Law & Order: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

abroad and talk about another TV show specifically Law & Order, the wildly popular franchise that has been on TV for decades, giving us incredible dialogue like this. Do you think there was a reason the killer sodomized your husband with a banana now that that's acting? Right there, even if she wasn't listening to the words coming out of Mariska Hog Attack's mouth, she would know based on her speech alone that the killer had sodomized this person's husband with a banana and then she was simply trying to figure out why now. . Turns out the victim's wife actually answered that question and thinks of the funniest answer possible.

You're wrong. It's this one. Do you think there was a reason the killer sodomized your husband with a banana? He was allergic to bananas. Excellent. I just love the idea. of a murderer asking before murdering and sodomizing you. I just have one question: do you have any allergies? I should note that that exchange is just one of the reasons why Law & Order is the king of cop shows among all of its various spins. -offs, there are over 1200 episodes and it's been around for so long that it's really hard to think of an actor that hasn't appeared at some point because it features everyone from Chevy Chase to Samuel L Jackson, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Angela Lansbury appears with his lawyer Bradley Cooper before Adam Driver, who is on SVU Series 13 Episode 11 for approximately 3 minutes and 32 seconds of screen time.

If you're the kind of person who tells that kind of thing, even politicians have been in it. Rudy Giuliani Mike Bloomberg and Joe Biden, all guests who start out as themselves, which is a little strange, although it would clearly be stranger if Biden appeared as someone else, like a Times Square Ninja Turtle who stumbled upon a gruesome victim of murder who was suffering from banana phallic shock. and Order is on the air all the time and for many it's Comfort TV, but shows like this have a real impact. One study found that viewers of crime dramas are more likely to believe that police are successful in reducing the use of force against crime only when necessary and that misconduct does not often lead to false confessions, which would be great if was true, but if you're watching this show you probably know it's not, and Law & Order in particular has become an American institution with enormous cultural influence; some have argued his formula.

It shaped a generation's understanding of the legal system and you've probably seen people using it as a reference point like this. I'm not a lawyer. I watch Law & Order and occasionally my legal experience resembles the law. and Order and Law & Order SVU I think the average Law & Order viewer probably knows that you're not supposed to get it right. I went to a great law school, but most of what I do on a day-to-day basis is based on what I learned about Law & Order, so there's nothing you can learn from Law & Order. I've learned a ton just from Iced Tea's Twitter feed, where he drops truth bombs like he's a real nutcase.

It feels like every bone in your body is coming. Take the head off your penis, say no more, I'm done, fall asleep in two minutes, look, the man is telling the truth, if you can't stand the ice, stay out of the freezer, it can be really alarming how seriously some people take the ice. In fact, the show only hears War and Light, Law and Order, from a long-time showrunner, talks about an unexpected group of viewers he found out about, we also find out over time and this is a bit eh, that causes me a lot of anxiety. of police officers are not trained on how to do their jobs in second sexual assault cases and many police officers get much of their information from watching SVU, which many police departments do not have the time or money to put people through training formal, yeah, that's not cool, is it?

No one should learn to do their job on a television show, unless, of course, their job is to tell jokes to mask their deep-seated feelings of emptiness and existential dread. In which case, keep watching, you might pick up some tips, so if Law & Order is co-signed by elected leaders and everyone from TV pundits to real cops is using it to learn about law enforcement, We thought

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we'll take a look at what this franchise is all about. has actually been teaching us and let's start with the fact that the line between cop shows and real cops has always been deliberately blurred;

In fact, Smash Hit's first crime show, Dragnet, which debuted on television in 1951, was a big selling point for its authenticity from the start. the opening part of each episode, ladies and gentlemen, the story you are about to see is true, names have been changed to protect the innocent. I mean the surprising thing to me is that it starts with ladies and gentlemen, since it sounds like the The kind of voice that would say that letting his wife watch TV might give him The notions are very similar came at a price. Dragnet star and creator Jack Webb agreed that the scripts would be formally approved by the Los Angeles Police Department's Public Information Division and, in exchange, the show could be filmed wherever they were.

I wanted to have cops as extras and use police vehicles and equipment, which was a good deal for both parties, the show took on a patina of authenticity and the LAPD got a flattering representation that frankly it needed given that right after Dragnet premiered, approximately 50 LAPD officers brutally beat. seven men in his custody for over an hour leaving him hospitalized with broken bones and ruptured organs in an incident that later became known as Bloody Christmas, so if Dragnet really wanted to be authentic, every episode probably should have started like this, ladies and gentlemen, the story that you What we are about to see is that the names were changed to protect the LAPD because they helped save a lot of money on prop drugs that had a huge impact on viewers at the time , including one particular boy who later remembers being five or six years old. old and was allowed to stay up late because Dragnet was on that boy eventually grew to be such a household name someone once did this to his own body here is the worst Executive Producer Dick Wolf on his lower back yeah the man He said he got it because he's obsessed with law and

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, yes, a wolf tattoo that's some real star power, especially for an executive producer, maybe that's why Iced Tea himself once simply tweeted at Dick Wolf and got 108 likes.

Dick Wolf is one of those names like Steve Madden or Charles Schwab that you see all the time, even if you have no idea what Dick Wolf actually looks like, for example, it's not Dick Wolf, that's Charles Schwab, this is Dick Wolf, Except it's not Steve Madden, this is Dick Wolf, it's what I would say if it were Dick Wolf, but it's just a stock image that came up when we were looking for business. Grandfather. This I Promise is the real Deadpool and Dick Wolf, a six-year-old Dragnet superfan worthy of being older, who later grew up to create Law & Order and Funnily enough, he actually got his start in advertising where, among other things, he helped create this campaign tremendously sexist advertising for National Airlines.

I'm Judy and I was born to fly, take me to Houston, non-stop nationalist DC-10s every day, or meet me in New York. Orleans on the army's dc-10s, you can fly me in the morning, in the afternoon or at night, just say when it's Judy, it's enough to fly abroad. Judy flies. National saint. I can only imagine the objective demonstration of that, where men between the ages of 18 and 40 live by the motto. Can't, I don't want it? The entire Fly Me campaign was a huge success and Dick Wolf later bragged about it to the most inappropriate person imaginable.

You were in advertising before as a writer as a producer writer. I did commercials. You did commercials. What were some of the commercials? Where did people recognize these commercials? Oh, today, I'm sure it's Cheryl, take me. I'm sure I'll find a hey today. That's an immediate sexual description that goes right off the bat in a pretty interesting way. Seven years. Interesting enough. I think it was. at the time one of the most successful airline campaigns in history because it was funny, I'm sure I'm Cheryl Fleming, it was aimed at businessmen and all the flight attendants were from the University of Florida and we're 22 years old, that's why they flew . in the air I'm surprised that didn't end your career if you gave a massage to the Roger Isles man best known for sexually harassing Ed so badly that he scandalously died.

Wrong turn is like if someone said you look lost and it turns out that someone was Amelia Earhart, now you're in big trouble after quitting advertising. Wolff worked on crime shows like Hill Street Blues and Miami Vice and in 1990 had his monster hit Law & Order, to which he even gave his own version of the Dragnet Preamble, one that I assume you can basically recite by heart because you know how it works. the criminal system in the criminal justice system. People are represented by two separate but equally important groups. Police investigate crime and district attorneys prosecute criminals.

These are their stories. fact done now these are their stories part there is really important because a big selling point of Law & Order is that, similar to Dragnet, it is inspired by real life cases, in fact, as Wolf relates when the network asked him which is the Bible for the show that said the cover of the New York Post no writer will do better than a headless body found in a topless bar, which is catchy, but I'm not sure it's true. An assless corpse found at a bottomless brunch there. I just did it and Like Jack Webb in Dick Wolf, I cultivated a close behind-the-scenes relationship with the NYPD, employing officers as consultants and boasting about the access I had.

I've probably spent more time with cops than anyone who doesn't wear a badge, so I mean, when you know people, you know cops, whether it's Bill Bratton, Ray Kelly or Sheriff Baca, you know there's a shared interest in putting the bad guys away. and that the police show themselves in a decent light. Wow Wolf, a law enforcement professional, is the most enthusiastic chronicler of blue lives since James Cameron and, while not as staid as Dragnet's Arrangement Laurel, which has also benefited from its relationship with the NYPD, A writer who worked on the show has said that there was always a feeling that If we told stories that reflected too badly on the police, the NYPD might make it very difficult for us to shoot in New York, which makes sense, doesn't it? ?

The NYPD is famous for being against shootings, unless they are the ones actually doing it. As much as Dick Wolf brags about how the show is written in Shades of Gray or how he will show both sides of an issue, there is one side that is always active and that is the police because no matter how flawed his characters are, they are They all fundamentally pursue justice and cops love to be portrayed that way, as the actors on the show have been tested over the years. Police across the country, I have to say, are big fans of the show because they feel it's authentic.

A couple of homicide cops came to visit them. They had wonderful things to say about the show, they said thank you and they were thinking of me, which was strange, uh, they felt like they were well represented, my favorite police quote is to keep making us look good, which is a nice compliment, they're very very nice yeah I bet they are although on the one hand it's worth it there was a pretty big difference between them they feel it's authentic and they feel it makes them look good and it's the same difference between these two photos one is one mirror of reality and the other is A Lie and a Look Thanks to Law & Order's close collaboration with its police consultants, the show gets a lot of smaller details, such as the jargon of specific laws and crime scene procedures , but more importantly, he also makes many decisions that significantly distort the overall picture of the police. for example, most episodes arrest the right perpetrators at the midpoint and then convict them at the end and it's structured like that for obvious reasons, it's a self-contained television episode and they need a satisfying fulfillment of the narrative arc, but as we know, in reality not only Many cases simply remain unsolved?

Almost none of those that are resolved go to trial. Prosecutors put massive pressure on defense attorneys to take plea deals, which means 97 percent of criminal cases don't go to trial, and Law & Order obviously can't reflect that reality. would be impossible to watch, no one wants to watch a show in which 97 of the episodes end with two lawyers reaching an agreement in a roomno windows and then you can watch the defendant serve six months and then struggle to get a job at his local Jiffy Loop, but the courtroom is left half-done. of Law and Order actually represents a significant departure from television tradition because, historically, Lawyers shows focused defense attorneys like Perry Mason who tried to work against the system as the underdogs and free innocent people, but Law and Order is different and that's largely due to Design Dick.

Wolfer said: "I think the heroes weren't the defense attorneys who were getting these bastards off their backs, the heroes were the prosecutors and you can see that on their shows where defense attorneys generally present themselves as an impediment to convicting suspects obviously guilty and they are the target of lines like this the chill ran down your spine it's because the defense attorney just walked in here the defense attorneys distort the facts they twist the evidence I believe in monsters and things that go bump in the night Jack made them rot in hell with his Journeys, well let me guess, the guy Darren aka defense attorney, a couple of things there, one yes, it's a post OC, Misha Barton giving an award worthy performance, but two, the lawyers are a part vital of the justice system, so it's a little strange that Law & Order can sometimes go out of its way to portray them as the babadook and again you can absolutely justify those decisions by saying, come on, they're making fiction, not a documentary, not everyone wants Seeing hyperrealistic depictions of our society is always desiccating.

John and I get it, but it's not just the depictions of defense attorneys where big editorial decisions are made. One study found that the criminals in Law & Order were disproportionately older, middle-class white men. o high Dick Wolf actually explained his reasoning for why the show's criminals lean that way by saying that there are no rich white boy lobbies, you can do whatever you want to the rich white boys and no one cares and you can see What he may not want to do is make a show where his good cops disproportionately target communities of color, he wants to please people, but the result One of all these creative decisions is that instead of depicting a flawed system Rife with structural racism, the show features exceptionally competent cops who work within a largely fair framework that condemns primarily white people, and while they have admittedly occasionally made episodes focusing on bad individuals. cops or references to real-world criticism, especially recently, with discussions of anti-police sentiment sometimes shoehorned into general conversations.

Police reforms are often portrayed by the main characters as, at best, a nuisance to them and, at worst, a threat to public safety. July they reduced stop and search people started charging him you two had him yesterday and let him go there was no probable cause for an arrest they create probable cause they push them they are provoking after Eric Garner and stop and Fritz sues so the 1pp It has been very clear. I don't do a scene like this or not. Nolan, the big bad Police Department is our partner and in case you haven't been paying attention, they are under attack.

Every decision, every arrest is examined. people trying to defund them for the love of God and here you are asking me to castrate them oh no, scrutinizing arrests how horrible you know, it's quite telling that even in this fictional universe the basic responsibility of the police is treated as an equivalent to that They may cut your balls off, but perhaps the best expression of the disparity between law and

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and real life is found in its most popular spin-off, SVU. It's a show based on the appeal of having cops who will stop at nothing to solve horrible cases.

Cops like Elliot Stabler, who before getting a The spin-off show routinely did like this I'm going to make you wait, okay, I get a little clumsy with trash pedophiles, why do you have to be so tough, because you still have a good arm left break, so I should put pigtails on you, little one come. About you little one I want you to cry for me tell me come on cry for me I don't know what the hell you're talking about I think I have a dumb cop D leave will with that one look I admit it as a viewer It's something to see Stabler chew up the scenery and spit it right out in Matthew Modine's face.

Is he the model of a good police officer? It's that police officers care deeply about achieving justice for victims, and their instincts mean they almost always get the job done in the end. In one episode, we learned that Stabler has a case closure rate of 97 and people love this show. Christopher Maloney is the Internet. zaddy and you can see why his butt alone is a pop culture icon and Mariska Hargitay also has a huge cult following. Fans of her have tattoos of her. Taylor Swift has a cat named after her character Olivia Benson and there's even tic tac like this, well, when you're a girl, daddy's girl, kind of like this look in general.

I think I've made my position on police brutality pretty clear, but even I admit it's hard to resist watching Olivia Benson slam some moron's head into a table to the hollaback girl beat, in which case it goes off, girl boss , leans toward state-sponsored violence, relatively appealing to the idea of ​​a world where police take sexual assault survivors seriously. Hockey even talks openly about some of the real-world positives of the show. Impacts Many times I have met people who have said because of this program that they knew what to do after their assault because of this program that they were raped because of the program they reported and that they had faith in that and because of the program more Above all , they didn't feel alone anymore and for me, when I started hearing those stories was when I knew it wasn't just a TV show anymore, it was much more of an appearance that is obviously genuinely moving and I don't doubt the show is doing important work. to inform or even provide catharsis to some of her viewers in between, i.e. showing her slamming a suspect's face into a table like she was a little girl making two Barbies kiss and, to her true credit, Mariska Hargitay has tried to take advantage of his fame. advocacy foundation of an organization that advocates for survivors of sexual assault, domestic abuse, and child abuse, but if, as Hargitay says, the show encourages people to take advantage of this system, it's worth knowing what that system may look like in the practice because it is not good government and press.

Reports have repeatedly shown that New York's real sex crimes unit is set up to fail sexual assault victims and its case closure rate is a far cry from Elliot Stabler's fictitious 97 percent. Official figures from the New York Police Department show that they only close about a third of sexual assaults. cases, but an analysis of cases submitted over a two-year period ultimately had a closure rate of only six percent. Additionally, a damning 2018 investigation cited several prosecutors who described inadequate handling of cases by overburdened or inexperienced investigators, until recently given only five days of specialized formal investigation. training, it's no wonder some cops are looking to SVU for advice which, honestly, may not be bad when it comes to Justice Crusader Olivia Benson, but it gets a little hairy when Zaddy is overused here and while the NYPD insists that we have since improved staffing and training, the Justice Department recently announced its own investigation citing reports that officers in the unit were not carrying out basic security steps. investigation and instead shamed, abused and re-traumatized survivors during investigations, and yet the portrait the SVU paints of the division is so compelling that when a new Commander took over in 2020 and made a interview about that internal scale report I just mentioned here, that's how the host concluded his conversation, you know I'm going to ask this because I'm obsessed with the Law Order SVU TV Show How real is the TV show on the real life?

I can tell you this, the dedication that you see on television with the investigators, is the same dedication that we have within the real Special Victims Unit, and the cases are very very similar as egregious as you see on television uh, we are seeing what same in real life, so a lot of them are ripped from the headlines, you know, boy, stop falling, keep it up, are you really as cool as you see? him on TV, do you sometimes make the car pee even when it's not necessary to pee? It's an iced tea. I follow him on Twitter and it's worth knowing that some survivors have spoken about what it's like to watch these detectives. rated on TV with one saying Law & Order SVU gave me the false impression that this squad cared deeply about victims and their jobs and another saying if I had a dollar for every time I heard this it can't be true Olivia Benson would never allow this If this happened, she would have enough to cover my hospital bills and therapy for my trauma, and you should know that even the real world inspiration for the tenacious and uncompromising Olivia Benson and the show's tough Ada Alexandra Cabot has a significant asterisk because one of the first models for both characters was Linda.

Ferstein, the woman now infamous for prosecuting the Central Park Five or, as they are now known, the Exonerated Five and I will say that some behind the program are very aware of her role in perpetuating a false narrative about police, of In fact, in 2020 at the peak of the Black Lives Matter protest Warren Lights reflected on the role the show plays in our discussion about policing, so, you know, individually, what I'm doing, am I contributing badly? to society? I don't know collectively, yeah, so how do you do it? Can you enter the network? I've pitched the uh, by the way, I think all the writers have pitched the Innocence Project series to the networks.

I've made that pitch. I bet it has a better chance of being published now and within Dick. In the Wolf Law and Order universe, they're not likely to make a show that reveals it's based on cops behaving illegally and aren't exactly part of Dick's brand, even if the people working on it show the people. actors that the writers and showrunners mean very well about correcting the record, there's a lot they can do. Law and Order is never going to deal with the reality of policing in a meaningful way for the same reasons Daniel Tiger won. Not doing it will never happen and honestly you'd be very surprised if it ever did because fundamentally the person responsible for Law & Order and its brand is Dick Wolf and he knows exactly what he wants his shows to do and the important thing not to do. do here is invoke one of the most notorious cases of police abuse in New York City, Abner Luima, who was beaten by NYPD officers and sodomized in 1997.

We are not there to do, Abner Lewima, that already You know, it's terrible. Something that happened but it represents one or two bad apples and a 35,000 person police force, I certainly think the

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uh program, the three programs are probably the best recruiting billboard you could have for being a New York City. . He's right because a recruiting poster will always be a version of the truth propagandized and laundered by heroes, a truth that most of the time is very ugly and for the umpteenth time I know that Law and Order is just a television show, I know that it is It's meant to be entertainment and honestly I'm not even telling you not to watch it, it's completely fine to enjoy it and it's completely understandable to want Olivia Benson to exist, but it's important to remember how far it is from representing anything resembling reality like a critic.

Law & Order has said it, if a medical show was giving us inaccurate information, we would say it's dangerous, which is true, because think about it, you know Gray's Anatomy doesn't depict what happens inside a real hospital, those doctors are ridiculously attractive, none of them. We're almost tired enough and about five thousand percent more insurance discussion is needed, but if those medical professionals routinely claimed that vaccines cause autism and herbal remedies cure cancer, we'd probably be having a conversation about it. because that's essentially what Law and Order is. To do so is to present a world where cops can always figure out who did it, defense attorneys are irritating obstacles that must be overcome, and even if a cop brutalizes a suspect, it's all in search of a just outcome and you get that fantasy destroyed in endless reruns. end. and marathonsThe guys are very well produced and extremely entertaining television, but Underneath It All is a commercial and a commercial produced by a man who, in his own words, is unabashedly pro-law enforcement and very good at selling things , and in this case. is selling a complete fantasy that many people in this country are happy to buy, which is fine as long as we don't lose sight of the fact that it is an advertisement for a defective product because if I am a

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quote from the library of Alexandria, that's the Iced Tea Twitter account, you should know who the hell you're dealing with, it could be the cops, that's our show, thank you so much for watching and telling

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's story, there's really only one way to end it. this and it is like that thank you foreigner