September 13 is Law & Order’s birthday.  To show our love: a comprehensive list of things that are irreversibly part of us.

The first episode of Law & Order aired on September 13, 1990, surprising audiences on the other ends of bulbous color TVs all over the country with what would become as permanent an aspect of their lives as sandwich bags and socks.  We celebrate Law & Order’s 26th birthday with a list of the most memorable facets of the show — things we think about by chance in the middle of the night when our lives are zooming by and we can’t seem to grab hold of any one thing, except our ever-faithful, beloved, ingenious, provocative, and full-color Law & Order:

1. The bum-bum — you know the one.

2. The chats with witnesses while they’re at work in the big city, juggling eleven things at once while still delivering perfectly memorized information to the curious detectives.

3. The detectives’ tiny notebooks where they scribble whatever it is that they actually scribble

4. Exciting interrogation scenes during which detectives pull up a chair and shout in people’s ears until their lawyers bust in and breaks up the party.

5. The distasteful and sexy jokes that circulate through the office and which are sometimes impossible to catch during constant lunch breaks involving mysteriously wrapped burger-shaped mummies and those minty-striped foam deli cups from the 90s.

6. The groovy title song, which is stuck in your head for life.

7. The “I slept with your wife — would you like to hear about it” and “No she’s just a tart” conversations between Briscoe and Munch, along with any off-scene banter about paychecks, wives, high school, babies in diapers, babies in shoes, babies in hats, cab drivers, babies in strollers, and hot dogs that makes the main cast more relatable and distracts our attention from actor replacements and an office-wide pandemic of workaholics.

8. The lawyer lingo, constant references to all the laws and all the orders.

9. The lavish New York apartments with chandeliers, french doors, intricate molding, studded leather chairs, and crystal brandy decanters in which old white families hide until the plot calls them to appear from their quarters and say something racist to a detective.

10. The complete lack of driving scenes masking the fact that no one has a license.

11. The deals — all 100,000,000,000 of them — when the lawyers offer someone thirty minutes in prison instead of thirty years if only they’ll rat out their scumbag boss, Valentino, when actually the person getting the deal is even more a scumbag, which Valentino reveals later when he is asking for his own deal.

12. The perfect lawyer hair which is fluffed by 50 mile-per-hour New York winds that the actors will primly ignore while they walk-and-talk down the steps of the courthouse in search of hot dog stands.

13. When the judge says to the attorneys as though he is speaking to 5-year-olds who have just gotten in his peanut butter cookie jar: “Both of you, in my quarters.  Now.”

14. The unresolved endings designed to show a more realistic view of the criminal justice system, when the lawyers walk down the solemn court hallways shaking their heads about things they couldn’t do anything about while victims being dragged away in handcuffs take direct and undeserved stabs at their consciences like: “You promised!” or “I’ll die in prison!” or “But you gave me a deal!” or “It’s OK because I’ll go on to be a famous actor one day and you’ll just be stuck in Law & Order forever!”

15. The fact that no one, except for the short lady who works at the dry-cleaner’s, will tell the whole truth the first time they speak to the detectives and will be called upon later after the team has been running around the city following false leads and wasting hot dog money.

16. The racist, sexist, everything-prevalent-in-the-90s-ist juries who obstruct justice by allowing themselves to be manipulated by overly enthusiastic defense attorneys, who are evil.

17. Sam Waterson (the Great Gatsy guy) with his loveable ferret face and frog voice, which combine into an authoritative force of Mother Nature when he gets fired up about something and shouts in people’s pathetic-by-comparison faces about what is right and what is wrong.

18. “Objection!”

19. The convenient-to-the-plot acts of police violence or carelessness that cast a hood of shame over the office and contribute to more unresolved endings, but which give ample opportunity for more distasteful and sexy jokes.

20. The buttoning and unbuttoning and re-buttoning of suit coats as lawyers stand up to speak, then sit down to ponder, and then stand up to speak again.

21. The yelling matches in the boss’ office about morals and justice, with fist-banging and rhetoric and sweat and rolled-up sleeves and basically all of the most action-packed moments of the show.

22. The droning sound that blares as someone is opening up about what really happened.

23. The affecting closing arguments by the prosecuting attorneys, especially if you haven’t just entered the room and caught the butt end of an episode, but have instead been sitting through every grueling stand-off between defense attorney and hapless old lady on the witness stand, every “You knew your daughter was going to buy those drugs, didn’t you?  Didn’t you!!!” and every erupting sobbing fit that follows.

24. The well-memorized monotone guy who has the privilege of starting every episode with an explanation of the show’s name, and who, despite the line in the credits about how an episode is fictitious, always assures us that “these are their stories.”

25. All of the coffee that was drunk during walk-and-talk scenes before the show finally ran out of seasons.

26. The fact that, after all of the lawlessness, and the disorder, and the deals, and the hot dogs, you are still feeling giddy when it’s announced that a station will be playing absolutely nothing but Law & Order for a whole day.
Happy birthday, good friend.

For your hearing pleasure:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6jvusVhmrI

Did something get left out that you love?  Add it in the comments!