"Law & Order": Still ripping off the headlines

Law & Order: L.A.'s "Gabby Giffords episode" turned out to be about a schizophrenic (played by Southland's Shawn Hatosy) who thinks a state senator is keeping him from his non-existent daughter.

by Ken

Was I the only one who was, well, shocked by this past week's Law & Order: L.A. and its use of the Tucson shooting as a plot device?

Okay, I realize I may have been the only one watching this past week's Law & Order: L.A.. I can't think of any particular reason why anybody should. Heck, I'm kind of shocked that I've kept having the DVR record it.

But to get back to this week's episode. True, the incident was moved to California, just the way events from all over the country if not the world were ritually moved to New York for the original Law & Order, and the pol who was targeted, and in fact killed, was a mere state senator. But we all recognized the source, didn't we?

We were certainly meant to recognize it. After all, "ripped from the headlines" has been a selling point for the franchise since original L&O went on the air in the back in the Cretaceous period.

Now sometimes you have to parse these things carefully. "Ripped from the headlines" indeed. Note that there's no claim that the stories are, say, "ripped from the news." I suppose that's not as catchy as "ripped from the headlines." More importantly, though, it's more clearly not true than "ripped from the news," which would imply even more strongly that the story is based on the story from, you know, the news.

I have a feeling that a lot of people don't know that the "headline" is just about all that any L&O is ripped from. And this is so clearly a matter of show policy that one really has to admire the chutzpah involved in making "ripped from the headlines" the show's identifying catch phrase. For those who don't know, back in the show's infancy, creator Dick Wolf, confronted with grumbling about the "inaccuracies" in the show's handling of stories that were recognizably based on real-life events, explained that the show would never attempt to dramatize actual events, that when it drew on such an event, all of the facts would be changed, including -- in fact, in particular -- whodunnit and why.

This is, in fact, a Law & Order pledge: Of the infinite number of stories that exist in the universe for the show to tell, the one that it absolutely will not under any circumstances in any way at any time tell is the story of the event that was, you know, ripped from the headlines. And so there was never any question of "inaccuracies" or "distortions" of the actual story -- the actual story is completely off limits to the show's writers. And so it was that the state senator was targeted on this L&O: L.A. episode was the victim of the schizophrenic gunman raging over his inability to regain custody of his non-existent daughter. (You might say she was the victim of some really dreadful TV wordsmithing.)

What I'm trying to convey here is that in the end the slogan "ripped from the headlines" is about as meaningful as the slogan "fair and balanced" as announced by the noisemakers who make believe it's what they do.

OH YES, WHY WAS I SO THROWN BY USE
OF THE TUCSON SHOOTINGS AS A TV PLOT?

A fictional TV show that actually carried over some of the realities of the Tucson event would have been even more offensive. It's hard to pin down, but I guess it's because this event, which brings us squarely in contact with some intolerable social realities, is still for the most part unprocessed, and the likelihood is that it never will be processed. As a society, we would rather sweep it under the carpet than come to grips with the realities that produced it.

Luckily, a Law & Order comes with that ironclad guarantee that while it may touch on such an event, it will never attempt to deal with it. Thanks, Dick Wolf! (FURTHER THOUGHT: I should have stressed that, although the policy of changing all the details dates back to the original Law & Order, in the old days the substitute plots, taken as dramatic fiction, generally had the show's usual measure of credibility and interest. But you really did need to think of those episodes as totally separate from the headlines they were ripped off from.)


UPDATE: Reader L.P. raises a point in a comment which I had meant to bring up and decided not to. In what the producers of Law & Order: L.A. presumably thought of as political evenhandedness, a character finds equal reason to blame the shooting on left- and right-wing extremists -- the left-wing extremists being unionists motivated to apply a Second Amendment remedy for taking away their pensions. Yeah, right.

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