(Editor’s Note: Reporter Copy Editor Gene Ritchings is a former production coordinator at the award-winning TV show Law & Order, which recently completed its 20-season run. He is also a Hudson County resident.)
Decades from now, when historians try to recall America at the turn of the 21st century, one place they’ll go will be the nearly 500 episodes of the original “Law & Order.”
Using New York City as a human laboratory, the series ripped countless stories from the headlines, mixed reality and fiction, and created one hour dramas of startling documentary accuracy and immediacy. How many times did you read a newspaper story and think, “I wonder when that’ll be a ‘Law & Order’ episode?”
In 1990, at a time when the one-hour drama was in eclipse, “Law & Order” opened a golden age of dramatic series on broadcast television. It lasted almost a decade, until “The Sopranos” made mainstreaming deviancy fashionable on cable TV and the gangsters from New Jersey took the hour-long drama into regions of content, character, and taste where shows on advertiser-restricted networks couldn’t follow.
After the show’s cancellation was announced on May 13, my mind reeled with memories.
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For 14 seasons, I worked on “Law & Order,” my last 10 running the New York production office. Since leaving the show five years ago, I have held my breath every spring until its renewal and continued employment for my colleagues was assured.
This year, the network that nearly fumbled Jay Leno and “The Tonight Show” and lost Conan O’Brien denied “Law & Order” its 21st season and the chance to become the longest-running one-hour drama in television history. Unfortunately, NBC waited until the crew had left on hiatus, that annual ritual of recovery from the stress of working on an episodic TV schedule, before sentencing the series to death.
Untold stories
There are hundreds of untold stories about working on “Law & Order,” enough to fill a thick oral history of the production. In particular, though, the testimony of the people whose blood, sweat, and tears are worked into every episode, who endured blistering heat and drenching rain and frigid winters and endless 18-hour workdays, deserves to be heard, because for 20 years the secret star of “Law & Order” was the crew.
These are a few of their stories.
Rising from the ranks
One of the more remarkable stories was how executive producer Ed Sherin, a veteran Broadway and TV director, mentored the careers of a handful of men and women who rose from the ranks of the tech crew to become directors of television shows. Another, lost in dusty cartons of production reports and budgets, is how the New York producers, Jeffrey Hayes, Lew Gould, Kati Johnston and Peter Giuliano, produced 22 to 24 hours of television every season on time and on budget, an extraordinary feat of professional acumen. Another is how Suzanne Ryan in Lynn Kressell’s casting operation hired an average of 30 New York faces and voices per episode.
Another is how “Law & Order” survived constant changes in Universal TV studio ownership without losing its direction or soul. Another is the many millions of dollars the show raised for charity by auctioning off set visits, memorabilia, or the chance to work as an extra (the record: $60,000 from a guy who flew in on his own jet for his appearance).
Memories
For two nights after the show’s cancellation was announced on May 13, my mind reeled with memories. Like the day Gregory Hines, playing a defense attorney, grew bored in a courtroom set crowded with crew and extras waiting for a lighting change and got up and began tap dancing, literally stopping the show. Or how on Sept. 11, 2001, members of the crew happened to be on the streets location-scouting for a planned “Law & Order” mini-series… about a terrorist attack on New York City. Needless to say, that idea was shelved, and after the anthrax attack on 30 Rockefeller Center, my production assistants in the office spent the remainder of the season opening our mail in a closed room wearing dust masks and latex gloves.
Within the “glamorous” world of a film crew there is often factionalizing, back-biting, ego-busting, petty competitiveness, and a sour, spiteful atmosphere, quite apart from the creative conflict necessary to produce the best possible product. Yet “Law & Order” was legendary among New York film crews as a great place to work. In an industry where – as Dick Wolf once said of Hollywood – “Shadenfreude is considered a polite emotion,” everyone worked together respectfully and supportive of each other’s contribution. Whatever momentary bitchery erupted in the daily tumult of working in a highly charged atmosphere, I am sure everyone who ever worked on “Law & Order” is sharing a deep grief at the end of a remarkable experience.
One last memory illustrates what it all meant. When the late Jerry Orbach chose to leave the show in the spring of 2004, the wrap party that year was his farewell. Jesse L. Martin and S. Epatha Merkerson took the stage with a piano player and serenaded Jerry with a duet of “They Can’t Take That Away From Me.” An official from the Detectives Endowment Association presented Jerry with a plaque for making New York City cops look so good. Other speeches and testimonials were offered, and then Jerry took the stage and did something entirely in keeping with the man’s elegant nature. While the pianist played the chords of Rogers & Hammerstein’s “Favorite Things,” he sang the song, having rewritten its lyrics, to portray virtually every member of the crew he’d worked with going about their jobs… accurately, and in detail.
Most of us knew at the time that Jerry was leaving because the cancer he’d been battling for years was gaining on him. That fact gave the song’s refrain — I simply remember my favorite things / and then I don’t feel so bad — a devastating poignancy.
Of course, Jerry tossed the song off with his usual nonchalance. But in a way, that’s what working on “Law & Order” was like: cool expertise and the highest degree of craft, to produce stories that tore at the heart.
To comment on this story, e-mail Gene Ritchings at obits@hudsonreporter.com, or go to www.hudsonreporter.com and leave a comment underneath. Have your own memoir to share? E-mail editorial@hudsonreporter.com.