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Law & Order: Special Victims Unit: The Book of Esther (2018)
Was it really necessary?
After nineteen years, it has been firmly established that if you want neat happy endings "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit" is not the series to go to. And I for one appreciate it, because in real life, the good guys don't always win. The Perry Mason formula of a landslide court win every week may be nice to watch, but it's too good to be true.
So the L&O franchise has made us used to losing cases, and to the idea that justice is not always served. But if things don't go well, it'd usually be because the bad guys find a legal loophole to get away with it, or the police officers and the attorneys are human, and have flaws that a good lawyer knows how to exploit, or red tape gets in the way, or superior officers care more about their careers than about justice, or simply because the case at hand has no solution that can be viewed as a victory: whatever the outcome, someone will suffer. So, losing is shown as a part of the system, and when they are defeated, it is always by the rules of the game. Only when a case involves some mafia organisation, you know you can expect things to go unreasonably bad, because on L&O mafias always beat the police.
But this time it was too much. The victim of the week is an innocent girl through and through. She's not hiding anything, she didn't do anything wrong, not even forced by circumstances. She hasn't even lied. And she is not so messed up she can't tell right from wrong, which on occasion has made some victims kill their victimisers or some third parties. But not here. This victim is just a victim.
The episode spends an hour trying to get you to sympathise with the girl. And when they think they've succeeded, BANG! She gets killed as the attempt by the police to save her turns into an unexpected shooting. Some of her equally innocent little siblings are also killed in the process. And in the final scene, when you are hoping for a last minute twist that will help you make it through a harsh episode, you learn the bullet that killed her was fired not just by the police, but by the one detective who put her soul and heart to try to save the girl for the entire episode! She was the one who wouldn't forget the case when it seemed there was nothing else to do, the one who got too personally involved with it and forced the final bloodshed, with the honest intention to release the victim from a horrible life. No hidden agenda. No personal obsession clouding her better judgment. No poetic justice punishing her for something bad she had done before. Yes, the detective did break almost every rule she could in this episode. But she didn't do so for herself, but for the girl's sake. So there was really nothing to make us expect this ending. It was just plain and simple out of the blue extremely unlikely bad luck. And the detective will have to live with the fact that she destroyed the life she wanted so eagerly to save. Isn't that too much?
All the Law & Order series have been praised for depicting the police and the legal system as nuanced and convoluted, far from the usual black and white picture Hollywood had been serving us so far, where the good guys were unblemished heroes, and the villains were evil beyond redemption. A completely unreal depiction. But if that scenario was artificial, so much so is this one in which everything that can go wrong, will go worse than you expected.
Besides, all the Perry Masons, the Jessica Fletchers and the Columbos of old school "too perfect" crime TV fiction, unbelievable as they were, would at least leave you with a sweet aftertaste in your mouth.
La noticia rebelde (1986)
An absolute classic
"La Noticia Rebelde" was a classic of Argentine TV. It taught many others who came after them, how to mix humour and information in an effective way and many well known products of today (among which "Caiga quien caiga" or "CQC" can me pointed out as the most successful, both in terms of ratings, and of international repercussions) owe much of their premise to LNR. The CQC we see now in Argentina, Chile or Spain, we saw in its splendour back in the mid-eighties.
When LNR first aired, Argentina was only coming out of the single hardest dictatorship ever. We were learning about the terrible outcome of circa 30,000 "desaparecidos" (missing people) who were killed basically for disagreeing, and a complete devastation of national economics. Unlike now, people were a lot more afraid of saying things. So, it took a lot of courage to come every weekday on the air, on a state-run television channel of national coverage, and say what they said in this show.
In a nutshell, LNR simply didn't shut up anything. And they didn't (as we say in my country) "get married" with anyone. That is, they didn't overprotect or fail to criticise anyone, just because it was convenient to do so. They were respectful, even careful, of the newly regained democracy. But within the limits of never risking that asset, there were hardly any limits, other than good taste and clever humour.
Probably now, when you see the reruns of LNR on "Volver" (an Argentinian channel that shows old national films and TV shows) you may have a feeling that this was a rather naive show. But twenty-one years ago, when I was a teenager and saw it every day live from home, I did have a feeling that they were doing something huge. And so many other shows that have sprung up ever since, seem to be there to prove me right.
Just a final note for those of you who are interested in linguistic remarks. "La Noticia Rebelde" (literally: "The Rebellious News", is a pun on "La Novicia Rebelde", ("The Rebellious Novice" the Spanish title for "The Sound of Music"). That is a little example of the kind of clever humour they made, and also an indication of the kind of journalism they performed.