Does anybody still read a newspaper, anymore? I mean, yes, you can go to the websites of just about every printed press still in business and, depending on if they demand you become a subscriber, look at today's top stories, read about the latest entertainment news... even get in a game of Wordle!
But I'm talking about going to a kiosk, plopping down your folding green and your silver, picking up a physical stack of printed paper and reading it.
The fact that we collectively don't do that much anymore, makes this series seem even more quaint than it otherwise might have been.
This is kind of a spinoff series from the "Law & Order" franchise. Series creator Dick Wolf wanted to produce a show that tackled the kinds of stories that were actually seen in the New York papers. Does that fact, in the year 2000, when this show aired, make this the first program that featured stories that were "RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES!" Maybe not, but perhaps it was the first to admit it, even as they ran the boilerplate disclaimer that "this story is fiction."
Oliver Platt, always moody, glib and intense, got to use his complete acting palette in the character of Wallace Benton, (he prefers "Wally," thank you very much) a journalist for a tabloid rag called The New York Ledger, which, if you get a good look at the newspaper's masthead, is clearly modeled after The New York Post.
I think they wanted to make Platt's character a kind of Jimmy Breslin type: a hardnosed, hard drinking honcho, who wrote hard hitting pieces with a bit of a hard head. Jimmy Breslin... Wally Benton... I'm not saying, I'm just saying.
There's plenty of reasons for Platt's writer to want to hit the bar. His wife, played by Hope Davis, is divorcing him but she's lingering around, because she continues to work at the Ledger. His editor, played by Bebe Neuwirth, is always against everything he says before he says it. And the the wealthy owner and publisher, played by Tom Conti (and obviously aping Rupert Murdoch - except he's Scottish, not Australian), has higher ideals for the paper, which maybe puts him in line with "Citizen Kane?" Suffice it to say, they didn't get THAT right!
New York is all over this series, top to bottom, and the stories were, like most of Dick Wolf's work, pretty worthwhile, if not a little far-fetched... Like the fact that Benton was also teaching a course on Journalism at Columbia University. He ropes his young interns into helping him investigate his latest story, including cub reporter Lili Taylor.
Even though this would have existed in the L&O Universe (The Ledger was referenced multiple times as a source for info and copies of the paper itself appeared on episodes in that group), this absolutely was a stand alone show and it featured a bit more humor than you would find in those other shows, even as the format of the program followed the standards of all of the other shows in that canon. But maybe that's why it didn't make the cut? If they added in more crossovers (and those would have been completely natural in the course of this series) it could have helped anchor the audience a bit more, early in the run, so they might have had a more solid foundation. A few years before, David E. Kelley did his infamous crossover with "Ally McBeal" and "The Practice" on two different networks, so there was precedence.
Finally, the message of the show might have put off some viewers - that being: print journalists are good-hearted seekers of the truth, wherever it leads them, and are working hard to get the story right. That seems difficult to deal with now, with so many newspapers shuttering their offices and fewer and fewer resources dedicated to that element of news gathering. Where have you gone, Wally Benton... our nation turns its lonely eyes to you. Woo-woo-woo.
