I used to watch Law & Order a lot growing up, but kind of fell off around the time Fontana came in, and was completely off by Cassidy. Now, with WE and Sundance showing the entire series, I set YouTube TV to record it and have been watching it during quarantine and had some thoughts.

• Cassidy was clearly supposed to have some kind of character arc, but cutting it short just made it look like everyone was mean to her. I am guessing fans in general didn't like her and her abrupt departure wasn't even explained. It's the only time I can think of when a principle character leaves and they don't even give it an offhand mention. I think they probably could have done something there if they committed to it, but we'll never really know.

• Speaking of abrupt, the style change in season 17 just comes out of nowhere. For most of the season, the show straight up just doesn't feel like Law & Order. It feels like they were trying to be much more of a cop drama than a procedural, like NYPD Blue or (most likely) SVU. They stop really establishing time and place, they try to be more artistic to a fault with their editing and cinematography. I can see why the creatives would find that appealing, but it really didn't work for me.

• Around season 18, it started to come back around for me. They did lean a little too heavily on "Cutter tries a crazy scheme and it backfires," though. The reason that worked for McCoy was because they used it sparingly, but it was basically every episode with Cutter and Rubirosa. I also got the feeling more often that McCoy wanted to see justice done, while Cutter felt driven just to win.

• Speaking of Rubirosa, I thought she was great. Borgia didn't feel like she really made much of an impact on me, and Southerlyn was a knockout but the actress honestly seemed like she was barely making her way through most scenes, so I was always a fan of Angie Harmon. That is likely owing to that being my favorite era, as well. But Rubirosa does a great job and the (comically implausible) episode where she is the defense council for a murderer was one of her high points.

• The lieutenant's cancer subplot was awful. It was a terrible concept that was executed poorly. The scenes felt completely at-odds with everything before and after and by the time they were over I was struggling to remember what the actual murder plot they were trying to solve was. It just took an axe to the pacing and I can't imagine they understood what the audience to still tuned in to that Friday night death slot (thanks, Jay Leno!) actually wanted.

• In that vein, it was really saddening how that series ended, both in terms of circumstance and that actual final episode. It felt like a made-for-TV Law & Order movie where they had to up the ante to ridiculous levels, they didn't even really give the "order" side a proper sendoff. And, again, the editing was so out of step with the rest of the series - at one point, they put the camera on Van Buren's MRI scan, then it fades to the police looking at a picture on a monitor, then a few minutes later they zoom in on the picture and fade to the place it was depicting. It felt out of place and it was poorly done, really amateurish. Not to mention the monologues characters were giving about teachers.

• Man, 9/11 really did a number on this show's writers, huh. There was a point where every other episode was about Muslim terrorists, the Iraq War, or George W. Bush in some way or another. I get it, that was the national conversation at the time and it's a consequence of ripping all your stories from the headlines, but jeez. Pull back a little.

• I didn't mind Lupo and Bernard. I actually thought they made a pretty good pair. Lupo got a lot better after they exited the season 17 doldrums of trying to dive into his psyche with dramatic lighting and how he's in love with his sister-in-law and augh. Bernard was fine, though it's funny how used to dead bodies he is despite working IAB before Van Buren picked him for homicide (which, funnily enough, was something she hated Cassidy for doing).

• Bernard's one-liners, though? Almost always terrible. Sometimes he had more than one in a scene. They were delivered like he thought he was saying the coolest thing in the world. They worked for Lenny because he was old and jaded and you really do believe this is the 3000th dead body he's ever seen. Bernard just felt like he saw someone else do it and thought it was neat.

• Speaking of, I still don't understand why they made the change to the cold open. For 16 years, it was the people who discovered the body having an in-progress conversation and then, whoa, dead body. It added to the mystery of the whole thing. All of a sudden, they changed it so every cold open was the victim a few hours before they died and then a smash cut to them lying dead somewhere while an officer who arrived at the scene gabs some exposition to the detectives. I decided to experiment for a bit by skipping a few of the cold opens and seeing if that changed anything and, nope, pretty much never did.

Overall, I'm not going to say I think seasons 17-20 are great, but I think they eventually found their groove. I do think season 17 is just straight up bad, but I get why they felt they needed to shake things up, that was just a bad direction to go. I also think the final episode was an ill-fitting finale for such a tent pole series. I'm not quite ready to say goodbye yet, so maybe I'll see if I accidentally skipped any episodes from seasons 8-16.