In 1990, "Law & Order" began as a one-hour drama on NBC and first series to film on location in New York. It also reversed the traditional focus of the television crime show by focusing on the police and the prosecutors rather than on the criminals and the defense lawyers. The formula worked. The show became a hit, not to say a cult favorite among New Yorkers. Creator Dick Wolf had tapped into the conservative unconscious of a liberal city. "Law and Order" was the television series for the liberal mugged by reality.
The show is now in its fifteenth season or what not, with an untold number of spinoffs, but the first four seasons present the show as it was originally intended: a crime drama without the sensationalism of crime itself. In the second half of season three you find the platonic ideal of L&O actors: Richard Brooks and Dann Florek (who were both fired by Wolfe after season three to make way for more women on the show), Chris Noth, Jerry Orbach (who replaced Paul Sorvino), and Michael Moriarty.
The strength of the early series could be found Moriarty himself, who as Ben Stone portrayed a hero as foundational to the American conservative ideal as Gordon Jackson’s Hudson was to the Tory ideal in Upstairs/Downstairs. But it has only been since his resignation from the show, after going toe-to-toe over freedom of speech with then Attorney General Janet Reno and moving to Canada, that Moriarty’s conservative heroics, and often quixotics, have truly come to light.
Readers of New York magazine were reminded of this side of Moriarty several weeks ago in a rambling letter to the editor. This letter read, in part,
The entire letter can be found here. Some say Moriarty has gone insane, a conservative Colonel Kurtz up the river in Canada. But he’s all the more a hero for what he represents, both on and off television: a conservative individualist in show business. From his website, this statement rings too true:
I’m running for president of the United States in 2008 on a third-party ticket, entering the race on a basically comic note, since no one in the mainstream press is taking me seriously, certainly not John Leonard. Or is he? Someone at New York is reading my editorials and articles on enterstageright.com and mmuuuhp.com, or Leonard’s French Revolutionary comparison would never have been made. No, Mr. Leonard, I didn’t play Ben Stone as a Robespierre. If you want to lay a French moniker on me, try Lafayette, who advised George Washington to abolish slavery. As Lafayette cried for an end to slavery, I’m declaring, "End abortion! Overturn Roe v. Wade!" The last great lion, Sir Winston Churchill, suffered from sudden depressions he called his "black dog." Churchill’s occasional funk will prove a mild case of the blues when compared to the eternal despair about to descend on the American careerists of the Third Millennium. Once the breathtakingly self-evident truth about abortion enters their Princetonian, Yalie, Madison Avenue, spin-doctoring, Rolling Stone, New York Times, exploitative souls, the effect of that light upon their eugenics-inspired darkness will be like rabies in a raccoon. Dick Wolf and John Leonard are minor raccoons swept up in the rabies of American careerism.
Michael Moriarty,
Maple Ridge, British Columbia
I am one of only two high-profile actors who are ardently conservative believers in the sacredness of a Republic. The other one is Charlton Heston. Briefly put, Heston defends the Second Amendment of the now-endangered United States Bill of Rights -- the right to bear arms --, while I defend that which the Second Amendment was intended to protect unto death: the First Amendment, guaranteeing freedom of speech.
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