TV Reviews : Justice Is Too Swift in NBC’s Two-Pronged ‘Law & Order’

NBC’s new “Law & Order” echoes the 1963-64 series “Arrest and Trial” on ABC.

Like its predecessor, the new series (premiering at 10 tonight on Channels 4, 36 and 39) is two programs in one: first the commission of a crime and police investigation, then the prosecution.

Whereas the earlier series ran 90 minutes, however, “Law & Order” is an hour, lengthy enough by ordinary standards, but not for a two-pronged format that seeks to depict complex cases from crime through trial.

Thus, “Law & Order” is at times as clipped as “Dragnet,” a sort of dramatic shorthand and fast-forwarding of the legal process that is snappy enough to be watchable, but also unsatisfying.

Tonight, a young woman who comes in with bronchitis mysteriously dies in a hospital emergency room. When her father claims she was murdered, detectives Max Greevey (George Dzunda) and Mike Logan (Christopher Noth) spring--I mean spring --into action. A half hour later, they have enough evidence for Asst. Dist. Atty. Ben Stone (Michael Moriarty) to prosecute. And it takes the equally speedy Stone only another half hour to get the conviction.

Credits, commercials, next program. Only Judge Wapner is faster.

Greevey and Stone are a little too sanctimonious for my taste, each tending to moralize about the law to their younger cohorts. And the trial sequences are unsuspenseful and hammy--the courtroom buzzing after each piece of key testimony, for example.

Although just as truncated, next week’s episode, inspired by the Bernhard Goetz case in New York, is much more interesting and intense. The brutalized subway shooter this time is a young woman, but Stone’s prosecution of the case against her raises the same real-life issues of possible racism and justified self-defense versus vigilantism. The hour ends on a note of thoughtful ambivalence, almost in conflict with the 100-yard dash that precedes it.