In the interest of full disclosure, I must admit that I have never seen a single, complete episode of Law & Order. Nor have I seen Law & Order: CI. Ain’t seen Law & Order: SVU either. Haven’t gotten around to watching Law & Order: K9 Squad, Law & Order: Roto-Rooter Investigations, or Law & Order: Daycare Diaper Detectives. So feel free to tell me I shouldn’t criticize something I haven’t seen, if you’d like.
But do the writers for these shows get paid a discounted rate? When you’re just ripping things from the headlines, are you more of a compiler than a screenwriter?
GalleyCat points to this New York Post article about how the fine Law & Order folks are working up a script based on the Judith Regan controversy. The episode is about the circumstances when “a brash female publisher is found murdered after she backs out of a deal to release a tell-all book by a hot-tempered baseball great who was notoriously acquitted of murdering his wife.”
My guess is that the staff writers there are still making a lot more than the people in the “Studio 60″ pool… which seems to work more like a traditional soap opera, in terms of writing.