Law & Order bad "guys"

This is not at all a scientific study, but I get the impression that the bad “guys” are frequently women. Moms and grandmothers, mistresses and girlfriends pushing around some poor emasculated boy/man. The mom is an abuser, the mom is forcing the son to have sex with her (a step-mom in a couple cases), the evil grandmother matriarch and the underachieving son…seems like there’s a lot of it going around. Am I imagining it?

I just watched the episode where that actress whodse name I can’t remember beat her son so bad it caused brain damage due to his shoe fetish, and the brain damage causes decreased self control and he ends up killing a woman for her fancy boots. I’ve been meaning to post about this for a while, and tonight is the night. Margot Kidder played a mom sleeping with her son, there’s been a couple of those I think…oh and a bunch more, I think, that I don’t remember at the moment.

Moving this from IMHO to Cafe Society.

More significantly, the bad guy is always the richest Caucasian character.

No matter who the murder victim is, the cops will initially pick up and hassle a poor minority male, then discover that the real killer is a zillionaire living on Park Avenue.

Or the bad guy is always the most popular/rich boy in high school or college, if the setting of the show is one of those places.

It might be a carry-over from when NBC insisted there be more women in the cast, which led to the hiring of Lt. Van Buren and the ADA babes. Apparently, women want to show that they’re capable of heinous capital crimes as well. :smiley:

And then that annoying blonde biatch will stamp her feet and yell, “If this were a fishmonger from Queens, we would’ve indicted already!”

Agrippina, that is sometimes the case, but there is also often a demanding/controlling mother/grandmother in the picture and the poor boy was just henpecked into committing the murder.

Aren’t they replacing the ditzy blonde from L&O? And I really liked the blond from SVU, but the new red head really works for me as well.

And I’m being intentionally piggish by not looking up the actresses’ names. Or is it “actors”? Do we call men and women actors now? Anyway, my wife thinks I have a thing for women with deep voices, as apparently these two women have deep voices. I don’t know, I just think they’re, like, hot and stuff.

According to my research, 56% of all guilty perps on L&o are adult males, versus only 15% who are adult women. Disregarding their ages, 80% of all criminals on the series are male. Additionally, 87% of them are white while 40% could be considered either wealthy or in a position of power (judge, politician etc). There are far more poor/working class victims on L&O than there are peretrators.

(I’m not just pulling these numbers out of my tuches - they’re from a college paper I wrote on the series).

It could just be my perception, but the wealthy defendants also rarely get acquitted. Poor defendants seem to be acquitted more frequently.

But if this were an average day in the New York court system, most of these cases wouldn’t go to trial and would just be pleaded out.

Perhaps it’s because the wealthy can afford good defense attorneys and can fight cases more strenuously that is why we see more rich defendants.

Either that or it’s focus groups.