Monsters of Television

“Stimulus money has gone to stimulust.”

Last time on Law & Order, I wrote about comedic guest stars on the show and why they may come to the franchise. It’s an idea I still really like, and would develop further given the time and money to pour through the various appearances such actors have made. This week I want to keep going with the guest star, but I want to talk about another facet of the guest star: the “Hey! I know that actor! And they’re not playing a defense attorney?  They did it.” mentality.

Yes, it’s true. The guest star can be a problem for the procedural. They suck all the narrative mystery out of a procedural because why would any show pay a fairly familiar face to just hang out and look cool in the background? They can pay someone scale (or slightly better) to do that! Instead, you pay that familiar face to draw audiences and/or have a powerful scene near the end of the show (to earn that Emmy).

This week’s episode has that very issue. A fairly recognizable guest star is in the episode not playing a defense attorney or a judge (it happens occasionally). As a result, the detects go through the normal red herrings until — surprise! — they settle on the guest star from the credits (aka the person you recognize by face but don’t necessarily remember their name). This can be compounded by the network promos blaring the guest star’s name at you leading up to the airing of the episode (if you didn’t know any better, you’d probably think that Sharon Stone’s extended guest appearance on SVU was the Second Coming based on the way NBC has been promoting it).

Kathy Baker,  known (to me at least) for playing crazy, sexually charged older ladies, hovers around the background of “Crashers” as the potentially murderous senator’s wife. And the show follows its formula very well. You get a couple of red herrings in the form of victim’s (coded as) sexually deviant brother, the senator, and then the senator’s right hand woman. Despite these red herrings, the show pretty much screams at the audience that the culprit is Baker’s character, not only by the  brother’s discussion of maternalness he received at the hands of his lover, but also by virtue of her being in the cast this week.

Which leads to Baker’s big Emmy scene wherein she and the brother, in increasingly tight close-ups, discuss their love and passion for another and explain why the brother’s sister had to die (she was going to tell the senator about the affair). It’s a remarkably well-played scene, especially considering that the two actors haven’t been in the same room with one another during the episode until this point. But the narrative drive behind it falters because Baker’s presence all but assured me she was the culprit.

So why, especially given the show’s track record of engaging in this practice (indeed, the entire franchise does this very often), do they keep doing it? Part of it is purely industrial: guest stars  can help ratings, so it helps to advertise these them in advance, building an audience. But with a franchise that has been running for just over 20 years, it almost seems like the guest star as the culprit is not only a franchise convention, but maybe a genre convention of the procedural itself. Something to think about.

FINAL THOUGHTS

• I should briefly mention that Merkerson’s scene with Ernie Hudson (a guest star who didn’t do it!) was exceptionally good in this episode. I’ve felt like Merkerson’s done good work with the cancer-related scenes, but this one really connected. Again, like Baker and the victim’s brother, an intense amount of chemistry existed between Merkerson and Hudson with only limited screen time for the two of them.
• Lupes loves animals, which allows for an on-the-sly message about bringing animals to no kill shelters (I honestly thought he would’ve kept the cat).
• A  bit of chatter in my Twitter feed about L&O last night, may try and address some of the issues in the upcoming weeks, depending on how organically those topics fit the episode.