Law and Order: UK
Feb. 24th, 2009 07:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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communicator's post on Law and Order: UK, and since it pretty much sums up what I thought, I'm copying, tweaking, and pasting.
As you know, Bob, I adore Law and Order, and I thought this was a pretty decent stab at it. I felt there weren't quite enough twists in the police story (L&O generally weaves around a hell of a lot in the first 20 minutes) and there was the notorious stock TV scene-ender at one point ("Oh, and [character]?" [character pauses at door and looks back questioningly] "Thanks." [character beams and leaves]) [1].
The legal scenes didn't capture that sense of civic society being constructed and enacted in the court-room (which programmes like L&O and Boston Legal do so well); partly because we, er, don't do that so much in the UK.mraltariel was saying last night that given the UK court system is about weighing competing narratives, it might work better dramatically to have cutaways as people gave evidence, like in Without a Trace.
[1] As noted in Rusty's The Writer's Tale.
communicator's post on Law and Order: UK, and since it pretty much sums up what I thought, I'm copying, tweaking, and pasting. As you know, Bob, I adore Law and Order, and I thought this was a pretty decent stab at it. I felt there weren't quite enough twists in the police story (L&O generally weaves around a hell of a lot in the first 20 minutes) and there was the notorious stock TV scene-ender at one point ("Oh, and [character]?" [character pauses at door and looks back questioningly] "Thanks." [character beams and leaves]) [1].
The legal scenes didn't capture that sense of civic society being constructed and enacted in the court-room (which programmes like L&O and Boston Legal do so well); partly because we, er, don't do that so much in the UK.
mraltariel was saying last night that given the UK court system is about weighing competing narratives, it might work better dramatically to have cutaways as people gave evidence, like in Without a Trace. [1] As noted in Rusty's The Writer's Tale.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-25 05:48 pm (UTC)I'll just stick to Cold Case, I think. They're running a 'best of' selection on some channel at the moment which actually seems to have some of the best ones in it.
I think it could be done, but I suppose you'd have to be fairly gutsy to say, "Well, yes, I know this is one of the world's most successful franchise formats, but it ain't going to work here, for these reasons."
Do you really think it would be doable? I'm not sure. I think by the time you'd finish ripping out the parts of L&O which don't work in the UK, there'd be so little recognisably L&O left that L&O fans would be disappointed. And people who don't like L&O would still be avoiding it because of the name, so you'd be screwed both ways.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-25 07:07 pm (UTC)Oh totally. L&O's distinctiveness really comes from the three-act structure:
1. police
2. police and lawyers
3. courtroom
That structure would work fine, if the second act had the CPS batting the case back until the police had enough evidence (rather than the lawyers out doing investigating), which is what L&O often does anyway. And the third act was more like Crown Court. I actually think TV could do with a good courtroom-drama-of-the-week.
At least they kept the "doink doinks".