one bee

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I can't help being really, really confused by the cancellation of Law & Order and the launch of Law & Order: Los Angeles in the same year. The former was a lifeline for working actors in New York, and a stalwart of NBC's lineup. Its revolving-door cast means there's no reason the cancellation had anything to do with the story lines going stale or the principals demanding too much money, because they could all be switched out. So, after pondering it as hard as I could for as long as I cared to (nine minutes), my best guess is that the grips and gaffers were starting to demand too much money, or that the show had simply run out of New York addresses to put on those interstitial "thunk-thunk" title cards. Presumably, the change of venue will not mean that all the cases are related to Hollywood starlets or the excesses of celebrity culture, but that's all this first episode is about. Everyone on the case spends the episode rolling their eyes at Danielle Panabaker (preposterously miscast as a vapid media sensation whose stage mother uses her for access to nightclubs and money – akin to Lindsay Lohan if Lohan had never had talent) and her chums for being superficial and untalented. Kind of ironic when Skeet Ulrich, star of Jericho, is getting huffy about who is a subpar actor. I haven't watched enough of the Law & Order franchise to say whether this version is better or worse than average, but it seems like a lot of very grumpy people constantly sneering at witnesses and suspects in the most cynical way. It lacks the procedural 'zazz of CSI or the clever deductive leaps of Castle/The Mentalist/Psych or the courtroom antics of Boston Legal. Which makes it pretty much cut-and-dry police work – essentially a successor to Dragnet. Kind of makes you realize what an important element Jack Webb was. As always, Alfred Molina classes things up. (Molina: the anti-Meloni?) It was nice to see Shawnee Smith (Becker) in a guest role, along with a couple of girlies from my Ones to Watch list: Leah Pipes (Life is Wild) and Danielle Panabaker (Shark). Danielle's little sister Kay (by way of the most forced segue ever), turned in a fantastic guest performance on an episode of Boston Legal a few years back, but can normally be seen mouthing off as Marg Helgenberger's daughter on CSI. Now she's playing a similarly surly teen on ABC's No Ordinary Family – in a family that is startlingly ordinary (bitchy, boy-crazy daughter, dim-witted son, blockheaded dad) except that the mom is a research scientist. The gist of the show is that they're going to rip off The Incredibles and pair each of these four up with a superpower that fits his or her station in life: so the mom, who feels like she's stretched in all different places at once – well she can't stretch like Elastigirl because that would be obvious, so she'll have super-speed, so she can very nearly be in all those places at once. The son, who can't master the quadratic equation (and really, who could?), is suddenly a math whiz. The daughter, who is dealing with gossipy backstabbing at school, gets telepathy. And the dad – well, they still couldn't think up anything better than "super strong.

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