BEST LAW & ORDER ADA

this is nigh-impossible

Claire vs Jamie vs Abbie vs Alex C vs Ron

i love courtney b vance but they never used him enough

i might go with novak on this one, she reminds me a lot of girls i went to high school with, probably used to have really low self-esteem and drank a lot but got her shit together and is now smart and funny and sort of hot

Abbie Carmichael (Angie Harmon)
This is the one with the husky voice, right?

i have a big soft spot for just about everyone here... except elisabeth rohm who is just awful. richard brooks is tremendous, the one (ones?) where they bring him back as defense council are great

i'd take elisabeth rohm over carey lowell any day.

^This is deeply true.
I love Courtney B Vance too, he needed a lot of air time and the man could work a suit. ANGIE HARMON ALL THE WAY
Actually Alex. Abbie should have stayed way longer than she did.

Shit I did vote for Abbie. By accident.

i'd take elisabeth rohm over carey lowell any day.

is it because she's a lesbian?

spouses of those in this poll include:
Richard Gere
Bobby Flay
Jason Sehorn
Angela Bassett

wait who married Bobby Flay

the early dianne neal days were really interesting for the show -- cabot was made out as this ridiculous superlawyer, i don't even know if it was intentional. the 'new girl' was pretty green for a long time and constantly fucking up. the whole franchise hadn't had their legal teams hit any kind of bump in the road they couldn't angle their way out of in some tenuous way for years, it was pretty jarring.

then she went blonde and was waking judges up in the middle of the night, training wheels off i guess.

wait who married Bobby Flay
Stephanie March

OH NOES

I don't know if this info cements my vote for Alex C in sympathy for her having to deal with BF or knocks her out of contention for having awful taste

Serena v Novak

leaning Novak. max otm.

Paul Robinette (Richard Brooks): lost in the mists of time. amazing voice.
Claire Kincaid (Jill Hennessy): prototypical, archetypical.
Jamie Ross (Carey Lowell): super rich, jerkoff ex husband -- the beginning of the encroachment of the personal on the show
Abbie Carmichael (Angie Harmon): southern girl, conservative (death penalty cases lol)
Serena Southerlyn (Elisabeth Röhm): someone who had trouble with the english language, how sweet of them
Alexandra Borgia (Annie Parisse): please god just get a brunette back in there whew ok
Connie Rubirosa (Alana de la Garza): annie parisse 2.0, dick wolf managed to find an actress with even bigger eyes, can you believe
Alexandra Cabot (Stephanie March): ice queen, she reigneth
Casey Novak (Diane Neal): as described above
Ron Carver (Courtney B. Vance): "hmm interesting theory but can you bring me some evidence you fucking nutbag?"
Kelly Gaffney (Amy Carlson): wait what

these polls are reminding me what a great show this was. annie parisse is the only one i outright didn't like - even elisabeth rohm worked for me, frankly. (never saw eps with alana de la garza or amy carlson). everyone else fucking rocks, even if angie harmon is a fascist

i want to give myself to cabot

i can't believe this thread isn't claire kincaid consensus.

She's leading the pack for me right now. Bobby Flay ruined Alex's chances.

claire kincaid is the old peoples' choice

people's

fucking kids

Paul Robinette

Claire!

paul robinette

Wait with Carey Lowell, though I think she Hennessy and Harmon were pretty comparable - but Jamie wins by a nose.

I kind of like Rohm, despite (because of?) her absurd miscasting. And of course, because she was a lesbian.

Tracey Kibre

def. Novak.

Kincaid, although Robinette was pretty awesome.

Cabot or Southerlyn, with the edge to Southerlyn because she's a lesbian.

Vance is really good in CI. Had to go with with Henn though.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Ron Carver (Courtney B. Vance) 2
Casey Novak (Diane Neal) 2

robbed

carey lowell in 2nd omg!

how the hell did Courtney B Vance come in behind a plank of wood

also Stephanie March was robbed

Is it because he's a lesbian? xp

Ron Carver (Courtney B. Vance): "hmm interesting theory but can you bring me some evidence you fucking nutbag?"

^^^ otm

they never used him enough in CI. courtney b vance rules tho he should be in more stuff

Vance played a hotshot stockbroker/murderer in a Season 5 episode of the OG series!

carey lowell in 2nd omg!

― goole, Sunday, July 20, 2008 9:20 PM (3 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Paul Robinette (Richard Brooks): lost in the mists of time. amazing voice.
Claire Kincaid (Jill Hennessy): prototypical, archetypical.
Jamie Ross (Carey Lowell): super rich, jerkoff ex husband -- the beginning of the encroachment of the personal on the show
Abbie Carmichael (Angie Harmon): southern girl, conservative (death penalty cases lol)

this is not right! aside from bits here and there (greevey's general discomfort, logan as a child getting abused/propositioned by a priest he ends up investigating as an adult because his friends are involved, claire resigning to try to avoid conflict with a judge she slept with that they're accusing of murder, and just barely van buren shooting a kid when she's held up at an ATM and her kids are in the car outside, and lennie's introduction as a former drunk), the personal stuff really gets going during the year that claire and jack's tenures first overlap. they imply, without ever outright acknowledging it, that jack sleeps with his assistants and that he and claire do so at some point (and stay involved?).

then during her last year (also curtis' first year, in which time he kind of sucks and lennie doesn't like him), new york passes the death penalty into law - an episode early in the season turns around it. the last episode of the season is THE personal episode. instead of handling a case they show jack, claire, rey, and lennie observing an execution, and then the rest of the episode is them dealing with it the rest of the day (by drinking, visiting dad the law professor, cheating on wifey with jennifer garner, and having a bad day with estranged daughter briscoe), until events transpire so that jack drunk-calls claire, lennie breaks his sobriety at the same bar, jack takes a cab home, claire picks lennie up, and then gets hit by a drunk driver and dies (but not lennie obv).

after that there's not TOO much personal stuff, save intermittent ongoing things like rey being kind of gruff all the next season from being on the outs with his wife, then dealing with her MS during the next. but that first season after the big personal episode is jamie ross's first season, and in the middle of it they do a three-episode GOING TO LOS ANGELES arc in which defense counsel is her jerkoff ex husband, they fight over custody, he dicks her around just to try to win his case, etc. - which is not a super lot of personal stuff in the grand scheme of things, but concentrated like that it has a really outsized effect. (oh, and then in the last episode of that season adam happens to pull the plug on his wife who falls sick in the same episode. during which he takes the governor to court. he cries. for the plug-pulling, not the court case.)

damn dude

i remember that TRIP TO LA arc being boss. a little bit 'diff btw NY and LA' standup but in a pretty funny low-key lawyer show kind of mode. wasn't the defendant some kind of drugged out silicon valley dude?

yeah, played by max from gilmore girls. at the same time that lauren graham is playing a studio exec who offers rey a cushy job and then stops him before he runs off: 'don't you want to sleep with me?'. janaene garofalo is in that arc too!

i'd like to see a list of TRIP TO LA episodes. it seems like every tv show i watched when i was a kid had one.

i can't believe this thread isn't claire kincaid consensus.

― horseshoe, Tuesday, July 15, 2008 11:48 AM (4 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It's too bad SVU is so laughable now, because Raul Esparza is a really good ADA but the rest of the show is terrible.

I agree.

The not at all, no siree Rihanna/Chris Brown episode was soooooo bad.

Yes, it really was.

I felt sorry for fake Beyonce, getting widowed and all. RIP fake Jay Z.

the only SVU episode I've seen recently was the Patricia Arquette one, where PA basically owned the entire episode and almost made me cry

i have probably only watched four svu episodes all the way through and i have no idea why people subject themselves to it

also CLAIRE KINCAID

http://brandonbird.com/lno/kincaid.jpg

i have probably only watched four svu episodes all the way through and i have no idea why people subject themselves to it

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&site=imghp&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1320&bih=876&q=mariska+hargitay

yeah but if i watched every show with an attractive human female i'd get even less done than i do now

this butter's not gonna churn itself

what can I tell you, I watched multiple episodes of "Undercovers"

about to watch three years of serena southerlyn episodes, her debut is already a tour de force

also god bless livejournal:

http://serena-femslash.livejournal.com/

oh my, elisabeth röhm's memoir

http://books.google.com/books?id=nU5GbgqzFLcC&pg=PT39&lpg=PT39&dq=serena+southerlyn+is+awful&source=bl&ots=JiLxkpgks0&sig=T4tTKUyyFh33PuWUT8rTfegPjJE&hl=en&sa=X&ei=hylyUfTNJMTBrgHZ6YGwDA&ved=0CFcQ6AEwBjgU#v=onepage&q&f=false

Serena and Alex are still together, but Serena now works in SVU with Casey Novak. Alex and Serena hooked up C/O and Casey's pregnant. Liv is very nervous and overprotective of Casey and their baby.

whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy

She has a book??! And the writing is as bad as her acting! She thinks people didn't like her on the show because she's blond.

This list is bullshit

Arthur Branch last is the only thing right about it.

i am only part way through my ahem studies but i think elisabeth röhm was kind of shortchanged by the writing. her first season was the worst to that date (and made weird and awkward by not even catching up to mention 9/11 until midseason) and they seem to have written her part in keeping with the tradition of making a new character's first year a little bit rougher before they settle in (whether on purpose or just as a side effect of doing a new character/part, who knows). rey is kind of insufferable in his first season before he toughens up, lennie is a little out of place while everyone around him still treats him like the risky (drunk) unknown, ed is a little more hotheaded (and gambling explicitly) before he settles into the job. but southerlyn is written as new to the criminal prosecution office/division, and the bit branch gives her when he fires her (too sympathetic to defendants) does seem to confirm the notes they give her character up to that point. so in her first season she's pretty meek in comparison to her predecessors. plus that was the first season where what's his name had left as showrunner. i don't know really but it seems like the dialogue became a little flatter, simpler.

on the other hand, what codes in her performance as 'wooden' i think is that she just hasn't internalized the lines as much as some of the others, so it's more of a challenge to deliver them AND act them simultaneously - she gives the impression of doing one thing at a time. i went looking for something in an older episode the other day and came across a jamie ross scene where she's having a conversation with mccoy, and pretty much every bit of her verbal interaction with him shows up on her face as meaning something to her (partly because of what it's meant to mean to mccoy, like when she's making a little jab at him or chiding him or backing off).

man that list is bullshit

and i don't recognize about half the list

svu DAs, who gives a shit

I give a shit about Francie Swift.

(and made weird and awkward by not even catching up to mention 9/11 until midseason)

I dunno, I recall Serena making a remark along the lines of "After what happened at the Towers..." in an episode that I'm p sure aired as early as November or even late October. It was a real throwaway of a line, very irrelevant to the plot; no doubt it was a late addition filmed weeks after the rest was in the can.

yeah, i think that's a bit less than halfway through the 24 episodes. it's not the only one after that point, either. but once they get back to episodes that were presumably produced after september, you can occasionally see less heavy-handed signs, like the presence of military guards in front of the courthouse, or (this is probably getting into the next season iirc) just security checkpoints out on the steps. and there are more natural offhand references to 9/11 from, like, witnesses or beat cops talking about changed circumstances in ways that make sense (not just a general, 'privacy sure is less important now!').

but even considering that it's law and order (all business) i would expect 'catching up' from such a place-centric 'realism'-heavy show to involve something like having people talking about it a LOT more. i wasn't really watching much tv at the time, so i'm not even sure i can remember whether it was possible for a tv show to pull anything like a response in 'real time' off.

(the west wing is a weird case, since it rushed a didactic episode outside normal continuity to air before the season started, but otherwise had kind of a built-in excuse for not being that in touch with reality, since they could hardly have the fake president there and let in much actual reality.)

huh, i totally forgot about 'rescue me'.

http://www.hitfix.com/blogs/whats-alan-watching/posts/how-tv-reflected-9-11

whew i finally got to serena's firing

i think that one scene is longer than all of lennie retirement scenes put together

'is it because i'm a lesbian' still out of nowhere

so classic

I made the mistake of reading some of Michael Moriarty's current writings. Good God.

Connie Rubirosa (Alana de la Garza) 1

so painfully inhumanly gorgeous, god bless dick wolf

i still can't believe how good the last three seasons get again

Still bummed out there was no season 21 with a pregnant Connie and a mystery father.

The last episode ended with her talking with Cutter and Lupo at a bar which noooo Connie noooooo.