Quote of the Day

Heard on Law & Order the other night:

Good liars make good actors.

Or was it:

Good actors make good liars.

Same diff. You watch enough Law & Order and you begin to recognize some patterns, like Detective Green getting a cell phone call in the middle of an interview and telling Lenny they've got to go for some reason, and they hurry off stage. Or the knock on the door when they have a suspect in interrogation. But the characters who aren't regulars are played by some good actors. They do a good job of confusing the issue. Who's lying? Who's guilty? But after a while you begin to notice subtle clues, like that person's response was slightly off, or the camera lingers on someone a fraction of a second too long, and a half hour later you find out you were right! I knew that so and so was no good!

Of course, the guys who are making this show all know this ahead of time, so it's interesting that they can make the clues subtle enough that they don't stand out, but people are still able pick up on them. That they are able to do this week after week and year after year makes me suspect there is more engineering going on than art.

I saw one episode last week that I think was really old because the timing was way different. The lapse between scene changes and the delays between people speaking were slower, or just different. We are talking fractions of a second here. It was interesting to watch.