t we were dealing with real issues, presenting a forum for very disparate, controversial points of view on a lot of subjects. Eventually advertisers discovered a special market: people who didn't watch TV except for "Law & Order." And our ratings have been going up every year for the past four or five years (Armbrust et al. 51).
Wolf developed the idea originally as a legal show in a half-hour format for syndication. He changed the format because he believed that a legal show would not be popular, and he thought if he combined it with a cop show, it would have a better change. In truth, this is not the first time this format has been used on television, for there was a 90-minute ABC series called Arrest and Trial on for one season in 1963-1964. That series was a more common television format, however, and was not as legally rigorous as Law & Order has proven to be.
The program is produced by Wolf through an association with Universal Television. The series is not only successful in its timeslot on NBC but has been seen for several years now in repeats on the A&E Cable Network five nights a week. In 1995, NBC indicated its support for the show by renewing it for another two years in a season in which the series reached its best numbers to that time and reached as high as No. 17 in the ratings (Kennedy 32).
The show that emerged in 1990 combined two television staples--the police drama and the courtroom drama. In this case, both were treated better than usual and were approached in near-documentary fashion, and the basic structure has remained the same, as described by critic Frank McConnell:
Every episode of "L&O" contains two stories, or actually, two tellings of the same story, one a detective narrative, the other a trial . . . The first half-hour follows the cops . . . two detectives working under a lieutenant--as through interviews and forensics they center upon their perp. The second half-hour follows the pr...