I was curious who would win this race:
And the Winner is the Instapundit:
The best part is the hyperlink is not to anything explaining this “move to the left,” but to his Amazon store so he can get a commission off the rubes who buy… leftist Law and Order dvd’s.
Heroes was also canceled. I’d love to hear about the leftward shift in that storyline, since I couldn’t stomach anything after the first season.
Brick Oven Bill
I heard they were actually combining 24 and Lost, putting Jack Bauer in charge of the island and building some cells.
Viva la Amerika!
Guster
I loved season 1 of Heroes, and hated it thereafter. Stopped watching immediately. But I’ve never figured out why.
What was it that made it so awful?
arguingwithsignposts
Is that the real BoB back after his b&? it seems too short. I also think “Lie to Me” has been canceled but nobody will admit it yet.
Zandar
Of course this is a victory for John McCain if you think about it…
Toast
Season One of Heroes was a perfectly satisfying and self-contained story arc. If the show’s creators had any guts they would have wrapped it after that. Instead they dragged it out and got silly with it, losing a lot of viewers (myself included) in the process.
It’s funny that Law and Order is now being billed as “too liberal”. The last liberal I remember on that show was Claire Kincaid, and they killed her off a decade and a half ago. When they replaced her with a series of ever more “tough” female assistant DA’s, I kicked the show to the curb.
On a related note, Flash Forward, which has really been finding its groove lately, is getting canned, adding to the long list of shows I like that get the hook way before their time. Meanwhile, dreck like Chuck (sorry, JC) gets renewed. Other TV viewers suck.
jron
@Guster: same here. I think it was too many new characters; they started to not really seem special anymore. Plus the first season was all about the people finding each other, and the 2nd (as far as I could stomach) was more about how they couldn’t. frustrating to watch. Plus the main villain was the same guy again and that was boring. Plus they were trying to about 100 storylines at once, which meant I could never get interested in any of them. Actually now that I think about it there were a ton of reasons why it sucked.
djork
Fred Thompson’s manly charisma could have saved the show.
Three-nineteen
I think conservatives have just replaced “got bad” with “moved left”. L&O “moved left” for a while and lost viewers. It
got better“moved right” the last couple of seasons but no one noticed, so it got cancelled.And Lie to Me has new episodes on starting next month.
Allen
That must be why the oh-so-conservative Glee has been cancelled. Oh, wait…
LD
salon.com/life/broadsheet/feature/2009/10/24/law_and_order_tiller
Seem like a leftward move to you?
Jrod, Slayer of Phoenix
It’s too bad that the PC Police have cut down another great show as it was just hitting its stride, a mere 20 seasons into its run. I sure hope the liberal hordes don’t kill any of the three spin-offs, because I can’t live without my doink doink.
tenkindsofgrumpy
It can’t be that the show was canceled because everyone involved in it’s production are all in nursing homes.
New Yorker
“Police Squad” was canceled because it moved too far to the left.
Guster
@jron: Yeah, I suppose that’s all true. I keep looking for that One Explanation, which is probably not very sensible.
Laertes
Holy shit. That show was still running? What’s next? Are they going to cancel Barney Miller?
Randy P
@Laertes: I hear M*A*S*H is on the chopping block. You want to talk about your liberal shows…
John
Man, another year and it would have beaten Gunsmoke.
I assume the “leftward turn” had to do with the DA no longer being Fred Thompson.
Comrade Tank Hueco
IMO L&O never recovered from Jerry Orbach’s passing away. The current cast is actually pretty good, but it may have been too late.
Laertes
I imagine the reason its’ ratings fell is that there’s fifty-seven seasons of reruns playing all day, every day, on six different networks, and nobody could tell the new ones from the old anymore.
Will
Heroes started to suck for two reasons.
Their best writer – Bryan Fuller – left to start Pushing Daisies. By the time they got him back in the third season, the show was in tatters.
Success was also bad for them. The original plan was to shred the cast at the end of the first season, killing many of the regulars. The second season would pick up with a new cast, slowly interweaving the survivors back in as the story went.
Then the show got popular, the execs decided this was because the audience loved the show’s “stars” and forbid the planned slaughter. The result was the second season tried to split the baby, keeping all of the old cast – minus the black guy – while introducing a show’s worth of new characters.
The writing then got ADD, trying to juggle 2.5 shows worth of plotlines without their strongest writer.
El Cid
I think it was the episode when all the attorneys began wearing Mao suits and were hunting down capitalists who had betrayed the revolution.
Will
And don’t cry for Law and Order. They are keeping one spin-off – SUV – and starting another – Law and Order L.A.
I’d also lay even money that TNT or one of the other cable networks that live off Law and Order reruns ponies up the money to keep the show going. It’s happened before, and Law and Order is just the type of moderately budgeted show that basic cable could afford to keep going indefinitely.
Alien-Radio
Heroes picked up the worst attributes of the mid 90’s X-men. Syler should have died at the end of the first season, there were far too many contradictory plots and dangling plot threads.
Rosalita
we still have L&O Criminal Intent on cable. I like the addition of Jeff Goldblum… not so much the chick they picked for his partner…
Derek
@Toast:
Hey, Chuck is awesome!
Also, I am mildly ashamed to admit I watched Heroes in seasons 2 and 3. That is some of the worst shit I’ve voluntarily watched. However, season 4 was excellent, even better than season 1, and I’m sad that they cancelled it right when it started to get good. That said, at least it went out on a high note. (Albeit, a cliffhanger! Argh!)
velouria
Exactly. I can’t believe anybody would complain about a drama being canceled after 20 fucking years on the air.
Laertes
Not only should Syler have died, but the nuke should have gone off.
Absolutely everything that painter ever saw came to pass. It didn’t always mean what you might have expected, but it always happened. They should have kept that going.
Peter should have exploded. Many of the cast should have been killed. Future Hiro was wrong: He thought he stabbed Syler and Syler survived because he’d eaten the Cheerleader’s brain. No. He stabbed Peter, who for some reason or other had assumed Syler’s shape at the time, and who survived because Future Hiro had intervened and caused him to meet the Cheerleader whom he’d not otherwise have met. That’s how the show should have ended.
Nuke. Roll credits. Mind blown. Would have been awesome.
Brandon
It seems there is a good reason where there is a “con” in conservative.
They all try to con each other into buying their stupid junk.
They want a “market” where the general premise is that everyone is conning everyone else, instead of actually trying to ad value, you know, something useful.
I think the most useful thing about that Mark Levin saga had nothing to do with the fancy-pants elaborate “epistemic closure” debate. The real reason cornerites and others had a hissy fit is because someone in wingnut land suggested that a product that one of their own was trying to pass off onto the rubes was junk and not worthwhile.
Mike in NC
@djork:
That or a personal appeal from Rudy Guiliani.
But you’ve gotta give them credit for something that had never been done before: a show about cops and lawyers set in NYC!
Now if only somebody would do a show about hot looking doctors and nurses having sex on the job 24/7.
Derek
Also, I heard yesterday that NYC will lose more than $700 million in revenue from the cancellation of Law & Order. That sucks.
Steeplejack
@Laertes:
There is no difference between the new episodes and the old. I accidentally caught a new episode last week (TV was on that channel in the background while I was screwing around on the computer), and except for the clothes and a few details it was interchangeable with what they were doing 15 years ago. Talk about a formula–it’s like kabuki.
scott (the other one)
We first starting watching Law & Order around the fourth or fifth season, I think, and couldn’t believe how great it was. A good friend of mine, VERY conservative, said that the first two seasons of the show were great…but then it got too P.C.
It never changes.
hilzoy fangirl
Is it because I’m a lesbian?
pablo
L & O has always been “to teh left”, because that’s where Dick Wolfe stands, and I think that’s why it has been on for 20 years. Justice IS left! Duh!
valdivia
I have been watching L&O since the first season and I will miss the show. There is no way in hell the first two seasons were more conservative. Maybe because they added women after season 2? Is *that* too pc?
some other guy
@Rosalita:
Yeah, they should’ve kept Julianne Nicholson (Det. Wheeler) around. She would’ve made a great match with Goldblum.
Bordo
Did any lefties jump up and down when Fox canceled “24” because of its ratings plunge? I doubt it. I suppose big brains like the Royal Rube of Knoxville will wager it was canceled because wingnuts tired of a series in which two black men were president followed by a white woman.
It’s tough to be a conservative, constantly weighing things as to whether or not the films, books, music, etc. you use are suitably right-wing. Poor babies. What are they left with? “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” and reruns of “Red Dawn?”
some other guy
@pablo:
Except for Special Victims Unit. That show is uber-authoritarian.
Citizen Alan
@Guster:
Spoilers for people who care about such:
I loved Season 1 as well, but realize in retrospect it was just as bad as the subsequent seasons. It’s just that since it was new, we all assumed that the characters were inexperienced and still finding their way as characters instead of really, really dumb. The plot of every season of Heroes depended on characters who were mind-bogglingly stupid and who wandered around not achieving anything until the last 2 episodes, at which point they all got together and beat up the villain before ending the season on a cliff-hanger.
The show had three different characters (Hiro, Peter and Sylar) who were basically unstoppable god-characters, so the writers would have them lose their powers and/or get amnesia for most of every season only to get them back at just in time at the end. The next most powerful character — telepath Matt Parkman — could have probably taken over the world in four years, but spent most of that time mooning and sulking over his relationship problems, including the death of the girl he fell madly in love with solely because he had a vision of being married to her in a possible future.
The final shark-jump moment was at the end of Season 4, when Sylar killed Nathan and Mama Petrelli forced Matt to brainwash the most dangerous serial killer in the world into thinking that he was Nathan and shapeshifting into his form … even though Nathan’s daughter, whose blood could raise the dead, was next door!
As Tom Servo would say, the writers “just didn’t care.”
Donald G
That’s right, Glenn, it’s all because the show “veered left” and lost viewers. I’m sure the loss in viewers had nothing whatsoever to do with the program being on for twenty years and the formula becoming tired and predictable.
I’m sure Glenn and Helen can content themselves with the prospect of twenty years of “24” and “The Half-Hour News Hour” and however many sequels the box-office smash that was “An American Carol” launched.
Glenn’s “liberal-elitist entertainment is alienating real NASCAR lovin’ Americans” meme is almost as tired as SNL (Betty White notwithstanding).
jrosen
The last episode had Lt. Van Buren smoking medical marijuana during chemo, it being noted in the “house” because of the odor, and being simultaneously bawled out and counseled how to hide it by an IAB captain (who says it got him through his own cancer treatment). I guess that’s liberal (or is it libertarian?).
BTW, if you didn’t watch it, you missed Serena Southerlyn (Elizabeth Rohm) constantly jousting with DA Branch (Fred Thompson playing himself) over civil rights issues. Sometimes she even wins.
My only carp with the show is that it too often villainizes defense attorneys, whose job is to keep the system honest even if a bad guy gets off. Otherwise, the show was almost always interesting, loved NYC (as I do) and gave a lot of excellent non-headlining actors work. I particularly enjoyed Spiro Malas as Russian gang boss, since I know the guy (in real life he is a first-rate operatic baritone, married to a classmate of mine).
I’ll miss the show.
Digital Amish
Does anyone watch Justified? Is it as good as I think it is or is it just that Timothy Oliphant is still in character from Deadwood and that’s why I like it so much?
Steeplejack
@Digital Amish:
I watch Justified and am mildly surprised that it doesn’t seem to get much love.
I haven’t watched the last couple of episodes yet (they’re on the DVR), but the first episodes were a little uneven. The show seems to be trying to find its footing. I think (hope) it will. Timothy Olyphant is cool, and the rest of the cast has some good people in it. And I like the pacing of the show.
Warren Terra
In the old days, L&O was about uncertainty and granted defendants some respect and their rights. Cop shows nowadays (esp SVU) are about cryptofascist infallible supercops; trials are an afterthought.
Martin
@Will: I thought the off-season solution was a pretty good idea. Rather than stick with the main characters, each episode was an independently written vignette of another person on earth that had some power. So all the stories were in the same universe, and might even reference other events and characters, but were otherwise isolated from each other.
Hob
@Derek: Not only that, but it employed just about every actor in town at some point. At the word processing agency jobs I did in the ’90s, which tended to attract artsy people without steady income, there were a couple of actors who had occasional L&O gigs and one lady who was a regular there; the latter would get cast every month or so as different people – judges, criminals, victims, it didn’t matter, they were all her and no one noticed, even though she was pretty distinctive-looking.
scarshapedstar
Stephen Colbert keeps moving further left. Is the end nigh?!
RobNYNY1957
Did Fred Thompson ever play a character who didn’t have a southern accent? He seems to blur the line between “memorizing” and “acting.”
debbie
I’ve read that it was closer to $1 billion and that over the 20 years, it created 4,000 jobs. Obviously, the conservatives will be happy to see as many “lefties” out of work as possible.
I’ve pretty much been a constant viewer since the beginning. The show’s overall politics didn’t move left or right; what changed was each specific plot line. All parts of the political spectrum played the bad guy at some point.
The show was more about social justice than anything else, but Glenn Beck thinks that that concept is a synonym for Marxism — thus, the bogus claims.
Bubblegum Tate
I’m seriously surprised that Big Hollywood’s Merry Band of R-tards didn’t win this competition. I guess they’re too hung up on Roman Polanski and how Machete is leftist evilness.
Tenzil Kem
The only time I’ve liked Fred Thompson was when he was on Law & Order. Politics, schmolitics, he was a vast improvement on Dianne Wiest…
Hal
@ Citizen Alan
That’s actually a fairly common comic book plot device, with characters like Phoenix or Superman, they always needed something holding them back since in the end, they could pretty much do anything they wanted.
DC characters were especially vulnerable to the power loss because so many of them were god like. It’s also why so many characters, again especially DC, had convenient weaknesses (kryptonite, fire, the color yellow) for villains to exploit.
Hal
Jack McCoy was super liberal. He just did what he had to in order to win cases, but in many an episode he remarked about his old 60’s days.
Elizabeth Rohm was definitely Liberal and so was Dianne Weiss character, but so much of the show focused on law. It was about prosecuting criminals, not some appeals court deciding abortion access, or gay marriage.
freelancer
Can I just say Fuck Law and Order and every Law and Order franchise?
I can’t ever remember a cultural trainwreck so adamant about being GLIB. There was no character development, the courtroom scenes were always overwrought with stupid plot twists and gratuitous melodrama, and the end to almost every episode tried to give you a brooding sense of unease. It wasn’t an artistic statement, it was like they were trying to be cynical knockoffs of the Coen Bros, only void of any talent or merit in the writing. Every detective was basically a member of MST3K cracking wise over a dead body, or somebody’s tumultuous affair, or kinky fetish.
We learned more about the Law and Order characters in 2 crossover episodes of Homicide life on the street, than we ever did watching 5 seasons of the show itself. It’s one-off throwaway entertainment, and you don’t feel thrilled, entertained, or edified in any fashion after its over. Your first thought is “Oh, I wonder if there’s any ice cream left in the fridge”.
Warren Terra
Contra freelancer, with whom I otherwise agree, lack of character development can be a plus in episodic TV, esp. in reruns. Grand story arcs that build are great, but one-off stories have a place.
Laertes
I’m with Freelancer. As TV shows go, L&O is particularly unsatisfying. Not everybody can be great, but often people are trying. Law and Order is the Franzia of Television–no ambition other than to be big and sell well.
Tenzil Kem
@Warren Terra: Complaining that L&O doesn’t have character development is akin to complaining that people in a musical keep breaking into song and dance.
Laertes
@Tenzil Kem: The problem isn’t that L&O has no character development. The problem is the L&O has no character development, the dialogue is trite & clumsily written, and the formula is boring.
I like a musical as much as the next guy. But I don’t like bad musicals.
Corner Stone
@Hob:
I love spotting recurring castaways.
Corner Stone
@Digital Amish:
It’s pretty meh. I tried to watch it and got through 2 and a half episodes. Recorded others but never watched them.
And I like TO.
skippy
personally i lurvs me some justified, tho i’m a big olyphant fan.
Jeff Fecke
Is now the right time for me to pitch my ultimate crime show, Law & Order: CSI?
Epicurus
I have it on very inside information (a friend who has worked for the show for some time) that “someone told Dick Wolf to go fuck himself.” Guess he started making demands on NBC and they told him to take a short walk. Still, maintaining two (?) other shows and rolling out L&O:LA does not sound like a terrible kissoff. Perhaps they just wanted to deny him the record over Gunsmoke. Who knows, I always liked it, and I think the last couple of seasons in particular have rocked. R.I.P.
velouria
@Digital Amish:
Personally I’m loving Justified. I think it’s neck and neck with Treme as the second best television show airing right now. The best is obviously Breaking Bad.
Steeplejack
@Jeff Fecke:
Step to the back of the line, bro’. I’m already in with CSI: Forensic Arguing Unit.
Derek
@debbie:
My bad, my friend said the cancellation cost them 700 million but he was posting from his phone, he meant to say they will lose 79 million a year. My fault for not looking up the article for myself.