Justice on the small screen

SATURDAY IS A GOOD DAY for “Law & Order” -- the television series, if not the concept. No fewer than 17 hours of the show and its various progeny are on the cable TV schedule today in most of Los Angeles, though three of them are repeats. Sundays are even better: 24 hours, and only eight of them overlap.

Like World War II or the Juiceman, “Law & Order” is almost always on somewhere on cable. It is the perfect show for the 500-channel universe -- engaging but never challenging, interesting without being surprising. You stumble across a vein of reruns on USA, TNT or Bravo and, before you know it, six hours have passed and all the victims and criminals, no matter how special or intent, have blended together.

There are at least two ways to explain the “Law & Order” phenomenon.

The first is simply supply and demand. Not since “Happy Days,” which spawned at least three spinoffs -- all but “Laverne & Shirley” mercifully short-lived -- has a single franchise been responsible for so much content. (TV’s other crime-show juggernaut, “CSI,” is just as fecund but hasn’t been around as long.) And not until the digital era caused the cable universe to explode was there any need for so much content. What else is the USA Network going to put on at midnight on a Saturday? Or any other day of the week, for that matter?

The other reason has more to do with the comfort of the familiar. Despite the best efforts of its writers and actors -- and its self-promotional “ripped from the headlines” riff -- “Law & Order” is essentially the same show over and over again.

A recent episode of “SVU,” for example, dealt with three orphans from Hurricane Katrina kidnapped by a child molester whose possession of anthrax is exposed by a newspaper reporter who goes to jail rather than reveal his source. So many headlines were ripped, cut and pasted together for that episode that all the threatening content had been wrung out of them. They’re just fodder for a TV whodunit. Substitute a Third World civil war for the hurricane, a U.N. diplomat for the child molester, trade in the anthrax for some incriminating documents in the oil-for-food scandal, cut the reporter, add a disgruntled former beat cop and -- presto -- you’ve got a whole new episode. You can even reuse most of the dialogue.

If only law and order were as predictable as “Law & Order.”