Law and Order: UK

[altariel]

I just left this comment in 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.

Comments

Re: Hmm. American legal dramas and realities

[altariel.livejournal.com]

Absolutely fascinating, thank you. A couple of years ago the BBC produced a semi-dramatized series about a rape trial: the witnesses were actors; the barristers were real lawyers; the jury was made up of twelve public figures. We got footage of the trail, and then the jury's deliberation. Depressing viewing. I gather the actors had several improvization sessions to help them work out their stories, which is something I would have liked to have seen too.