Why NBC canceled Law and Order and immediately ordered a season of Law and Order: Los Angeles is one of those mysteries only the wizards at the Peacock Network can answer.

Actually, why they canceled Law and Order is obvious: the ratings had been falling for quite some time. As to why NBC thought people would like an LA version, I don’t know, but the new show is actually doing all right with audiences so far.

Last week’s episode finished second in its timeslot (Wednesday, 10 p.m.), with an audience of 7.2 million (800,000 below its lead-in, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit). Viewers gave the show a B rating in the USA Today audience poll, making it the seventh-highest ranked out of twenty-one new series.

Whether that success can be sustained remains in question, however, given the show’s excessive borrowings from its canceled predecessor.

The show avoids one of the things that reportedly caused many people to stop watching Law and Order in recent years: overt leftist politics. But note that word ‘overt’. Many viewers will definitely be able to find things to be offended about in Law and Order: Los Angeles, though so far the show has admirably avoided making obvious political points. Most of the stories have dealt with intersections between the rich and the poor, and the producers have typically made the evildoers wealthy individuals, which one could indeed see as politically charged, though at least the episodes are light on explicit socialist rhetoric, and what is there is true to the characters.

The cast is excellent. Skeet Ulrich plays lead detective Rex Winters, and Corey Stoll is his partner, Tomas Jaruszalski. Their commanding officer is played by Rachel Ticotin. Alfred Molina plays Deputy District Attorney Morales, with Terence Howard as Deputy District Attorney Jonah “Joe” Dekker on alternate weeks.

As the Deputy District Attorney. Molina is much better than Sam Waterston was in the New York-set Law and Order, in my opinion, and Howard is very good in his episodes. Molina is stolid and direct and does not indulge in the histrionics and moral dudgeon that were Waterston’s stock in trade. Howard is a bit flashier, but also avoids the priggishness of Waterston’s character. Ulrich and Stoll are very effective, steering clear of the often excessive emotionality of the detectives in the New York version.

The stories follow the same pattern as in Law and Order. The pilot episode, “Hollywood” (from a story by writer-producer Dick Wolf, the man behind the entire “Law and Order” franchise) deals with a group of burglars targeting the homes of young Hollywood stars while the latter are out clubbing.  Amusingly, the detectives confer with a papparazzo in order to find commonalities among the victims on the nights of the burglaries. And (mild spoiler) as is common in the various “Law and Order” shows, the main miscreant is indeed a wealthy caucasian.

In episode 2, “Echo Park,” the detectives search for the killer of an elderly female who participated in a mass murder as part of a Manson-style cult decades earlier. The main suspect, however, turns out to have been imprisoned for murdering her two daughters in an arson fire a few years earlier, after giving a confession that may have been coerced by Det. Winters’s wife (Teri Polo). It’s the kind of diatracting coincidence that’s all too obviously intended as a way to heighten the emotional intensity of the story.

It also, however, shows just how much is at stake in these trials. Being sent to prison means being subjected to years of horrific abuse by otheer prisoners. It’s a scandal of our justice system that really cries out for reform, and this episode does a good job of bringing that to mind.

What the case actually hinges on, however, is the question of diminished responsibility: whether a woman abiused by another in prison was justified in killing her former persecutor, under a spousal-abuse type of defense. Diminished responsibility is an important issue, but it’s one that has been dealt with countless times in crime fictions over the years, including episodes of various shows in the Law and Order franchise. So, no marks for originality there.

Episode three, “Harbor City,” deals with a robbery and murder at a medical marijuana shop. The investigation story is very skillfully compiled, involving professional surfing, Samoan gangs, surfer gangs, fights over public access to beaches, and social-class tensions. The legal case in the second half of the episode deals with the statutory definition of street gangs.

The episode hits the class-warfare themes pretty hard, however, which may indicate that the show is headed toward the same kind of overt politics as its New York predecessor. And, one suspects, the same fate, if the producers choose to go down that ill-trodden path.