Okay, so I was watching the teaser for LAW AND ORDER tonight and it goes like this: two cops are driving along. They get a domestic disturbance call. They park in front of a building and — WHAM — a body lands on their windshield. The scene was so familiar that I knew the body was going to land on the car before it happened. I was sure I was watching a rerun…but the TV Guide listed it as a new episode. And, as it turned out, it was new show. So my question is this… am I just imagining that I saw the exact same teaser before or did a LAW & ORDER: SVU also begin the same way this season?
Actually, it reminded me of the movie “Collateral.”
I’m pretty sure it was similar to a scene from earlier in the series — I had that same sense of deja vu but I don’t think it was on SVU. Or maybe it was on an earlier season of SVU.
I do recall another *L&O:SVU* episode (which I think was from the first half of last season, before I stopped watching the show) where a body landed on the front of a car.
In that case, though, I don’t believe the people in the car were cops: I think they were a couple of drunk guys who had stopped to make out with girls.
Here we go, season 6, episode 128.
http://tinyurl.com/qtlty
I’m only surprised this kind of thing doesn’t happen more often. Back in the 60’s and 70’s the networks would go through genre cycles. There’d be 5 or 6 Westerns, a similar number of detective shows, and so on. This worked for freelancers who had to pitch 6 or 7 ideas to the show runners and sell 5 or 6 scripts to make enough money to support their lifestyle. If you were lucky a single show runner would buy 2 scripts of the 6 you pitched, so you had to pitch 4 or 5 show runners.
Did that mean you came up with 30 unique show ideas? You’d throw in 1 or 2 really unique ideas for one show and repackage some you’d already pitched to the same genre. Life being as it is, the show runners frequently picked the same ideas for different shows, so a lot of shows looked similar.
In one case that I saw, it looked like the writer turned exactly the same script for 2 different shows. I was watching “Bert D’Angelo Superstar” (thank you IMDB) starring Paul Sorvino and had this great feeling of deja vu even though I knew it wasn’t a re-run. When I saw Sorvino sit on a desk to talk to someone, cross his legs and start acting a little light in the loafers, it hit me. He was playing a part written for Angie Dickenson on Police Woman. It looked like the writer had delivered the same script changing only the names.
Isn’t that the beginning of “Lethal Weapon”?
James, I don’t recall it in Lethal Weapon bu Die Hard had the body thrown out by good old John McLane near the beginning that landed on the police car, from which the pace really picked up.
cheers
Dave
While Amanda Hunsaker’s body does land on a car at the beginning of Lethal Weapon, the vehicle is unoccupied at the time. Whereas, in Die Hard, for example, when McClane tosses the body of one of the terrorists through the pane glass window he’s shattered, it lands on SGT Powell’s cruiser while the SGT is behind the wheel. (Accompanied by his chorus of “let it snow, let it snow, let it snow”.)
“Welcome to the party, pal” – M
This speaks of utter exhaustion. I think crime, police procedurals, and crime/courtroom dramas are past their apex and will swiftly vanish the way westerns did when all you saw on every channel was horse opera.
Thanks Maestro, I had forgotten about Amanda taking the swannie off the balcony, but yes, it is just some poor schmucks car that happens to be parked there rather than a police car, or do you guys actually call them cruisers?
cheers
Dave
They are actually known as cruisers.
A body also falls on a windshield in CON AIR. Ever notice how bodies never fall on the roof, or the rear window? It’s always the windshield.