The Reputed End of Law and Order: The Original

I am a big fan of crime dramas, none more than Law and Order and its various spin-offs. I have identified with it because of its “ripped from the headlines” plots and its use of New York City – my New York City – as parts of stories. For me, it was like a parlor game sometimes to identify exactly where a scene had been filmed. Sometimes scenes were filmed in my Harlem neighborhood.

Think of some of the issues tackled: domestic violence, wilding, forced female circumcision, adoption of black children from abroad to turn them into indentured servants, youth violence, a late night murder in a fast-food restaurant, gay-bashing, racial demagoguery. Even though each episode was preceded by a caveat that the story we were about to see was complete fiction, we aficionados knew differently.

The current cast in this 20^th season includes S. Epatha Merkerson and Anthony Anderson. But over the years in recurring roles or cameos or bit parts, black actors on the show have included Richard Brooks, Jesse L. Martin, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, Michael Rooker, Viola Davis, Stephen McKinley Henderson, James Earl Jones, Samuel L. Jackson, Jennifer Beals, Ludacris, Edwina Findley, Ernie Hudson… And the list goes on. So do a number of careers. I get a kick out of reading the biographies of actors in theater; if they’ve been in New York for any length of time, it’s almost impossible that they did not do at least one episode of Law and Order. Indeed, two current Tony nominees, Viola Davis and Stephen McKinley Henderson, in Fences, are Law and Order alums.

I never watched Lost, so I didn’t care about its finale. Nor did I watch Friends – mainly because none of the main characters as a I discerned from People magazine would have been my friends. So I didn’t watch that finale. And I certainly did not watch Seinfeld, a self-proclaimed show about nothing when I was too busy to take time off for nothingness. So I didn’t get caught up in the hype of that finale.

But I do care about the end of Law and Order. Tonight’s episode will be only one hour. So I have a feeling that sometime in the future there will be a proper send-off. If Chuck gets a two-hour season ending episode, then certainly Law and Order deserves more than a one-hour finale to a 20-year run.