These Are Their Stories, Guv’nor

Assessing last night’s much-heralded debut in Britain of Law & Order: UK, Michael Carlson, the film editor of Crime Time and a columnist for Shots, writes in his blog:

It only occurred to me when Law & Order: UK hit its first courtroom scenes that the script, far from being extraordinarily close in content to the original U.S. series, was actually an adaptation of an episode from one of the early years. A little research then revealed that producer/scripter Chris Chibnall had actually chosen 13 of the American shows to adapt, after watching some 150. (Wonder if the L&O version of the Sunny von Bulow killing will be one of them?)

This trans-Atlantic scripting created quite a bind for the British reviewers, one of whom actually opined that the fast pace and slick dialogue was ‘not what UK TV is about, I’m afraid.’ It must be awful to live one’s life in fear, but anyway. Since the actors and the adapter were British, there was the urge to praise, but since this was an American format, the urge to get the boot in was just as strong. A few people mentioned with smugness that it’s the first time the format-following has gone in this direction (thinking of everything from All in the Family to The Office), which overlooks the sad truth that where the Yanks buy formats and tinker with them, the Brits simply steal the idea and butcher it, to wit The Bill (Hill Street Blues), Casualty (ER), or This Life (‘this ISN’T the British Friends’, Amy Perkins told every interviewer, as if that made it so!).

The finished product is actually a blend of L&O and the kind of pacing which Kudos, the British production company, first showed in Spooks ..., and it works pretty well. But the punch of L&O comes from the legal dilemmas, not the pacy cop show; and those dilemmas are often related to police procedure: the ultimate question of whether the law can be enforced and whether, if it is, it constitutes justice. The interesting thing is that ITV, in its advertising, has made the usual mistake of equating the two halves of the show with its title, but the title is actually backwards, since it's the police who maintain order, while the lawyers play with the law. Order and Law doesn’t really flow, though.

You can read all of Carlson’s commentary here.

READ MORE: “TV Main Title of the Week--Special Foreign Law & Order Edition,” by Lee Goldberg (A Writer’s Life); “Law & Order: UK Redux,” by Michael Carlson (Irresistible Targets).