How Early ‘Law & Order’ Lets Us Relive New York’s Gritty Past — And Explains America’s Future
The original Law & Order premiered on Thursday, Sept. 13, 1990. Fourteen million people tuned in. Thirty-four years later, on Dec. 16, after years of the show’s early seasons being inexplicably absent on American streaming services, the first 20 seasons — all 456 episodes — were released on Hulu, and directly into my living room. DUN DUN.
Not that long ago, back when we got most of our entertainment from television channels, it was hard to turn on the set and not bump into a Law & Order rerun. It was the M*A*S*H of the first decade of the 21st century. During every cold open, you’d keep your fingers crossed it was a Jerry Orbach episode. But I hadn’t seen them in years. Over the holidays, I dove back in — and quickly found myself reliving a New York that no longer exists, and yet, at times, felt alarmingly familiar. Even radical.
If you’ve ever harbored the desire to live in New York City before the internet, when the tabloids reigned supreme and phone booths were more than decoration, and if you also find yourself wondering what the next four years of life in America might feel like, the early seasons of the original Law & Order (a.k.a. Law & Order: Mothership) have you covered. Few shows offer the opportunity for such comprehensive time-traveling.
One reason for this is that the series was shot on the streets of New York, unusual at the time. The show employed so many local working actors, one producer claimed every person listed on a Broadway bill had appeared on at least one episode. Some part of the city appeared on every episode, too, and as a result the show, particularly the early seasons, does double duty as a strange sort of oral history of New York City at the end of the millennium. Here is the city, during the last decade before the internet became our way of communication, captured frame by frame, the way it later would be when every phone became a camera.
It’s also a map of a vanished New York — no box stores, no banks! When the story calls for a scene at the rundown corner of Christopher and Hudson, the police detectives on call actually arrive at the corner of Christopher and Hudson (which was, in 1990, quite rundown! Oh, to time-travel through these series cold opens with an apartment down payment in hand). In one Season Three episode, the action takes place in the courtyard of the famed Upper West Side building the Apthorp. Talk about only murders in the building. Was Nora Ephron home and also watching, one wonders? These days you’d need millions of dollars to get a glimpse inside one of those apartments.
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Building numbers on the scene cards — again, DUN DUN — were adjusted (had they existed in reality, many of the apartments would have been located somewhere in the middle of either the Hudson or the East River), but otherwise the early years largely stuck to geographical truths. Whatever else the show provides, it’s a New York real estate junkie’s dream. And a reminder that some parts of the city (the wealthy parts) remain largely unchanged, while others are unrecognizable.
The Nineties were a decade during which the city underwent a shocking transformation at the hands of Mayor Rudy Giuliani. When the show premiered, New York’s murder rate was at its highest in recorded history. Just a few short years later, it had plummeted to levels not seen in nearly half a century. “A period,” former New York Observer editor Peter Kaplan once wrote, “when nothing seemed to go wrong.”
In those first seasons, that violent, crime-ridden city was its own character. It’s hard to remember now, after three decades of Law & Order franchises dominating our television experience, but one of the things that made the show unique was its lack of gloss. The main characters — in the beginning, all male — had little backstory. Instead, we come to know them through how they interact with New York, as represented by suspects, witnesses, judges and, notably, passersby. In the Law & Order universe, neither the cops nor the law are heroes. They are representatives of a certain type of power that is constantly being questioned by the show, often in ways that feel notably familiar to anyone paying attention to the abolish-the-police arguments of the past few years. One might even suggest the show routinely borders on “woke,” at times lunging across straight into its deep end.
The only heroes in the Law & Order universe are working-class New Yorkers: the bodega workers, the cab drivers, the sex workers, the bartenders, the waitresses, the doormen. So many doormen. (Every time I leave home these days, I can’t help but wonder what the doormen in my building will tell the police should I not return.) Amid all the brilliant one-liners from a weary, wonderful Lennie Briscoe (Jerry Orbach), and the caption-worthy responses from an array of arraignment judges (including Giuliani’s former wife Donna Hanover, and later, Fran Lebowitz), it’s the people on the street who are the chorus of the city. More useful than any detective or police presence are the vast array of what the late journalist and social activist Jane Jacobs famously termed the “eyes on the street.” It is these voices, these characters, that give the show, and the real-life city, its humanity.
Also deeply familiar is the tabloid hysteria, which has since become our universal ALL-CAPS way of communicating. Despite each episode assuring viewers that “This story is fictional. No actual person or event is depicted,” every plotline in the early days was ripped, as it were, directly from the headlines (when the warning appears at the beginning of an episode, instead of at the end, you know you are in for a real doozy). Like a televised “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” it’s often possible to track the social history of New York through these storylines — there’s a Central Park jogger episode; a preppy murderer episode; a Son of Sam episode — though they are often given a twist. In the Bernie Goetz episode, for instance, the Goetz character is played by a woman (Cynthia Nixon!).
If the first half of the show, the Law half, functions as a sort of live-action New York Post headline, the second half is essentially the New York Times op-ed section dramatized (if the op-ed section ever spent any time walking in someone else’s shoes and/or regularly conceding they might be wrong). It’s in the second half that the stories are flipped on their heads, offering different outcomes tied to the cultural argument of the day — an opportunity to explore and tangle with larger ideas; judgments rendered by juries, not always in a satisfying way.
And good lord, are some of these storylines alarmingly familiar. People are shot on the subway. Abortion doctors are murdered (“You ever notice how some people’s concern for life stops at birth,” says Lt. Van Buren, played by S. Epatha Merkerson). There is a white, racist serial killer who is murdering Black people (James Earl Jones guest stars as his defense lawyer). There is a Black Wall Street financier accused of murder who tells psychiatrist Dr. Olivet (Carolyn McCormick): “You want the short course in the history of race relations in America? It all starts with white men trying to protect white women from the big bad Black man. It was the prime argument in favor of segregation. And it’s what made lynching an honorable diversion.” Then there’s the ever-present gentrification: “New York City: You don’t like the neighborhood, wait 10 minutes,” says Briscoe, echoing the famous refrain of longtime residents.
Watched all together, and in order, it’s easier to see the degree to which the early show is infused with issues of race, feminism, homophobia, and class warfare; murder is just the vehicle for these conversations. They are filled with exchanges that, to a 2025 audience running scared from “wokeness,” can sometimes feel shocking in their forthrightness, language, and sophistication. Especially considering this was network television and not a cable show. You just turned on your television (which in my case in those days got reception through a hanger I attached to it) and voila, suddenly you were discussing the intersection of race and class and women’s rights and murder. When the city erupts into race riots, and a Black man is put on trial for dragging an Italian man out of his car and beating him to death, assistant district attorney Claire Kincaid (Jill Hennessy) reflects: “You know, I don’t know how I would react … if I’d been screwed by the system my whole life.” (That Lorraine Toussaint’s public defender Shambala Green was never given her own spinoff is the true Law & Order crime.) “She can’t be raped because she’s a prostitute?” asks ADA Jamie Ross (the best ADA of the bunch, played by Carey Lowell) when an escort is accused of murdering a client. (The prostitute’s defense attorney, Lanie Stieglitz — “the Betty Friedan militia” — is played by Elaine Stritch.)
From a 2025 social media-infused world, some episodes can feel like a dramatized version of an especially smart, or informed, or inflamed Twitter thread. Exposure therapy for the culture wars we are embedded in today. Have we not progressed, I found myself wondering more than once, or are we regressing so quickly at the moment, we are simply reliving the Nineties backward as we head to some other darker place?
That darker place, be it a Mothership plotline, cable news, or the incoming White House, sounds an awful lot like a New York Post headline. Nothing looms larger in Law & Order than the tabloids. They are the id of the city. The front page of the Post was the original Twitter. And no one loves the Post more than our once and again president.
Donald Trump, you may or may not be surprised to hear, factors into early episodes of Law & Order constantly. Not as a character so much as a reference point in casual dialogue. It’s chilling to be reminded that 30 years ago, long before The Apprentice, he often played the part of the outsized joker in the city’s cast of outsized characters, and Giuliani the “savior.” That those roles have now flipped so completely is dizzying.
Indeed, the city we find in the original Law & Order is the New York from whence Trump emerged. He is the ripped-from-the-headlines mentality made manifest — the world we are reentering in 2025, perhaps best described as a New York Post headline gone global, but without the filter of subway-goers, and people on the street, and all the other interactions that keep us grounded in reality, and our humanity.
In real-life New York, that’s how the tabloid was always contained. The Post was the paper you read on the subway. At the bar. It was communal. You might slip glimpses of it over the shoulder of the person next to you on the crowded train. Pick up a discarded copy to keep you occupied until your next stop and then leave it for the next person. Between reading the incendiary headline and returning to the street, you had to pass through a wall of your fellow human beings of every stripe. You had to contend with real people. In our global, online world that buffer is dangerously absent.
Law & Order takes a turn around Season Six, not long after Chris Noth departs. This tracks, too. In 1996, the AIDS cocktail arrived; a short time later, storylines featuring main characters who were gay entered the cultural lexicon (Rupert Everett in My Best Friend’s Wedding; Will & Grace). Shockingly quickly, the city became notably safer. Moneyed. Celebrity-driven. It practically glowed. Email begins to make an appearance (much to Briscoe’s befuddlement: “Me? I used a computer once, lost 27 straight games of solitaire”). The storylines focus less on the city as a character than characters who live in the city, until, as the century comes to a close, stories featuring young women with mutilated bodies begin to take over, and eventually are spun off into their own SVU series (which I’ve never seen, all due respect to Olivia Benson stans).
Meanwhile, here we are in 2025, out in the real world, cowering under a daily barrage of headlines that 30 years ago would have beggared the imagination of even the most extreme TV script writers. Continually hoping that some semblance of law and order survives what’s coming.