Recently I discovered that the Law and Order franchise expanded once more like a runaway bacterial cell, this time turning the focus from increasingly esoteric sections of the American legal code (about which I shall not be making a joke on account of it's been done roughly eleventy billion times before) to the UK. This excites me, because now they can focus on extremely esoteric sections of a completely different legal code and also maybe evolve a slight chemical reordering at the 30S ribosomal subunit thus granting a resistance to Paromomycin, a long-time difficulty of the series.

I remember watching V for Vendetta and being obscurely delighted at the scene where the TV station's fire alarm or whatever is going off and the alarm system politely says "There seems to be a bit of a fire. Kindly evacuate the building. Queue up, chaps. Orderly now, please." whereas in the US such an alarm would go "FIRE OH GOD SAVE YOURSELVES FIRE! FIRE FIRE FIRE! RUN FOR IT TRAMPLE IF YOU GOTTA!"

Basically things are a lot more polite in Britain, and the joke that Family Guy made about drive-by disagreements was in the forefront of my mind as I watched the pilot episode. I kept expecting the detectives to be led over to a body, victim of a vicious No It Wasn'ting with the suspect being a white male about six feet tall, thin, bespectacled, and with an overbite. But actually it was a dead baby in a duffel bag. Which, you know, kind of put a damper on the whole thing.