So long, L&O: LA — we hardly knew ya

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This article was published 11/07/2011 (5252 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The case closes for good tonight on the ill-advised, twice revamped Law & Order spinoff, Law & Order: LA, with an episode shelved earlier in the season, but which airs tonight for the first — and presumably last — time.

The story revolves around a Latino college student murdered while trying to protect his sister, a star soccer player at their college campus. Detectives Winters (Skeet Ulrich) and Jaruszalski (Corey Stoll) jump on the case, only to have it take the usual last-minute twist. The case lands in court, where prosecutors Morales (Alfred Molina) and Price (Regina Hall) try to make their case. The evidence doesn’t quite fit the crime, though, and it’s only a matter of time before the case threatens to go sideways.

And so it goes. When Law & Order: LA ends, and Law & Order: Criminal Intent retires at the end of its final season this summer, TV’s most familiar franchise will be down to just one edition, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, which begins its 13th season this fall, on Sept. 21.

Longtime followers of Law & Order: LA will notice, just from the casting, that tonight’s episode was filmed before January’s changes that saw Ulrich’s character killed and Molina’s character demoted to street detective. Showing an unaired episode from a previous incarnation is an ignominious end for a series that was supposed to breathe new life into the Law & Order franchise. The original Law & Order was TV’s longest-serving drama, tied with Gunsmoke‘s 20 seasons, before its sudden cancellation last year.

The decision to transplant the Law & Order formula to Los Angeles was doomed from the outset, though, and L&O viewers knew it.

New York City is a tight-knit, teeming city of crowded sidewalks and towering skyscrapers, where people live in close proximity to one another. Los Angeles is the very definition of urban sprawl, a city of enclaves, where residents spend long hours stuck in traffic on the freeway. People in New York walk; people in L.A. drive. Some of Law & Order‘s most memorable episodes were those that lifted their stories literally off the street, where pedestrians jostled, ran into each other and saw things they weren’t meant to see.

New York is exotic where Los Angeles seems familiar. Countless TV crime dramas are set in L.A.; only a handful are set in New York, or Toronto, for that matter.

When Law & Order: LA‘s ratings faltered out of the blocks, it was easy to blame the cast — but, as tonight’s episode proves, Ulrich and Stoll are just fine together, as are Hall and Molina. Law & Order‘s problems were never its actors; that’s why the original series weathered so many casting changes over the years.

Law & Order: LA was never going to win any awards, but Law & Order itself deserved a better fate. It dared to raise the bar for courtroom dramas, and it seems a shame that its LA incarnation comes to an end tonight, on a midsummer evening when hardly anyone is around to witness its passing.

— Postmedia News

TV preview

Law & Order: L.A.

MONDAY

CTV, NBC, 9 P.M.