A new assistant DA, Elizabeth Rohm, is just sort of dropped into the show without any sort of introduction. She’s not very good to start off with, having this irritating flat voice, but around episode 12 she gets a great story where she has to go into a hostage negotiation, and later gets in career trouble for it, and I started warming to her. It’s actually better knowing in hindsight her character’s a lesbian as you can read all this subtext into the scenes which the writers and actor were probably unaware of at the time. (Something proved in an episode that season about a lesbian girl – this isn’t written or played as if the character is gay at all. Maybe she only came out after the episode.)
Along with the regular jealous spouses and greedy kids, there’s the typical mixture of odd stories that you wouldn’t believe unless they were based on true stories: a vicious killer dog, the P-Daddy and J-Lo case, the Robert Blake case, environmental terrorists, re-birthing. The internet is a big novelty here: email and worms and disk fragmentation. September 11’s influence is felt, too – there’s often concern about governments having big powers. (Although they don’t do an out-and-out terrorism story until the series finale.) And again there’s a story where one of our main characters (in this case Van Bruren) meets a well trusted old friend who’s never been mentioned before who turns out to be crooked.
Guest cast includes Gary Busey (washed up singer), a very young Gennifer Godwin (as one of the fifty worders at the beginning – great to see someone who played this role kicked on with a career), Frank Whaley, Ted from How I Met Your Mother, and William Atherton - not really a star-studded line-up. Diane Wiest is great - having a more liberal DA really helps in conflict with Jack McCoy. Unfortunately it was her last season.
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