The best Sam Waterston story is not actually about Law & Order. It’s about another long-running NBC show, Saturday Night Live. Which hired him to do the voiceover for the “robot insurance” commercial. If you have not seen this commercial, hunt it down and watch it; it’s hilarious. And Waterston was just whipping through the copy, reading it really, really quickly. The director suggested that perhaps he should slow down, and Waterston’s response was, “I figure any actor who’s doing commercials for robot insurance is doing it for the money and wants to get it done and get out of there as quickly as possible.” Since he was definitely not wrong, they did it his way.

The history of television is full of shows with sharp divides. Trapper or BJ—or Frank or Charles, really. Dick York or Dick Sargent. Old Ray or New Ray. And, yes, those are often quality dividers—apparently they literally started recycling scripts on Bewitched, figuring no one would notice or care, and that’s not a sign of a show that’s really trying anymore. But often it’s a matter of personal preference. Some people like Ben Stone; some people like Jack McCoy. And while the assistants, and the cops, came and went, and even the bosses changed several times, those are the two eras most people talk about.

I like Jack McCoy, and I like Sam Waterston, and I’m having a hard time finding a lot to say about him, honestly. He’s been Jack McCoy for nearly four hundred episodes of television across four shows, surely marking one of the longest-running characters not merely on the Law & Order franchise but of all time—especially if you leave aside soap operas—and of course he did an episode or two with great Cross-Television Landmark John Munch. Meaning, of course, that Jack McCoy could still theoretically show up on any number of shows that people don’t realize are part of the same extended universe.

But Sam Waterston himself has done many, many other things, and I’ve even seen a bunch of them. As I said two weeks ago, he made a really excellent Tom Wingfield opposite Katharine Hepburn and alongside Michael Moriarty, back in the ’70s. And the other great production I’ve seen of that play starred John Malkovich, his costar from The Killing Fields. So that’s a pair of interesting connections there.

In a rather more obscure note, I think he was really well cast as Andrew Stuart in a made-for-TV movie of Lantern Hill, one of my favourite L. M. Montgomery movies. He’s great at the role, and he even looks not unlike the part, based on the description of the character in the book. It’s a shame that it’s not a great adaptation of the book. Part of it is that it’s so cramped for time and space; the book is as much just a slice of life of 1920s Prince Edward Island, and the movie is short enough so that they have to rush through to the bits of major plot. It also features Sarah Polley with a dreadful Cockney accent, so I guess that’s worth watching?

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