Firstly, it should be stated that in my short twenty one years I have managed to rack up a relative abundance of life experiences, but among those I cannot count having ever seen more than a single episode of Law and Order, as such I may not carry the required level of certification for this post.

The title “Law and Order” itself implies a lot about the defining ideology of both the show and the viewers that watch it (it isn't called “Crime and Disorder”). The show is presented as a window into how the system ensures that everybody adhere to a basic set of socially accepted principals and rules of conduct at a base level. People who watch the show do so on some level because they agree with this code, however the show is not actually about the difference between right and wrong but the procedure involved with ensuring everybody who begs to differ from that code gets their just desserts.

While the show is told from the perspective of those who enforce the law in its various stages, the viewer retains the role of “television viewer” and thus the social identity of the observer at the 'moment of decoding.' “Television viewer” is probably in itself an entire demographic at this point. Because, as Stuart Hall mentions, the show is created by many different people subscribing to many different ideologies and, at its level of consumption, is received by only one person, the message taken by the consumer at the 'moment of decoding' is often either a reconstructed version of the original message or even something completely different from the message which was originally intended. The medium of television often differs from other media in that it requires a large number of people to progress from initial conception to the television screen and therefore has the potential to be far more ambiguous in terms of the message sent out than media produced by a single person or a handful of people. This often has the effect of creating a message which panders more to a dominant ideology and which, when re-constructed by the consumer, assumes the ideology particular to that particular viewer's particular vision of whatever the dominant ideology is, varying by demographic and personal taste.

Hall states that “certain codes may, of course, be so widely distributed in a specific language, community, or culture, and be learned at such an early age, that they appear not to be constructed- the effect of an articulation between sign and referent- but to be naturally given. Simple visual signs appear to be given a 'near universality' in this sense, though evidence remains that even apparently 'natural' codes are culture-specific” (511). Police/legal procedural shows are not a new phenomenon and those who create them probably give them much thought- at the moment of encoding- to how the show is interpreted, but not to how that interpretation reflects on the culture performing the interpretation. In order for a show to be successful it must maintain a large enough viewing base to either garner money from advertising or carry a strong enough reputation that people are wiling to pay to see it. For this reason viewers of such a widely successful show such as “Law and Order” usually take two different readings of a viewing: the one in which the dominant message of 'Law and Order' is accepted wholly, or the aforementioned one in which it is accepted partially, with the viewer placing his own personal vision of the dominant ideology on top of the one put forth by the show, usually dictated by demographic or personal preference. People who reject outright whatever message the show puts forth probably will not watch it, but these people must be in a minority in order to account for the show's success.

Dominant ideology is not therefore, in terms of the larger cultural picture, determined or perpetrated at the 'moment of encoding' by the creators of television-based media but at the moment of reconstruction by the individual consumer. Hall states that “Traditionally, mass-communication research has conceptualised the process of communication in terms of a circulation circuit or loop. This model has been criticised for its linearity sender/message/receiver for its concentration on the level of message exchange and for the absence of a structured conception of the different moments as a complex structure of relations. But it is also possible (and useful) to think of this process in terms of a structure produced and sustained through the articulation of linked but distinctive moments- production, circulation, distribution, consumption, reproduction. This would be to think of the process as a 'complex structure in dominance...'” (508.) Law and Order is therefore part of a complex cycle through which dominant ideology is refreshed and re-interpreted at the moment of decoding and then re-produced at the moment of encoding.