Egyptian family, John had figured out his college enrollment before I had even begun to consider my own. That was who we were as teen friends: John was the type who was accepted into the National Honor Society and ran for senior-class president; I was the type who fell asleep in class and spent all day playing X-Men vs. Street Fighter. But John wanted my company in college, so he pressured me to join him at Western Michigan University. “They have one of the best criminal-justice programs in the country,” he told me. And I was sold.

John knew that mentioning the school’s criminal-justice program would make it an easy sell. I loved TV shows and movies about cops, and spent countless hours watching detectives, FBI agents, and CIA spies working through or around the system to serve justice, stop terrorists, and protect the innocent. I’ve written about my fascination with Law & Order before, and about what it felt like to be infatuated with the series before learning the realities of the U.S. criminal-justice system:

Dick Wolf’s world of procedural crime dramas, the good guys working via the legal system to catch the bad, mesmerized me throughout high school and into college. In particular, I fell in love with Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, following Detectives Olivia Benson and Elliot Stabler as they brought criminals to justice … To be interested in cops was to wedge my beliefs between the pop culture that wanted my attention and the stories of state-sanctioned violence against Black people passed down from parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends.

I was convinced that I would be a good cop, and that if the system was broken, that I could change it from the inside. I planned to graduate from college, join the Marines, become a detective, and eventually join the FBI, DEA, or CIA.

John watched many of the same movies, but he didn’t like my plan to start a career in law enforcement—especially the part about risking my life in the military. It was the start of the Iraq War, and he was grateful when my interest shifted to applying to law school (prosecuting attorney Casey Novak had become my favorite SVU character). John only asked me to make one promise: “If you become a lawyer, just promise me you won’t be one of those defense attorneys,” he said.

“I would never,” I reassured him.

Our view of defense attorneys as morally bankrupt, slimeball opportunists came partly from the Law & Order universe. In the series, defense attorneys are often unscrupulous characters who act as roadblocks to the successful prosecution of blatantly guilty criminals. Police and prosecutors are the heroes; criminals and their defense attorneys are the villains.

Law & Order was the subject of the most recent episode of Last Week Tonight With John Oliver on HBO. Currently in its ninth season, Last Week Tonight has become well known for its deep dives intended to either explain a complicated topic in digestible form or to explain how a seemingly innocuous topic is more insidious than viewers might realize. This week, the show won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Variety Talk Series for the seventh year in a row. It also took aim at Law & Order.

HBO

“Law & Order is on all the time,” Oliver said in the episode. “And for many, it is comfort TV. But it, and shows like it, have a real impact. One study found that viewers of crime dramas are more likely to believe the police are successful at lowering crime, use force only when necessary, and that misconduct does not typically lead to false confessions—which would be great if it were true, but if you’re watching this show, you probably know it is not.”

What stood out to me most in the episode was Oliver’s choice to reiterate one point several times: It’s fiction. It’s entertainment. Oliver’s repeated acknowledgment that Law & Order is fiction was a preemptive rebuttal to a common, misguided belief that smart people are unaffected by popular entertainment. Many of us like to think that we see through propaganda, and that we’re generally smarter than the marketing that is meant to influence us. It doesn’t matter that Law & Order is a deeply misleading advertisement for the U.S. criminal-justice system; it’s just fun, and it’s not real, we tell ourselves.

But that’s only partly true, as Oliver explains. I won’t get into the details of the argument here—the segment is available on YouTube, and you should watch it for yourself—but I will say that my personal experience makes clear how much entertainment like Law & Order can impact a person. Sure, I was a naive kid at the time; my planned future was at one point almost entirely mapped out by fiction, and I can take comfort in knowing a lot more as an adult. But you don’t have to be a kid to adopt the implicit messages fed to us through marketing and media. As Oliver said of Law & Order: “It can be genuinely alarming just how seriously some people take the show.”

Diane Neal, the actor who played my favorite character, Casey Novak, actually apologized recently for her former understanding of our justice system. “I’m embarrassed to admit, I used to think the way it worked on the show was like real life,” she said in a tweet. “Then I found out the hard way I was wrong.” But she’s not alone: Police recruits, law-school students, and regular people can also develop a deeply wrong view of our legal system from watching the show without exposure to enough accurate information to counterbalance its fantasy. If you’re a fan and are willing to be honest with yourself, you might admit that it has influenced your understanding of the justice system too. It surely skewed mine.

Unexpectedly, it may have also influenced my friend John’s. I actually did go on to study criminal justice and public policy, and eventually unlearned much of what I had hoped to be true from television. Years after John and I graduated from college, John became a police officer. I gave a recommendation over the phone on his behalf after he applied, and spoke highly of his character, noting that he was the type to be accepted into the National Honor Society and run for senior-class president. Later, he would argue with me to defend the choke hold that killed Eric Garner, and would tell me that he voted for Donald Trump because “he supports the police,” who he said are “under attack.” We didn’t agree on policing as teenagers. Suffice it to say that we still don’t agree now.

With multiple spin-offs and more than 1,200 episodes in its fictional universe, Law & Order has had impeccable endurance. (Law & Order: Special Victims Unit is currently the longest-running live-action primetime television show in history.) The franchise isn’t just entertainment; it’s a cultural force that we’ll likely look back on with some embarrassment, like Victoria’s Secret or Abercrombie & Fitch. The more we downplay its influence, the more likely we are to be misled, and the longer it’ll take for us to move on.

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Thanks to everyone who responded to my last Humans Being, about profanity and Christian doublespeak. I read a ton of great responses, so although I usually highlight just one favorite, this week I have several.

Jim wrote, “The example that comes readily to mind is someone who stepped in front of me while I was in line to purchase coffee at a gas station. I called them on it and they ignored me until they were finished checking out. Then they looked directly at me and said, ‘have a blessed day.’ There wasn't a person in that store that didn't know that really meant ‘go fuck yourself.’”

Nicole wrote, “I’m a mormon (a Black mormon at that. We exist! Who knew!) and the community, particularly in Utah, uses the phrase “sweet spirit” when a person has nothing else to compliment. Especially when someone is “homely” or considered unattractive by conventional Mormon standards. ‘Ahh there’s Jenny … she has no friends, prospects, and she’ll never be married, but she’s such a sweet spirit.’”

Christopher wrote, “As a teacher we often use the words ‘enthusiastic’ or ‘energetic’ to describe kids who are a terror in the classroom. Telling a parent that their child is responsible for half of all the classroom disruption is tough.”

And Cathy wrote, “My personal favorite is ‘Missed you last Sunday’ as code for ‘Why weren’t you in church?’ Simple and cutting in its implicit judgment.”