After Seinfeld went off the air, Law and Order was the only TV show I watched regularly. But Jerry Orbach left and took my loyalty with him and over the course of last season my interest grew less and less.

It’s not just the case that Dennis Farina’s Joe Fontana doesn’t measure up to Lennie Briscoe, or even to Max Greevey and Phil Ceretta.

It’s that the show’s writers don’t seem interested in Fontana the way they were interested in the other guys.

In fact, they don’t seem interested in any of the main characters. Law and Order—I’m talking about the original, not the franchise—is famous for how far into the background they bury the main characters’ personal lives. All we know about them is the bits and pieces of their biographies they drop off-handedly into conversations that are primarily about other things. But that didn’t mean the characters’ true personalities were off screen.

They came alive and revealed themselves in going about their work. Law and Order is the only TV show I can think of that is about doing a job. All the doctors shows, all the other cop shows, all the workplace sitcoms—the workplace in those shows is merely a stage on which the characters act out personal emotional drams. But on Law and Order work does, or did, what it does in real life. It defines who people are.

Better way of putting that is that people define themselves by how they go about doing their jobs.

Doing your job includes interacting with your colleagues, clients, customers, bosses, etc.

That’s what made the show compelling to me, the professional interplay, the accidental drama of having to work with people and having to depend on them or get around them in order to get the job done. That’s why the show has suffered so much form the loss of Steven Hill’s DA, Adam Schiff, more than it has suffered from the loss of any other character except Lennie.

Schiff had a comlicated relationship with his executive ADAs, Ben Stone and Jack McCoy. They were both like sons to him. Stone was the second son, the one most like his dad, and therefore most rebellious. McCoy was the gifted eldest son, the one who could do no wrong in his father’s eyes, but whose recklessness had to be watched and reined in. Their relationship was further complicated by Schiff’s being a responsible politician. He had constituents to serve, and he often put them ahead of what he knew was right and always ahead of what his surrogate sons’ wanted to do.

None of this was ever spelled out, as it would be in any other TV show. No dramatic explosions in which truths were laid bare and inner feelings revealed. They only ever talked about the job at hand. Yet it all came through, in the acting, of course, but aslo in the writing. Hints, clues, and asides revealed whole chapters of personal history.

When Schiff left that whole dynamic disappeared from the lawyer half of the show.

I don’t dislike Fred Thompson as the new DA the way James Wolcott does. But he’s just a boss. Without Schiff, the lawyer part of the show has been only about lawyering. The focus is on the Law.

And since Briscoe left the focus of the detective half of the show has been the Crime.

It’s as if the writers have decided that their audience is made up of only amateur detectives and jailhouse lawyers.

And they treat the investigations and the trials as if crime is an abstraction, interesting for itself alone. How interesting the way that bank was robbed! how intriguing the way that murder was plotted!

So I’ve been drifting away from the show emotionally for a while and this season I missed the first three episodes almost without noticing that I’d missed them.

But Rob Farley and Scott Lemieux at Lawyers, Guns and Money insist the show’s improving again, so I watched Wednesday night’s episode.

My complaints still stand, but the show was compelling because, while the main characters were treated perfunctorily again, the killers and their motivations took center stage and I was fascinated.

Although this may not be due to the writers’ talent as to their choice of stories to rip from today’s headlines.

They did the Terri Schiavo story.

And they had Terri’s parents conspire to murder Michael Schiavo.

Raised a lot of interesting questions. Not about Terri Schiavo herself or her condition or any of the right to die/quality of life questions that fueled the turmoil of last spring.

About the nature of love and the meaning of faith and the politicization of both.

This has been a long introduction to a post I’ll have to finish this afternoon.

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