Now that Sam Waterston has joined the cast of "Law & Order," he's fighting the image of two lawyers from the immediate past.
Although the New York City assistant district attorney Waterston will be playing an entirely new character on the NBC drama, he's following in the footsteps of Michael Moriarty's character, Ben Stone. And he's also following in his own footsteps - he played attorney Forrest Bedford on "I'll Fly Away."But both the star and the show's creator/executive producer, Dick Wolf, promise that Waterston's new character, Jack McCoy, won't be easily confused with either of his predecessors.
"It's very much our intention to break new ground from both Forrest Bedford and Ben Stone," Waterston said.
"Not only is Jack McCoy diametrically opposed from the character Sam played in `I'll Fly Away,' he is certainly 180 degrees off of Moriarty and Stone," Wolf said.
The actor said he doesn't think his current lawyer alter-ego and his past lawyer alter-ego will be confused in the viewers' minds. "With the profession, these two characters could not be more unlike one another," he said. "And the show's couldn't be more unlike one another, either. The feel of them is very, very different."
Waterston describes McCoy as "the merry attack dog," a term Wolf explained as "somebody who enjoys the game."
"This is a guy who is much less troubled by the vagaries of the law," Wolf said. "He is a guy who sees the the law as a gigantic . . . three-dimensional chess board, and he is one of the master game players.
"And he is much less apologetic about some of the things that he does than the Ben Stone character ever was. He's there to win. He's there to play hard. . . . (He's) a guy who is a master of wooing juries, a guy who makes personal contact with the people in the jury box. But if he's prosecuting you, once he gets outside of that courtroom he'll cut your heart out with a butter knife."
REPLACING MORIARTY: The departure of Michael Moriarty from "Law & Order" came after a very public dispute that began when Moriarty publicly attacked Attorney General Janet Reno for her stand against television violence and ended with the actor accusing NBC of censoring him.
But while Moriarty has said he was fired, Wolf disputes that.
"He was not fired. He was not censored," Wolf said.
The producer said he received a faxed letter of resignation the day after he'd spent 90 minutes on the phone with Moriarty discussing scripts and the future of "Law & Order."
"I was the most shocked person in the country, because I had spoken to him the day before he quit," Wolf said.
The producer, a longtime, outspoken television industry figure on the subject of violence, said he never tried to stop Moriarty from speaking out, but that he advised him he was going about it the wrong way.
"Michael chose a path that I don't think was very fruitful, and I made that very plain to him," Wolf said "I don't think the way you handle an explosive political situation that many of us had spent years trying to deal with rationally is best answered by calling the attorney general names.'
Basically, Wolf's contention is that Moriarty overreacted and that the actor's version of events was somewhat skewed. He said he never tried to prevent Moriarty from speaking out on his views, and that accusations that the network did so were also untrue.
"I made it very clear to anybody who asked for a comment that I completely agreed with Michael's right to say whatever he wanted, but I maintain my right to disagree with the methodology that he was choosing to employ," Wolf said.
All of which could have made Waterston's arrival on the show somewhat uncomfortable, but both the producer and the star said Moriarty has already quit when Waterston signed on.
(What makes all of this rather ironic is that while "Law & Order" often deals with the aftermath of violence, it is in no sense of the word a violent show.)
ON VIOLENCE: Last year's outcry against violence on television has died down considerably, and Wolf for one thinks that the way things ought to be.
"The four network schedules do not have one show that 10 years ago would have even been considered marginally violent on their prime time schedules," he said. "There is a warning on the front of `NYPD Blue' not for violence but for blue.
"And the only show that would be remotely reminiscent of the more violent era would be `Walker (Texas Ranger),' and I think he just kicks people."
MUSICAL CHAIRS: The departure of Moriarty and the arrival of Waterston are by no means the first such changes in the makeup of the "Law & Order" cast.
Only one cast member - Christopher Noth (Det. Mike Logan) - has been with the show since it debuted in 1990.
A FAN OF THE SHOW: Waterston said he's been well-acquainted with "Law & Order" because he and his wife have been watching the show for years. Sort of.
"We have a television in our bedroom, and we would have it on and we would be thinking of other things," Waterston said. "And it was more like what the radio used to be."
They would be only partly paying attention, "and then my wife and I would find ourselves sitting at the end of the bed watching the show. This was way before the possibility of my being on it ever came up," he said. "And it's because of the way this narrative runs - the way they pose the difficulty of figuring out what's right, and the argumentativeness of it, and the fact that the narratives are very emotionally charged.
"When the notion arose that I might go onto it, the we watched with more concentration."