The viewing public has been doing Law and Order for about 20 years it seems. But the early shows were fairly detective. As with most Hollywood drivel, they brought out the political propaganda after they had their time slot guaranteed.
Early Law and Order was less political overall in that every other episode wasn’t a thinly veiled hour of left wing propaganda on a given issue. Most episodes were crime stories without a political agenda, except maybe that the killer was usually a white guy, when of course the vast majority of murders in NYC are committed by non-whites. There were episodes that dealt with issues like abortion, and it definitely took a pro-choice stand overall and gave the pro-choice characters betters lines. But there was also an episode where they dealt with the Tawana Brawley hoax, and they came down pretty hard on the Sharpton-like race hustler. They even gave Michael Moriarty’s character a great line where he said that the source of most racism today was from the professional agitators. The first two seasons are definitely the best.
However, as the show went on it became a consistent hour of liberal garbage. Entire episodes were constructed for the obvious purpose of pushing the liberal view on some big issue of the day. Gun control, gay marriage, abortion rights, mass immigration, and many more; they all got their own episode or episodes. Not surprisingly, the plots of these episodes were thin and laughable in their absurdity, but they became more common as the show went on.
The show’s use of dialogue was also heavily biased. Even when they would let a more conservative character (like Fred Thompson’s DA) utter a decently written conservative line, they would almost always be trumped by a better written line for the liberal response. And the liberal character would almost always get the last word.
But often times they would present a caricature of conservative thought. This was usually done by having some bit character (like a beat cop on the scene) say something indicative of the way a liberal imagines that conservatives think, only to have one of the main characters slap them down with a snappy liberal retort. In other words, the conservative rube would tee up the smart liberal with some stupid remark, and then the liberal would knock it out of the park.
Law and Order SVU followed pretty much the same path. Eventually they both became unwatchable.