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October 27, 2003
LA Dragnet SVU
The lead detective is played by Al Bundy from Married with Children, who can't seem to make up his mind exactly how seriously he wants to take his role. I think when the producers originally cast him, they were looking for someone who could play deadpan so well it would come off as slightly ironic. Instead, the show is a straightforward cop show with a host of very unironic castmembers (whom critic David Bianculli describes as "insanely good looking") helping Al track down LA's various ne'er-do-wells. His young partner, Desmond Harrington, brings a kind of intensity to his role that is not wholly unlike Guy Pearce in LA Confidential. The other cast members are more disposable and less interesting, but they move the plot along.
You'll remember the famous the-stories-are-true but "the names have been changed to protect the innocent" approach from the original series, and the remake continues in that vein. This week's episode adapted the Phil Spector case...a big-time producer "accidentally" shoots to death a struggling actress after a night of partying, and Friday has to get to the bottom of it. At first, I thought I was along on a simple predictable cop-solves-case adventure, but then the show started taking so many twists and turns (one of which was actually surprising), that I realized whoever wrote the episode was interested in building some suspense and taking an unusual approach, not unlike the various Law & Orders. Also, much like Law & Order SVU, this show featured a gruesome crime at its center. The Phil Spector character killed his victim while engaged in a sex act that directly -- very directly -- involved a loaded gun, and the victim was pregnant at the time of her death. L&O: SVU does this sort of thing all the time -- usually several times per episode, in fact, so it got me thinking that since SVU raised (lowered?) the bar for what's acceptable prime time programming, it was unfortunate that Dragnet felt compelled to follow in its footsteps. But, since the story was imaginatively told and reasonably well acted, I kept watching. By the fourth or fifth plot twist, though, the similarities to the Law & Order spin-offs seemed too bald-faced, and all I could think about how this show was basically a relocated, ripped-off version of SVU. So much so, the show has more in common with Law & Order than it does the original Dragnet (though Friday's periodic unnecessary voiceovers remain). They even have the DA come in towards the last act to start wrapping things up. As Friday and his partners finally unravelled the last layer of the case and the credits rolled, I was immediately reminded of something I had forgotten: Dick Wolf, the father of the Law & Order family, is also responsible for this show, the misfit son who moved to LA to make it big.
