‘Law and Order: Los Angeles’: Like ‘CSI’ but better

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‘Law & Order: Los Angeles’ took on a big one last night, making fiction out of Los Angeles’ Grim Sleeper, a serial killer targeting young black women in South Los Angeles for decades.

It was an ambitious gambit. Trying to condense a case of that scope into an hour of TV can’t be easy. And, as seems to be their way, the show’s writers weren’t content sticking to the strict contours of the real case and needed to add a few fictionalized twists and turns of their own.

All in all, I thought it was entertaining enough. With so much to tell in such a short period, however, I felt at times as if I were watching ‘CSI,’ as DNA tests and results that take months in real life were resolved in seconds with a click of a computer mouse.

Also, Deputy Dist. Attny. Dekker’s horse is getting a little too high for me. All those morality speeches, delivered in that breathy sotto voce, are wearing thin.

(For those interested, Christine Pelisek, then of the LA Weekly, tore the lid off the real Grim Sleeper story here . My colleagues and I wrote several pieces on the case as well. (See: ‘Grim Sleeper: How LAPD followed the DNA to an arrest ‘ and ‘DNA leads to arrest in Grim Sleeper killings.’)

-- Joel Rubin