As I was writing the final entry of Triumphs & Tribulations XVI a little while ago, I looked back on other September 30th entries in which I was closing out a particular volume of my longtime journal. In looking through the composition notebooks in which I wrote all of the entries in Triumphs & Tribulations X, the only such year I’ve handwritten all entries, I read the September 30th entry. I wrote about watching a new television series the night before. That brings me to this week’s moment in the Flashback Friday series: the Law & Order: Los Angeles TV series.
How I first came across this moment? I first came across Law & Order: Los Angeles in the Fall of 2010. It was one of the debuting television series I checked out alongside Undercovers, Chase, No Ordinary Family, and The Defenders. I saw the aforementioned promo with the famous 2Pac song. I also saw some familiar faces in it with Skeet Ulrich, Terrance Howard, and Regina King making appearances. It was also part of the Law & Order franchise and I needed a quality replacement for Law & Order: Criminal Intent, which was to be canceled the following spring. So I watched it.
What it meant to me then? The pilot episode was aptly named “Hollywood” and every bit of the episode had an LA vibe. I loved everything about it because it was very different from Law & Order or the spin-offs in Criminal Intent, Special Victims Unit, and Trial by Jury. I felt like the characters had true Southern California personality and the cases even had a LA feel to them. It wasn’t as dark and gloomy as the New York-based series.
What it means to me now? Just as I was really grasping the show, NBC pulled the plug on it. First, there was a 4-month hiatus. Then, when it did come back, they killed off Rex Winters (Ulrich) and transformed his partner (Cory Stoll) into a New York-style cop. Those changes effectively killed the series, which was canceled in Spring 2011. I was crushed then…I’m crushed now. If you ask me, Law & Order: Los Angeles was the best series in the franchise. Of course, there’s a lot of bias in there for me as I prefer Los Angeles over New York in just about everything. Having lost Undercovers a few months earlier, I became very disillusioned with NBC for the way they basically gave up on TV series.
