BEST LAW & ORDER ADA

Arthur Branch last is the only thing right about it.

i am only part way through my ahem studies but i think elisabeth röhm was kind of shortchanged by the writing. her first season was the worst to that date (and made weird and awkward by not even catching up to mention 9/11 until midseason) and they seem to have written her part in keeping with the tradition of making a new character's first year a little bit rougher before they settle in (whether on purpose or just as a side effect of doing a new character/part, who knows). rey is kind of insufferable in his first season before he toughens up, lennie is a little out of place while everyone around him still treats him like the risky (drunk) unknown, ed is a little more hotheaded (and gambling explicitly) before he settles into the job. but southerlyn is written as new to the criminal prosecution office/division, and the bit branch gives her when he fires her (too sympathetic to defendants) does seem to confirm the notes they give her character up to that point. so in her first season she's pretty meek in comparison to her predecessors. plus that was the first season where what's his name had left as showrunner. i don't know really but it seems like the dialogue became a little flatter, simpler.

on the other hand, what codes in her performance as 'wooden' i think is that she just hasn't internalized the lines as much as some of the others, so it's more of a challenge to deliver them AND act them simultaneously - she gives the impression of doing one thing at a time. i went looking for something in an older episode the other day and came across a jamie ross scene where she's having a conversation with mccoy, and pretty much every bit of her verbal interaction with him shows up on her face as meaning something to her (partly because of what it's meant to mean to mccoy, like when she's making a little jab at him or chiding him or backing off).

man that list is bullshit

and i don't recognize about half the list

svu DAs, who gives a shit

I give a shit about Francie Swift.

(and made weird and awkward by not even catching up to mention 9/11 until midseason)

I dunno, I recall Serena making a remark along the lines of "After what happened at the Towers..." in an episode that I'm p sure aired as early as November or even late October. It was a real throwaway of a line, very irrelevant to the plot; no doubt it was a late addition filmed weeks after the rest was in the can.

yeah, i think that's a bit less than halfway through the 24 episodes. it's not the only one after that point, either. but once they get back to episodes that were presumably produced after september, you can occasionally see less heavy-handed signs, like the presence of military guards in front of the courthouse, or (this is probably getting into the next season iirc) just security checkpoints out on the steps. and there are more natural offhand references to 9/11 from, like, witnesses or beat cops talking about changed circumstances in ways that make sense (not just a general, 'privacy sure is less important now!').

but even considering that it's law and order (all business) i would expect 'catching up' from such a place-centric 'realism'-heavy show to involve something like having people talking about it a LOT more. i wasn't really watching much tv at the time, so i'm not even sure i can remember whether it was possible for a tv show to pull anything like a response in 'real time' off.

(the west wing is a weird case, since it rushed a didactic episode outside normal continuity to air before the season started, but otherwise had kind of a built-in excuse for not being that in touch with reality, since they could hardly have the fake president there and let in much actual reality.)

huh, i totally forgot about 'rescue me'.

http://www.hitfix.com/blogs/whats-alan-watching/posts/how-tv-reflected-9-11

whew i finally got to serena's firing

i think that one scene is longer than all of lennie retirement scenes put together

'is it because i'm a lesbian' still out of nowhere

so classic

I made the mistake of reading some of Michael Moriarty's current writings. Good God.

Connie Rubirosa (Alana de la Garza) 1

so painfully inhumanly gorgeous, god bless dick wolf

i still can't believe how good the last three seasons get again

Still bummed out there was no season 21 with a pregnant Connie and a mystery father.

The last episode ended with her talking with Cutter and Lupo at a bar which noooo Connie noooooo.