One of the TV shows I watched Saturday night, when I was too tired even to turn the pages in the books I’d just bought at Powell’s, was a rerun of
Law & Order: Special Titillation Unit that bore a remarkable similarity to the 2003 Mexican movie
Nicotina.
I don’t mean to suggest plagiarism—as the cable guy once said when I suggested it was too great of a coincidence that my TV stopped working the day he came to tweak something, “That’s what a coincidence is.”
The episode of
SVU, called “
Surveillance,” concerned a concert cellist, who is attacked in her apartment. When detectives investigate the scene of the crime, they discover several Webcams hooked up to various rooms in her apartment. She’s being spied on by an obsessed computer geek while carrying on a relationship with the orchestra’s maestro.
In
Nicotina, a computer geek, who happens to manage an apartment building, places Webcams in the apartment of one of the tenants with whom he's obsessed—a concert cellist who’s involved with her orchestra’s conductor.
Nicotina has way more going for it—hot diamonds; lots more characters, including Russian gangsters; the recurring theme of smoking and attempts to give it up; and Diego Luna (of
Y Tu Mamá También fame and
Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights infamy). Still, it’s a small world …
