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Wrestling with the law
Akron Beacon Journal - September 17, 1999
By R.D. Heldenfels
New 'Law & Order,' 'Judging Amy' series deal with same theme
Shows about crime and the law seem to have a clear-cut way of attracting viewers, offering a vision of bad guys being chased down and the system somehow working.
But even from their earliest incarnations, such shows have not always been so reassuring. Dragnet, in both its '50s and '60s version, was as much about the collapse of society -- and especially
the family -- as it was about catching crooks. The show is littered with scenes of troubled parents looking at the misdeeds of their children and wondering how it could happen.
In recent years that notion has become even more marked in series, especially as they show the deterioration of the personal lives of the crime-fighters alongside the stories of the criminals they
deal with. Police Story and Hill Street Blues helped set the tone, but it wasn't confined merely to shows about police officers; the defense attorneys of L.A. Law and, more recently, The Practice
also wrestled with fundamental issues about law and justice and the price that legal struggles demand from everyone involved.
So two seemingly different series, Judging Amy and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, walk very similar ground.
Judging Amy, which has a preview telecast on CBS at 8 p.m. Sunday before moving to 10 p.m. Tuesday, stars Amy Brenneman as a high-powered, and newly divorced, lawyer who's moved to her Connecticut
hometown with her young daughter and started a new career as a judge. Complicating things is her mother (played by Tyne Daly), a retired social worker who's very much plugged into the town's
politics -- and very much willing to meddle in Brenneman's life in a way that makes the show's similarity to the NBC hit Providence even more evident.
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, premiering at 9 p.m. Monday on NBC, is a gritty police drama about an elite police unit investigating sex-related crimes in New York City. Derived from the
NBC hit Law & Order, the new show shares some cast members and a general look from its predecessor while staking out stronger emotional ground.
And it's on emotional matters that the shows overlap. In the two episodes made available for preview, Judging Amy deals a lot with cases involving children, including children who have been
abused. She is expected to be Solomon-like while deciding, for example, whether to take extraordinary measures to keep alive a comatose child. But such decisions not only take a toll on their own,
they dovetail with her own responsibilities raising her daughter.
The pilot for Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, meanwhile, departs from the original Law & Order by taking us almost immediately into the lives of its police detectives. One, played by
Mariska Hargitay, brings an intensely personal perspective to rape cases.
And we learn in a throwaway line in the pilot why John Munch -- the detective played by Richard Belzer on the now-canceled Homicide: Life on the Street -- has made the leap from Baltimore to New
York. (Homicide fans, at least, will find the answer very funny.)
But in the episodes previewed, the shows diverge in outlook. Judging Amy, though at times grim, is fundamentally optimistic; the new judge wants to be a good one, and she seems to be helping to
make the system work. The premiere of Special Victims Unit, following the grisly murder of a taxicab driver is unrelentingly grim. The law is served at the end, and maybe there's a little bit of
justice. But the best its main characters can do is find just enough of a positive note to sleep at night. And it's by no means clear that the sleep will be untroubled.
Perhaps because of that, I liked Judging Amy more.
There have been other fine, grim series on the air -- including Homicide and The Practice, which gets very grim in the first two episodes of its next season. But despite a good cast, Special
Victims Unit proved too depressing.
You could argue that Judging Amy looks a little too hard for sunshine. Maybe it does. But Brenneman is appealing enough, and Daly -- wonderful as usual -- provides a suitably tart counterpoint.
And sometimes we need a little sunshine.
Copyright © 1999 Akron Beacon Journal. All rights reserved.
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