"I always think about the show as before Jerry and after Jerry. You saw the weariness of 25 years of crime-fighting in New York written on his face."—Law and Order executive producer Rene Balcer, on star Jerry Orbach’s performance as Det. Lennie Briscoe, quoted in Amy Chozick and Ellen Gamerman, “'Law & Order' School of Drama,” The Wall Street Journal, May 21, 2010
NBC’s announcement that it was canceling Law & Order has sparked all kinds of retrospectives on the Dick Wolf cops-and-lawyers show, analysis of What It All Meant (for a typical example of the latter, see Bruce Headlam’s “This Crime Spree Made New York Feel Safe,” in The New York Times)—and, given the cast members that shuffled on and off over the 20-year-life span of the program, fan and critical summations of their favorites.
The last is an easy call for me. I watched the show with close to religious intensity for the dozen years when Jerry Orbach played Lennie Briscoe. After he died of prostate cancer in 2004, the modus operandi of the show remained the same—plots “ripped from the headlines,” lightly fictionalized to add some complications to the case—but its animating spirit had fled.
Other actors, capable in their way (e.g., Dennis Farina) might assume the role of the older detective, but what Orbach brought to the part--that crucial seen-it-all commitment to getting a dirty job done day after day—could never be replaced. Perhaps viewers sensed that, too— viewership was down by slightly more than half from a decade ago.
Generations of big-screen viewers have grown accustomed to the idea of “The New York Actor”—an individual who, sometimes by virtue of ethnicity, but always through sheer force of personality, imparts the force and electricity of the streets. Think Cagney, Garfield, DeNiro.
It shouldn’t have been surprising, on a show which, according to Chozick and Gamerman, employed nearly 21,000 individual actors over the years, that television produced, in Orbach, its own answer to movies’ New York Actor.
Diminished force might have been a necessity on a smaller screen. For two decades, as a young-to-middle age actor, Orbach had taken on landmark stage roles in The Fantasticks, Promises, Promises, Chicago, and 42nd Street. In the ‘80s, he had good, but only subsidiary, roles in high-profile movies (Prince of the City, Dirty Dancing). He was constantly working, but he was made for more, and it had to be slightly disappointing to him.
Orbach had read for the roles of Max Greevey and Phil Cerreta before finally being cast as Briscoe. The role fit from the beginning. (You wonder how much the show’s writers even patterned the part on Orbach: like his character, he was the son of a Jewish father and Catholic mother.) You couldn’t miss the asperity in Briscoe’s quips over a newly discovered corpse, the disbelieving challenge to a rich suspect’s alibi, or the anger directed at slick defense attorneys or other cops who violated his code of partner ethics.
Wolf kept the focus across the years on the case rather than the characters’ personal lives, but you always sensed more of a huge backstory behind Briscoe: the stress of the job, the years of drinking, the wrecked marriage, the fractured, guilt-ridden relations with his children. If his lanky frame looked slightly hunched over at times, no wonder—he seemed to be carrying not only the weight of his history, but of an entire city that could come apart at any moment without his and his partners' efforts to check criminal chaos.
In the late 1990s, Orbach provided me with one of those close encounters with celebrities that New York-area residents have come to expect but that, more often than not, still delight them. During intermission at a Saturday matinee for a Roundabout Theatre production, I blinked at the sight of the Law & Order actor a few feet from the bar, more erect in real life than on the small screen, engaged in conversation with someone.
My reticence—and strong belief that people deep in conversation should not, as much as possible, be disturbed—kept me from saying anything—a respite from the importunings of fans that celebrities must cherish.
If I could have managed to say anything relatively intelligible, it would have been that, with the skill he brought to his craft every week, he not only embodied all of us, but exemplified the best of us.
NBC’s announcement that it was canceling Law & Order has sparked all kinds of retrospectives on the Dick Wolf cops-and-lawyers show, analysis of What It All Meant (for a typical example of the latter, see Bruce Headlam’s “This Crime Spree Made New York Feel Safe,” in The New York Times)—and, given the cast members that shuffled on and off over the 20-year-life span of the program, fan and critical summations of their favorites.
The last is an easy call for me. I watched the show with close to religious intensity for the dozen years when Jerry Orbach played Lennie Briscoe. After he died of prostate cancer in 2004, the modus operandi of the show remained the same—plots “ripped from the headlines,” lightly fictionalized to add some complications to the case—but its animating spirit had fled.
Other actors, capable in their way (e.g., Dennis Farina) might assume the role of the older detective, but what Orbach brought to the part--that crucial seen-it-all commitment to getting a dirty job done day after day—could never be replaced. Perhaps viewers sensed that, too— viewership was down by slightly more than half from a decade ago.
Generations of big-screen viewers have grown accustomed to the idea of “The New York Actor”—an individual who, sometimes by virtue of ethnicity, but always through sheer force of personality, imparts the force and electricity of the streets. Think Cagney, Garfield, DeNiro.
It shouldn’t have been surprising, on a show which, according to Chozick and Gamerman, employed nearly 21,000 individual actors over the years, that television produced, in Orbach, its own answer to movies’ New York Actor.
Diminished force might have been a necessity on a smaller screen. For two decades, as a young-to-middle age actor, Orbach had taken on landmark stage roles in The Fantasticks, Promises, Promises, Chicago, and 42nd Street. In the ‘80s, he had good, but only subsidiary, roles in high-profile movies (Prince of the City, Dirty Dancing). He was constantly working, but he was made for more, and it had to be slightly disappointing to him.
Orbach had read for the roles of Max Greevey and Phil Cerreta before finally being cast as Briscoe. The role fit from the beginning. (You wonder how much the show’s writers even patterned the part on Orbach: like his character, he was the son of a Jewish father and Catholic mother.) You couldn’t miss the asperity in Briscoe’s quips over a newly discovered corpse, the disbelieving challenge to a rich suspect’s alibi, or the anger directed at slick defense attorneys or other cops who violated his code of partner ethics.
Wolf kept the focus across the years on the case rather than the characters’ personal lives, but you always sensed more of a huge backstory behind Briscoe: the stress of the job, the years of drinking, the wrecked marriage, the fractured, guilt-ridden relations with his children. If his lanky frame looked slightly hunched over at times, no wonder—he seemed to be carrying not only the weight of his history, but of an entire city that could come apart at any moment without his and his partners' efforts to check criminal chaos.
In the late 1990s, Orbach provided me with one of those close encounters with celebrities that New York-area residents have come to expect but that, more often than not, still delight them. During intermission at a Saturday matinee for a Roundabout Theatre production, I blinked at the sight of the Law & Order actor a few feet from the bar, more erect in real life than on the small screen, engaged in conversation with someone.
My reticence—and strong belief that people deep in conversation should not, as much as possible, be disturbed—kept me from saying anything—a respite from the importunings of fans that celebrities must cherish.
If I could have managed to say anything relatively intelligible, it would have been that, with the skill he brought to his craft every week, he not only embodied all of us, but exemplified the best of us.
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