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Sound and look familiar ?

Well, here’s the original and still the best:

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The creator of one of the longest running dramas on television still hopes he can find a home for a record-setting 21st season:

Is “Law & Order” really dead?

Not if its creator, Dick Wolf, can help it. Mr. Wolf said after Monday’s NBC upfront presentation that he was out seeking “other offers” for his 20-year-old, New York-based franchise, which NBC canceled this week.

Mr. Wolf has long aimed to see his signature police and legal procedural surpass the classic western “Gunsmoke” as television’s longest-running prime-time drama. NBC’s decision left the two shows in a tie for that record.

Mr. Wolf was known to be negotiating as hard as he could to try to persuade NBC to extend the show for another year. On Monday, he said he was not giving up, but he did not specify where he was hoping to place the series.

Here’s hoping he can do it.

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Congratulations, Daniel Dae Kim. You are the first “Lostie” to get a new job.

And you get to stay in Hawaii! That makes us feel better about the fact you had to see Jin drown a couple of weeks ago.

CBS has begun its march toward announcing its new fall schedule. It picked up the remake of the buzzy “Hawaii 5-O,” starring Kim as Chin Ho Kelly, and Alex O’Loughlin. The network’s been trying to connect O’Loughlin with a hit show for several years now, could this be the one?

The cast includes: Taryn Manning (“Drive”), Grace Park (“Battlestar Galactica”) and Scott Caan (“Oceans Eleven”)

Peter Lenkov (“CSI: New York”) wrote the script, and the “Fringe” and “Alias” producing team of Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman is behind it. Based on the hit CBS show that aired from 1968 to 1980, the new version will center on Steve McGarrett, played by O’Loughlin, who heads a police division in Hawaii that reports directly to the governor.

There’s no way, though, that they’ll be able to come up with anything cooler than this:

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Just one season shy of setting a record for the longest running drama in television history, the plug has been pulled on Law & Order:

NBC confirmed Friday that it had canceled the original “Law & Order,” bringing an end to a 20-year-old television drama that jump-started an era of television production in New York City.

“Law & Order” was on the verge of becoming the longest-running drama in prime-time television history, surpassing “Gunsmoke.” But it appears that the “Law & Order” executive producer, Dick Wolf, has settled for a tie. The final episode of the series will be shown on May 24, NBC confirmed in a news release Friday.

Actors and producers on the program were told Thursday that the series had been canceled, but NBC and Mr. Wolf remained in conversations through Thursday evening, apparently in an attempt to make a deal for a 21st season.

NBC said Friday that it had ordered a new series, “Law & Order: Los Angeles,” or “LOLA” for short. It also renewed “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” for another season. The network plans to officially announce its 2010-11 schedule on Monday in New York.

NBC is also quietly exploring the possibility with Mr. Wolf that the show may be able to produce some kind of movie or extended retrospective next season to give the series a proper send-off.

It would seem to be the least that the shoe deserves after two decades of faithful service.

For me the best of years of Law & Order will always be the time between 1992 and 2004 when Jerry Orbach took over as Senior Detective Lennie Briscoe. He was, more than anyone else on the show, the quintessential wisecracking New York detective. A few years later Sam Watterson stepped in as Executive A.D.A. Jack McCoy, and, for almost ten seasons the show had a rhythm that it hadn’t achieved before, and didn’t achieve afterward.

In the meantime, the show has spawned several spinoffs, including the often disturbing but still compelling Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, the intense Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Law & Order: Trial By Jury, an unsuccessful show that told it’s stories from a different point of view, and apparently, the upcoming Law & Order: Los Angeles, There is also a British adaptation, Law & Order: UK, that is currently in it’s second season.

While many of us will miss the stories “ripped from the headlines,” it means more to New York City:

In 20 years of production on the streets and soundstages of New York, “Law & Order” served as a springboard and a meal ticket for hundreds of actors. It did the same for the careers of other New Yorkers, like David Dreishpoon, the caterer.

Mr. Dreishpoon was struggling to make a living in the food service business when he borrowed $5,000 from his grandmother and talked his way into a job feeding the cast and crew of “Law & Order.”

The job lasted 14 years, and by the time he severed ties with the show six years ago, it had paid his company, David’s Gourmet Catering and Craft Service, about $1.5 million and Mr. Dreishpoon was established as a nosh-maker to the stars.

“It was the best source of business I’ve ever had,” Mr. Dreishpoon said Friday as he drove to a Hamptons location for another TV show.

“It just kept going and going and going,” he said.

But the wheels of TV justice will soon grind to a halt, after NBC announced on Friday that it was canceling the original “Law & Order,” leaving a big hole in the city’s economy.

Katherine Oliver, the commissioner of the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theater and Broadcasting, said that every year the show provided jobs to about 4,000 people, including one-day acting roles. Its spending totaled about $79 million annually, she said, including things like coffee and bagels, boom microphones and duct tape. During its 20-year run, that impact amounted to as much as $1 billion or more, she said.

Ms. Oliver praised Dick Wolf, the show’s producer, for choosing to film a series in the city when most other shows about New York were being shot in Canada or some other faraway place.

“He’s really proved that New York City is an affordable place to shoot,” she said.

Mr. Wolf also lobbied city officials to provide tax breaks to productions that do most of their work in the city. “Law & Order” was the model for that legislation, said Assemblyman David I. Weprin, a Democrat from Queens who was a sponsor of the 2005 law when he was a city councilman.

The end of “Law & Order” is “disturbing,” Mr. Weprin said.

“Hopefully,” he said, “Dick Wolf will have something else waiting in the wings that we can use to promote New York.”

Unfortunately, the new series is based in Los Angeles.

Along with the characters and the stories, Law & Order will also be remembered for it’s sounds, such as the dramatic gavel-like sound that served as a transition between scenes:

And, of course, the theme song, which started out in Season One like this.

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Even Jay-Z worships at the altar of Betty White. And why wouldn’t he?

At the end of his second song on this weekend’s “Saturday Night Live,” the appropriate “Young Forever,” Jay-Z dedicated his performance to the host, “the most incredible Betty White.”

Saturday’s whole show was one big celebration of White, from the commercials featuring the actress to her game presence in every sketch. A number of the skits didn’t do much more than trade on her saucy-grandma image, and there wasn’t necessarily a classic moment in the 90-minute show.

Still, White proved why she’s getting work at age 88 — her comic delivery is still formidable. Of course she nailed all the naughty stuff, but given enjoyably silly material, as she was in sketches with Kenan Thompson, Rachel Dratch and Tina Fey, she killed. The show would be smart to extend an open invitation to White to return as host any time, but given how in demand she is, who knows if she’d be able to make it back?

If there wasn’t a sidesplitting “Hamm & Buble” moment (and how I wished for a Jay-Z-Betty White collaboration, a la Jon Hamm and Michael Buble’s 2009 “SNL” skit), White at least had some effective zingers in her opening monologue.

Back when the campaign to get her on “SNL” began, she didn’t know what Facebook was, White confessed. “And now that I do, I think it sounds like a huge waste of time,” she said

You can watch the whole show on Hulu if you missed it, but here are my favorites:

The monologue:

The “muffin” sketch:

And the census sketch with Tina Fey:

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This is a cartoon watched by millions of children on broadcast television at 9 pm. Many parents have seen the kind of spoiled child who finds a line he’s not supposed to cross and then crosses it with bravado, daring anyone to discipline him. Not many have seen this bratty behavior from a grown man at the age of 36. Fox Entertainment reportedly pays this man $100 million to poison the culture.

Where is the FCC chairman in “protecting consumers” and “saving” television on this matter? Where do people go to complain that conglomerates like Fox Entertainment are not acting in the public interest?

(…)

MacFarlane keeps placing prank calls. Back in January, an episode of MacFarlane’s “American Dad” cartoon demonstrated its creator’s ongoing fascination with horse sperm. (Previously and infamously on “Family Guy,” baby Stewie ate horse sperm for breakfast, with full knowledge of what it was.) Stan Smith, the doltish CIA agent and title character of “American Dad,” was tricked into masturbating a race horse to improve its performance. Viewers next saw Stan being showered with liquid, which turned out to be water from a garden hose as he washed himself off in disgust after he’d performed this supposedly hilarious deed.

We can have overtly sexual activities, with animals, no less, and the FCC can’t be bothered.

Should MacFarlane be ignored? Someone who churns out this kind of “comedy” surely craves attention. He now has three half-hour shows on Fox every Sunday night, all vigorously lunging to offend. If MacFarlane plays with baby feces in the woods, does anyone see it? Sadly, yes: this sorry hour-long episode of “Family Guy” was watched by 7.3 million people, tying ABC’s “Desperate Housewives” for first place.

Here’s an idea, Brent. If you don’t like Family Guy, don’t watch it. If you don’t want your kids watching it, don’t let them watch it. In the meantime, don’t use the power of the state to censor something just because you don’t like it.

In any case, the Griffin’s have already prepared their response to any FCC complaint:

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With 24’s Eighth and final season taking place in New York City, it was perhaps inevitable that someone would make this comparison:

In an era when television is often ahead of reality, perhaps it was inevitable that the New York police commissioner measured the country’s success Tuesday in the attempted Times Square bombing against the fictional heroics of Jack Bauer on FOX’s “24.”

At a midday news conference, Ray Kelly praised the actions of law enforcement officials for capturing a suspect in the car bomb case a little more than two days after the incident.

“Now, by my calculation . . . it was 53 hours and 20 minutes,” Kelly said. “Now we know that Jack Bauer can do it in 24 minutes. But in the real world, 53 hours is a — is a pretty good number.”

Kelly meant 24 hours, of course, a reference to the TV series in which Bauer always manages to solve a major terrorist event in a single day. But Kelly’s comparison was clearly meant to draw the comparison between real-life agents and the Hollywood version.

In fact, the similarities are eerie between reality and the television version of the terrorist plot now playing out in New York City. The main difference? The video surveillance is far better in the show.

As Bauer tracks a terrorist bomb hidden in a van through the streets of Manhattan in this season’s “24,” he is aided by secret spy drones flying over the city, training their cameras on virtually every intersection. With just a phone call, Bauer directs a drone to the location he wants and up pop detailed images — license plates, even the face of a suspect.

What a contrast to the short, grainy video the New York Police Department released Monday of a “person of interest” in the botched Times Square bombing. Worse than most YouTube clips, the picture of a man removing his jacket is fuzzy, obscuring his face and any other identifying features.

Let’s hope the similarities end there, because otherwise we’d be dealing with a traitor inside law enforcement, the Russian mob, an assassinated foreign leader, and the sight of an idiotic President being turned into a corrupt fool by the most corrupt fictional President ever.

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The scene above showed up last night during The Simpsons’ intro sequence:

With ‘South Park’ creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone receiving death threats from the radical Revolution Muslim regarding their depiction of Muhammad, their comedy brethren have shown their support. Last week, Jon Stewart came to their defense, and last night, ‘The Simpsons’ (sort of) did as well.

In the episode’s opening credit sequence, Bart’s ever-changing chalkboard line read “South Park – We’d Stand Beside You If We Weren’t So Scared.” It was a an affable sign of solidarity between the two animated giants.

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