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law and orderIn September of 1990, NBC began airing a new crime show that took a different narrative approach from traditional television dramas. It was called Law & Order. Each episode was structured to spend half of every episode with detectives investigating crimes and the other half with lawyers prosecuting them.

It probably seemed like an unremarkable premise at the time, but it ended up tying for the longest-running drama series of all time, begetting numerous spin-offs along the way (the latest of which, Law & Order: Los Angeles, will premiere in the fall, 20 years after the original debuted) and changing the way television regarded procedural shows. In last night's unexpected series finale (the episode was shot before the show was officially canceled), there was a large focus on the internet, specifically a blogger.

Interestingly, although most of the show's "ripped-from-the-headline" stories are timeless, burgeoning internet technologies have played a large role in shaping the types of crimes that people commit and how those crimes are inspected in at least the past decade. Simply put, a bulk of this episode's story wouldn't have been conceivable or believable in an episode airing in say, 1991. It's a testament to this show's legacy that it has evolved with the technological revolution. Onto the episode...

The finale starts with a pervy dad coming across naked pictures of his daughter that someone else put on a Chatroulette-esque site. Upon seeing these pictures, the detectives go on a hunt for an entirely different website and find videos of pipe bombs exploding. When Detectives Lupo (Jeremy Sisto) and Bernard (Anthony Anderson) interrogate the proprietor of that blog, he says, "I thought if I had [those videos] on my blog..." before Lupo interrupts, "you'd get some of that web cred, huh?"



They eventually get to a blog written by someone simply called "Moot" (talk about "ripped-from-the-headlines!") who posts lots of complaints about teachers and discusses blowing things up and shooting people a la Columbine. It's a pretty primitive looking blog. It probably only took the writers a couple of minutes to find an archived Geocities blog with minimal web design.

When the lawyers deem this website potentially threatening (even though it only has 2,300 hits), they try to subpoena the NY Board of Education in order to track down the blog's owner. The judge laughs when the prosecutors propose that this blogger poses a threat, adding "according to what? A blog? Get real! Have you checked the internet lately? It's filled with videos of dumb kids blowing up crap with pipe bombs."



In a twist, the blog turns out to be run by a teacher who has been suspended from the classroom and sent to a "rubber room." "Rubber rooms" are places where teachers accused of overstepping their bounds are held and kept on salary until their hearings. Later, the police get wind of who he is in the nick of time as he starts shooting up a school – something he foreshadows on his blog. The cops take him down and the series goes out with one more psycho killer off the streets. (Also – SPOILER ALERT – for those keeping score, Lt. Van Buren beats cancer.)

Farewell Law & Order. See you on TNT, USA, Bravo and, of course, the net.