Law & Order: Changing Television

Organizers: Lisa Parks, Chair and Professor of Film and Media Studies, UC Santa Barbara; Jennifer Holt, Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies, UC Santa Barbara

Moderator: Jennifer Holt

This panel explored the social and cultural significance of Law & Order and the manner in which the series represents crime, punishment, the criminal justice system, and the law. Panelists focused upon such issues as how Law & Order has transformed television portrayals of the criminal justice system and how this has contributed to cultural understandings of criminality, New York City and the urban space, justice, morality, and/or the complexities of guilt and innocence in a flawed system.

Participants included:

Benjamin Bratt, Actor, Law & Order

Charlotte Brunsdon, Professor of Film and Television Studies, University of Warwick, U.K.

Arthur Forney, Co-Executive Producer, Law & Order branded series

Pam Golum, President, Entertainment/West Coast, The Lippin Group

Lisa Hajjar, Associate Professor of Sociology, UC Santa Barbara

Organizer and Moderator: Constance Penley, Co-Director, Carsey-Wolf Center, Professor of Film and Media Studies, UC Santa Barbara

This panel compared and contrasted the styles of representing policing and adjudicating in the U.S. Law & Order shows to those in the U.K., France, and Russia. What changes must be made to storylines and characters to adapt to cultural norms and notions of criminality in the different countries? Panelists also reflected on Dick Wolf’s wish to someday create a Law & Order show in a Muslim location, say Law & Order Cairo. What would that look like?

Participants included: 

Charles Engel, Executive Vice President of Programming, Universal Media Studios

Elizabeth Guider, Former Executive Editor, Variety

Leslie Jones, Former Head of International Format Sales, NBCUniversal

Linus Roache, Actor, Law & Order

Barbara Villez, Professor, Legal Languages and Culture, University Vincennes-St. Denis/Paris 8, France

Law & Order creator/producer Dick Wolf shared stories of the series’ history and future plans at this closing session. The evening opened with a screening of the original Law & Order pilot, “Everybody’s Favorite Bagman”,  followed by a conversation between Mr. Wolf and television producer Marcy Carsey (The Cosby Show, Roseanne, That ’70s Show). Ms. Carsey also moderated audience Q&A with Mr. Wolf and panelists from the day’s conversations.

Benjamin Bratt’s career has successfully spanned film and television for more than 20 years. Bratt made his fourth appearance at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival as an actor and his second as a producer with the film La Mission. Bratt’s distinguished film career includes the critically acclaimed films Piñero, for which he was lauded for a striking, haunting, and “career defining” performance of the poet-playwright-actor Miguel Piñero; Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic, which received five Academy Award® nominations and a Screen Actor’s Guild Award for Ensemble Cast; and The Woodsman, a festival and critical favorite starring Kevin Bacon. Television audiences perhaps best recognize Bratt from his award-winning role of “Detective Rey Curtis” on NBC’s long-running drama Law & Order.  He recently starred in the A&E drama series The Cleaner, for which he also served as Producer. In La Mission, Bratt re-teamed with his writer/director/producer brother, Peter Bratt to star in and produce a story which recalls the culture, people, and beliefs of their childhood in the Mission district of San Francisco. Throughout his inspiring performance, he delivers to audiences a challenging character with depth and complexity; a character who is sure to define Bratt’s accomplished resume for years to come. Bratt will next join the cast of the ABC drama Private Practice beginning with the May, 2010 season finale.

Charlotte Brunsdon is Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick, U.K.  She specializes in the study of British cinema and television, and has a longstanding interest in British television crime series. Her books include London in Cinema and The Feminist, the Housewife and the Soap Opera and she is currently working on A Screen History of Britain.  Her most recent book is a British Film Institute Television Classic on the controversial 1978 BBC series, Law and Order (written by G.F.Newman, directed by Les Blair, produced by Tony Garnett), which caused such uproar on its original broadcast that it was impossible to view until its DVD release in 2008.

Marcy Carsey is a founder with partner Tom Werner in the Carsey Werner Company, the television production company responsible for a litany of successful shows, including The Cosby Show, Roseanne, 3rd Rock from the Sun, and That 70’s Show. In 1998, Carsey and Werner joined forces with Geraldine Laybourne and Oprah Winfrey to create Oxygen, a multimedia company that fused a new cable channel with an internet base, directed to serve women. In addition to being inducted into the Hall of Fame of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences as well as the Broadcasting and Cable Magazine’s Hall of Fame, the Carsey Werner producing team has received numerous awards including the Emmy, the Humanitas Prize, the Peabody, the Peoples Choice, the Golden Globe, and the NAACP Image Award.

Michael Curtin is the Duncan and Suzanne Mellichamp Professor of Global Studies in the Department of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara. His books include The American Television Industry (2009); Reorienting Global Communication: Indian and Chinese Media Beyond Borders (2010); and Playing to the World’s Biggest Audience: The Globalization of Chinese Film and TV (2007). He is currently at work on Media Capital: The Cultural Geography of Globalization. Curtin is co-editor of the International Screen Industries book series for the British Film Institute and co-editor of the Chinese Journal of Communication.

Charles Engel is Executive Vice President of Programming for Universal Media Studios, where he is in charge of production for all of Dick Wolf’s Law & Order – branded series. During his career, Engel has been responsible for some of television’s most successful programming, including: The Rockford Files; Magnum, P.I.; Quincy, M.E; Rich Man, Poor Man; Murder, She Wrote; and the Kojak, movies-of-the-week.  He also supervised Crime & Punishment (the “real-life” Law & Order), Columbo, and executive produced the Murder, She Wrote television movies.

Arthur Forney, co-executive producer of the Law & Order – branded series, heads all of Wolf Films post-production activities on all of Wolf’s series. A 30-year industry veteran, Forney began his career in post-production at Warner Bros. After working on independent films, Forney landed at Universal where he served as an editor on the hit CBS series Magnum, P.I. and joined Wolf Films in 1987. He has directed numerous episodes of Wolf Films series, including New York Undercover, Law & Order, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and Law & Order: Criminal Intent.

Clifford W. Gilbert-Lurie is a partner of Ziffren Brittenham LLP, where he has practiced entertainment law since 1986.  His practice is primarily in the motion picture, television, and “new media” industries.  In 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010, he was named as one of the top 100 Power Lawyers by The Hollywood Reporter, Esq. His clients include Sandra Bullock, Dick Wolf, Tina Fey (30 Rock), Brenda Hampton (creator of The Secret Life of the American Teenager), Andy Breckman (creator of Monk), Doug Ellin (creator of Entourage), Patricia Arquette (Medium), Hugh Laurie (House), Drew Carey, John Walsh (America’s Most Wanted), Sarah Silverman, and Constellation Ventures III (an investment fund).

Pamela Golum is President, Entertainment/West Coast of The Lippin Group, a leading independent entertainment public relations and marketing firm. Ms. Golum has managed some of the firm’s most prestigious accounts, including: the Law & Order – branded series and creator Dick Wolf’s Wolf Films; Target Entertainment; projects for The Disney Channel; the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, the Emmy Awards, and the Monte Carlo Television Festival. Golum served two terms as Vice Chairman of the Television Publicity Executive Committee and won the prestigious Bob Yeager Award for Community Service from the Publicist’s Guild in 2010.

Elizabeth Guider is a writer and editor with some 20 years experience covering the global entertainment industry. Before going freelance and beginning a novel late last year, she spent three years as the editor of The Hollywood Reporter in charge of the daily paper and its global editorial operations. Before joining The Reporter, Guider spent 15 years with Variety, working as a reporter and an editor in Paris, Rome and London as well as in New York and Los Angeles. Among her management roles were international editor, overseeing some 60 correspondents, co-managing editor, overseeing the newsroom, and executive editor and deputy editor, playing a major role in setting the direction and tone of coverage.

Lisa Hajjar is an Associate Professor of Sociology at UC Santa Barbara. She holds an undergraduate degree in International Affairs from Georgetown University (1986) and a PhD in Sociology from The American University (1995). Her areas of expertise include sociology of law, law and society, international and global studies, and political sociology. Her research interests include human rights, international law, torture, war and conflict. Her first book, Courting Conflict: The Israeli Military Court System in the West Bank and Gaza (University of California Press, 2005), is a sociological study of law and conflict in Israel/Palestine. She is currently working on a book about anti-torture lawyering in the United States in the post-9/11 period.

Jennifer Holt is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara, and co-director of the Media Industries Project at the Carsey-Wolf Center. She specializes in the study of media industries and regulatory policy. She is the co-editor of Media Industries (2009) and author of the forthcoming book Empires of Entertainment (2011). Her current research explores media policy in the age of convergence. Her work has appeared various journals and anthologies, including Film Quarterly, Quality Popular Television, and Media Ownership: Research and Regulation. She has a Ph.D. in Film Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Leslie Jones is the former Head of International Sales and Format Production for NBC Universal TV Distribution. In that position, she helped leverage NBC Universal’s existing library assets, as well as develop and produce new local content outside the U.S. for all forms of electronic media. Jones was instrumental in cutting groundbreaking deals in France, Russia, and the UK for locally adapted and produced versions of Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Law & Order: SVU, and Law & Order. Previously, Jones handled non-scripted format sales and international program sales for NBC News, NBC Sports, and NBC late night programming, as well as reality series and documentaries. Currently, Jones provides management and strategic consulting for companies ranging from international distributors to foreign broadcasters to independent production companies.

Warren Littlefield is a 20-year career veteran of NBC. As President of the Entertainment Division, he oversaw the development and production of NBC’s prime time, late night and Saturday-morning programming. He was a central figure in developing some of the most popular TV shows of the 90’s, including Seinfeld, Frasier, Friends, ER and Law & Order. NBC programs won 168 Emmy Awards during his MUST-SEE TV tenure.  Mr. Littlefield is now the President of The Littlefield Company, a production company that is under an overall deal with ABC Studios. Since its inception, the company has developed and produced the innovative documentary series My Generation, and produced five prime-time television series, including the critically acclaimed Keen Eddie.

Jonathan Nichols-Pethick is Associate Professor of Media Studies and Director of Film Studies at DePauw University in Greencastle, IN.  His teaching and research focuses on broadcast history, media industries in the post-network era, and genre studies.  He is currently revising a book manuscript, Policing Television: Police Drama and Cultural Politics for Routledge, which will be published in early 2012.  This book addresses the institutional and cultural contexts that have informed and shaped the television police drama since 1980.  His work has also appeared in The Velvet Light Trap, Cinema Journal, and the anthology Beyond Prime Time: Television Programming in the Post-Network Era (Routledge 2009).

Lisa Parks is Professor and Chair of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara, where she is also an affiliate of the Departments of Art and Feminist Studies. She is the author of Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual (Duke University Press 2005) and co-editor of Planet TV (NYU Press 2003) and Undead TV (Duke UP, 2007). She is currently working on three new books: Coverage: Media Space and Security after 911 (Routledge, 2012), Mixed Signals: Media Infrastructures and Cultural Geographies, and Down to Earth: Satellite Technologies, Industries and Cultures (Rutgers UP, 2012), co-edited with James Schwoch.

Constance Penley is Professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara and Co-Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center. Her major areas of research interest are film history and theory, feminist theory, cultural studies, science and technology studies, and contemporary art. She is a founding editor of Camera Obscura: Feminism, Media, Cultural Studies. Her books include NASA/TREK: Popular Science and Sex in America, Technoculture, and The Visible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Science and Gender. Her collaborative art projects include “Primetime Art by the GALA Committee as Seen on Melrose Place” and “Biospheria: An Environmental Opera.” Penley is a 2009 recipient of a MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Award for “DigitalOcean: Sampling the Sea.”

Linus Roache has worked extensively in theatre, television, radio and cinema across the world for over 25 years. In 2002 he won the London Evening Standard Best Actor award for his portrayal of Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Julian Temple’s acclaimed film Pandemonium and in 2003 he was nominated for a Golden Globe for his portrayal of Robert Kennedy in the FX TV movie RFK. With a career that has taken him from Shakespeare’s Richard II to Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins, Roache played Assistant District Attorney Michael Cutter in the series Law & Order from 2008 to 2010. He is currently shooting the ITV and ABC miniseries Titanic, scheduled to air in 2012.

Michael Schneider is TV Guide Magazine‘s Los Angeles Bureau Chief, overseeing the magazine’s west coast bureau, managing breaking news and feature coverage. He was previously TV editor for Variety and Daily Variety, and before that, he was the Los Angeles bureau chief for the weekly trade Electronic Media. As a television expert, Schneider has appeared on ABC’s World News Tonight and Primetime Live, NBC’s Today show and Dateline NBC, CBS’ Early Show, G4’s Attack of the Show and E! News Daily.  Michael also runs the blog Franklin Avenue (www.franklinavenue.net), where he writes about Los Angeles media, restaurants, politics, and events and which has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Magazine and LA Weekly.

Betsy Scolnik is a consultant focused on business, digital and communications strategy.   She has consulted with the world’s leading organizations from commercial to philanthropic including Wolf Films, TED, The Paley Center for Media, National Geographic, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and AOL Time Warner. For Wolf Films, Scolnik created the first Wolf Films online presence, making the Law & Order brand more available to new and existing fans via YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. The overall Wolf Films audience for Law & Order online has more than doubled and its online presence has represented the most consistent promotion for the shows week over week with a permanent presence on AOL TV, MSN TV and TVGuide.com.

Ellen Seiter is Professor and Stephen K. Nenno Endowed Chair in Television Studies at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinema Arts. She is the author of The Internet Playground: Children’s Access, Entertainment and Mis-education (Peter Lang, 2005), Television and New Media Audiences (Oxford, 1999), Sold Separately: Children and Parents in Consumer Culture (Rutgers, 1993). Seiter’s research on Anti-American and Anti-Muslim sentiments among college students is available in the form of an educational documentary:  Projecting Culture: Perceptions of Arab and American Films. She co-edits the International Journal of Learning and Media. Seiter’s is co-authoring a book on copyright for media makers, which is forthcoming from Yale University Press.

Barbara Villez is Professor of Legal Languages and Cultures at the University Vincennes-St Denis/Paris 8. She is also a member of the “Communications and Politics” research laboratory of the CNRS (Centre National de Recherche Scientifique), where she directs a Franco-British network of scholars studying television series. She is in charge of research about images of justice at the Institute of Advanced Judicial Studies of Paris, has written many articles on television courtroom dramas, and in 2009 published Television and the Legal System (Routledge), a comparative history of American TV courtroom series to French productions, and key aspects of the two legal systems.

Dick Wolf, a two-time Emmy winning and Grammy winning producer, is the architect of one of the most successful brands in the history of television–Law & Order. Wolf serves as creator and executive producer of all the Law & Order series–Law & Order, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Law & Order: Criminal Intent and Law & Order: LA. Law & Order’s 20 seasons on NBC ties it with Gunsmoke as the longest-running drama series on television. It earned eleven consecutive Outstanding Drama Series Emmy nominations, winning in 1997. Wolf has had an illustrious career as one of television’s most prolific producer/writers, with such series as Hill Street Blues, Miami Vice, and New York Undercover. His company also produced the Oscar-winning documentary, Twin Towers, the Emmy-winning HBO movie Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, and the Grammy-winning and Emmy-nominated feature film documentary about The Doors, When You’re Strange.