Season 1 Episode 6: Everybody's Favorite Bagman

We watched Episode 6 last Friday with our good friends Nate and Amanda (see Episode 5 write-up for more about why they're good people). We fed them well and then subjected them to two episodes, the second of which, this one, put them to sleep and then drove them out of the house.

Too bad for them, because there was actually a lot of interesting trivia about this episode. It was filmed as the pilot episode in 1988 for Fox, but the show was passed off to CBS and then NBC, who then decided to run this episode mid-season.

NBC didn't do anything to cover up the continuity problems. Some stranger had Adam Schiff's DA job and Detective Greevey was a completely different size. You can get away with these things when you create a show that's not character driven.

William Macy makes a cameo as a US Attorney, although at that stage of his career he was probably happy just to have a gig. He doesn't look as young as Cynthia Nixon in Episode 2, but close. Another difference, he doesn't show up in a later episode as a killer with a split-personality.

The story is based on a 1986 New York Parking Violations Bureau Corruption Scandal (see wikipedia's entry on Don Manes). There's not much of a moral dilemma, the crooks are crooked, although Asst. DA Paul Robinette has to come to terms with the corruption of his former little-league coach.

In the past three weeks we've managed to blog six episodes while all three L&0 series have been off the air. I think that we started with 797 episodes to watch (411 L&0 Prime, 202 L&O SVU, 155 L&0 CI, 13 Trial by Jury, 13 Conviction, and 3 Homicide crossovers), so now we're down to 791. However, tonight is the season premier of SVU. If we can keep up this pace of two episodes per week and the three L&0 series continue to put out 66 new episodes per year, then we'll catch up at the rate of 38 per year. We'll be watching tonight's SVU episode on October 26, 2020 May 5, 2016 and in 2030 2028 (updated with better calculations.) we'll be caught up enough to blog the shows live.

As Sarah's cousin said, "You must be really confident in your relationship to make that kind of commitment."

Comments

[Sarah Milstein]

Nice write-up, but to my mind, you left out the key attribute of the episode: Dick Latessa, the long-time partner of a very good friend of mine, played one of the corrupt politicos. So that was awesome.

Also, a key scene takes place at Cafe De Bruxelles, which they say is at 118 Greenwich (totally true!), and which they show the actual outside of. So that was nifty, too.

[AztecQueen2000]

Did it have the original intro? The first time I saw it, I couldn't believe it was the same show. When A&E used to air it, it had completely different opening credits.