I recently bought the DVD set of the first 20 seasons of  Law & Order and added them to my Plex library. 

Law & Order, while I liked the show a lot, is not one of my top ten favorite shows of the 20th century. It generally took a ripped-from-the-headlines approach to picking stories to dramatize, and it was largely issue driven so it rarely delved into the private lives of its law enforcement officers. Thus, there were no stories of single police detectives balancing their work lives while trying to keep their unruly teenagers from breaking the law, or whatever.

The shows that I liked best were the ones where there really was a lot of ambiguity in the issue, and I couldn’t come down easily on one side or the other.

The show was filmed on location in New York City, and it dispensed with establishing shots. You know, where the camera slowly pans in to show the viewer the neighborhood or the mansion’s exterior or whatever. Instead, it used title cards with a distinctive music cue to set the scene.

Needless to say. With such a story-driven and issue-heavy show, where very often each character would express a different point of view about the situation, there often wasn’t much time for humor, but every now and then the writers would slip in a bit.

For example, in the episode “Sonata for Solo Organ”, which started off when police found a man on a park bench who had been kidnapped and had had his kidney stolen (well, there’s some humor in the title), the detectives interview a doctor played by Lonny Price.

Now a few years earlier Mr. Price had played Charley in the original Broadway cast of George Furth and Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along.

And he would go on to direct quite a few Sondheim productions in later years as well as the movie of his experiences in that Broadway show, Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened.

So I have to believe that Lonny Price was either intentionally cast in the role of the doctor for this scene, or after he was cast, a line was added just for him.

In any case, here is the scene: