New order for ‘Law’

JUST as little children thrive on routine, television, our Great Mother, keeps the masses happy by constant reapplications of whatever it is we appear to like. A change is sometimes prescribed for an ailing series -- give that character a baby! -- but that is usually a sign that the end is inescapably near.

The end, apparently, is never near for “Law & Order,” back this week for its 18th season of stories ripped from the headlines and converted into an easy-to-digest formula that has not substantially changed since the George Herbert Walker Bush administration. Children have been born and entered college, hairstyles and musical styles and more TV series than any healthy person could name have come and gone and been forgotten, the world itself in its political particulars has become a vastly different place in that time, and yet you can watch practically any episode of “Law & Order” without feeling any kind of chronological dissonance.

They are all, functionally, structurally, fundamentally the same. The awesome familiarity of the title cards accompanied by that two-beat musical cue; the real New York locations; the way that we are never told more than we really need or want to know about the private or inner lives of its agents of justice, making them, in some way, interchangeable. (Though, if you’re keeping track, Linus Roache and Jeremy Sisto join the cast this year, as a prosecutor and detective, respectively; and Sam Waterston gets promoted to district attorney.)

Half an hour for the cops, half an hour for the lawyers, some kind of verdict by the end. Cha-chung!

(NBC, Wed., 9 p.m.)

-- Robert Lloyd