Law & Order: UK

The adaptation of a US series made for a UK market is always going to be an interesting proposition. But when the property being adapted is the long-running Law & Order series, the curiosity value soars.

Law & Order: UK has Dick Wolf taking the Law & Order formula and transplanting it to London. At its core, the investigation of a murder is a fairly easy to translate formula. What makes this such an interesting adaptation is that the half-hour Order section of the show requires a radical shift in its structure to accommodate a different legal system.

The translation, thankfully, actually works. For the most part.

What’s It About?
Law & Order follows a very specific formula. Each section of the show is broken into two halves. The first focuses on a murder investigation from the perspective of the detectives on the case. The second half hour focuses on the legal proceedings that follow, from the perspective of the DA and his Assistant DA. Occasionally there will be some blurring of the storyline with the police appearing in the second half of the show. It’s a rigid formula that seems to have worked.

Law & Order: UK is simply an extension of the franchise and does very little to the pre-established formula in order to make it function.

Who’s in the darn thing?
Law & Order: UK stars Bradley Walsh (Coronation Street), Jamie Bamber (Battlestar Galactica), Harriet Walter, Ben Daniels, Freema Agyeman (Doctor Who), and Bill Paterson (Auf Wiedersehen, Pet). Interesting is the casting of Battlestar Galacticas Jamie Bamber as Detective Sergeant Matt Devlin, appearing on screen with his natural British accent.

What happens in that crucial first episode?
As with all of the thirteen episodes that comprise of the first series, the script for the first episode is adapted from an episode of the US series. Law & Order: UK show-runner Chris Chibnall reportedly watched every episode of Law & Order to find 15-16 that would translate well to Law & Order: UK.

The first episode is based on the 1992 L&O episode “Cradle to Grave” in which the police investigate the death of an infant who has died after a gas leak in a poorly maintained apartment building. It’s a fairly by-the-numbers affair. While the original series is rarely highly engaging, it’s a shame that the UK adaptation didn’t choose to use a more meaty episode for its launch.

Is it any good?
I’ll admit by bias up front on this, I’m generally not very keen on watching procedural police dramas. It isn’t that I dislike them, I just find them to be a very disposable form of television drama and don’t have reason to return week after week. That said, I don’t generally hate them either. And I didn’t hate this.

Ultimately, Law & Order is a fairly well put together procedural police drama. While the format adapts quite well for the UK, the show does maintain a certain air of inauthenticity. It certainly feels like the UK, but it doesn’t feel like UK television. Once Law & Order: UK starts producing original scripts that reflect their own culture, the show will certainly be a much more fulfilling experience for the viewer and cease to be purely a novel experience.