LAW AND ORDER was the most powerful hour and a half of television that I’ve seen all year…

–Pauline Kael, The New Yorker

… a vivid impression of (the policemen’s) working lives and through this a complex sense of what it means to be in their position in a large American city… There is the implicit threat of violence in any radio call. Moreover, the cops are expected to dispose of countless routine problems — drunks, accidents, family quarrels — that can’t be ‘solved’ to anyone’s satisfaction and that most ‘decent’ people don’t want to touch.

–Gary Arnold, The Washington Post