Law & Order Needs To Jump Into The TV Stream

The Concept

So the idea is that in the first half of the episode, you follow a pair of detectives as they crack a case, and then in the second half it's all about the trial. But it's impossible to live in this culture without knowing that.

Opening Credits Cast

The original Law & Order -- as opposed to any of its spinoffs -- was on for twenty seasons and went through a shitload of cast arrivals and departures in that time, but some highlights: Sam Waterston; Chris Noth; S. Epatha Merkerson; Angie Harmon; the late Fred Dalton Thompson; the notorious Elisabeth Röhm; and a certain Jerry Orbach, THE GREATEST OF ALL TIME.

Notable Guest Stars

Load up the "Full Cast & Crew" IMDb page for the show and comb through it to see if you can find a New York-based actor working on the stage during the decades the show was on but WASN'T on the show. Actually, don't bother, you can't. Also: Oscar winners Dianne Wiest, Julia Roberts, and J.K. Simmons, and that's just off the top of my head.

Why It's In TV Jail

Let's say it's in TV Jail with a regular weekend furlough. You can buy the entire series on DVD -- and after this week, tbh, I am strongly considering it. And on my DirecTV package, it regularly runs marathons on five different channels (WeTV, Ion, WGN, Sundance, and TNT, in case you want to set your DVR). Buuuuuuuut...

Why It Deserves Parole

...BUUUUUUUUT if you were, let's say, the co-editor of a TV website with story ideas that required you access to specific episodes, and you didn't buy that 700-disc DVD set because storing it would require building an addition on your home and because buying "all of Law & Order" feels as absurd as buying "all of 60 Minutes" or "all of recorded human history": the odds are against your being able to access the episodes you need on demand. Law & Order currently isn't on Netflix or Hulu. iTunes has Seasons 16-20, for purchase; Amazon has them as well, plus Seasons 1 and 2. Your TV website's having a Law & Order Week and you want to contribute an Ermahgerd! Kernader! post on "True North," the ripped-from-the-headlines episode with Bellamy Young as a Canadian defendant? That's S09.E09, so: tough noogies! See also: "Fools For Love," the show's take on one of Canada's most notorious murder cases with Ellen "Meredith Grey" Pompeo as its Karla Homolka; it's S10.E15. (On that one, to be fair, you could have also gone to your TV listings; WeTV aired it last night.)

Don't get me wrong: the ubiquity of Law & Order in syndication is a true gift to all TV viewers, but particularly to those of us who work at home. When I get to my desk at 4:30 AM HT (not a typo), I cycle through all the above-listed channels to see which of them happens to be airing L&O (or SVU), park my DirecTV receiver there, and leave it until the network programmer harshes my mellow with a CI or a Blue Bloods. The pleasure of marathoning this show in syndication is that while you might not know what you're going to get unless you have an encyclopedic memory of the sequence in which episodes originally aired, you definitely know it'll all be great. But, on occasion, you might have a larky need to get your eyes on a particular episode at a particular time, and right now, our streaming services are letting us down.

Recommendation

Law & Order is a cultural touchstone, and as such, it should be accessible to the public -- you know, like running water is. At the very least, the whole series run should be available for purchase, but let's be real: a towering achievement like this show really should be on every subscription streaming service in existence. If Hulu has Seinfeld and Netflix has Friends, Law & Order should come loaded on everything from Apple Watches to the display screen on your coffeemaker. (I am not a crackpot.)