Law and Order: "The Right Thing" (Dick Wolf Productions, Universal, NBC-TV, aired February 24,2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I watched NBC’s new block of three Law and Order shows, starting at 8 p.m. with a revival of the original Law and Order after a 12-year hiatus. At least two of the original cast members returned: Sam Waterston as district attorney Jack McCoy, which I more or less expected; and Anthony Anderson as Detective Kevin Bernard. That was during the last 12 years when Anderson got a career boost from doing a whole other sort of show – eight seasons as the all-knowing dad in the sitcom Blackish, essentially the old Father Knows Best with an all-Black cast (which had already been done by Hollywood as The Cosby Show).

In fact, though Bill Cosby wasn’t mentioned in the script, he was clearly the model for the murder victim at the start, a once-popular Black singer named Henry King (Norm Lewis) who receives a promise not to be prosecuted for raping a woman named Nicole (Jeaninne Kaspar). Then the assistant district attorney who made that promise receives word that King raped up to 40 other women, all by drugging them with spiked drinks and then having his wicked way with them while they were conscious but powerless to resist. She prosecuted King for raping some of these other women, but an appeals court threw out his conviction on the ground that the A.D.A.’s promise not to prosecute extended to all King’s alleged victims. King is set free and gives a TV interview in which he plays the race card, depicting himself as yet another innocent Black victim of an unjust and racist white system. Then he’s found dead with five bullets in him, and the cops launch an investigation.

This time the captain of the precinct the cops work out of is a heavy-set white woman, Camryn Manheim, instead of a heavy-set Black one, S. Epatha Merkerson; and the partner Detective Bernard has to work with is hot-tempered Detective Frank Cosgrove (Jeffrey Donovan), who takes so cavalier an attitude towards the Constitution and its due-process guarantees he makes Clint Eastwood’s character of “Dirty” Harry Callahan seem like a charter member of the ACLU by comparison. After cycling through and clearing various suspects – including a gang leader who was receiving $100,000 per year to have his boys in prison protect Henry King from personal or sexual assault, who got pissed at him when he announced tnat now that he was out, the deal was off – the cops zero in on Nicole, the first woman King raped (at least the first to complain publicly and call the police), who killed him after seeing him on TV expressing no remorse and proclaiming himself an innocent victim. She took a gun from a safe belonging to her husband, Ryan Bell (Marcel Simoneau), and when the police come to their apartment with a search warrant and find a green hoodie she had just washed (she’d worn it during the murder to get rid of the blood spatter) but hadn’t dried, they take her into custody.

During the interrogation Detective Cosgrove feeds Nicole a cock-and-bull story about how if she confesses to the crime she’ll be allowed to go home; he signs the confession and then arrests her. At the trial, the assistant D.A. McCoy assigned to the prosecution, Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy), agrees with Nicole’s defense attorney that he won’t use the confession in evidence, but hot-headed Detective Cosgrove mentions it anyway in answering a question on cross-examination as to just how the cops knew to find the gun in the dumpster where Nicole had dumped it after the murder. The defense attorney asks the judge to declare a mistrial, but the judge (a woman) tells her that a simple instruction to the jury to disregard the mention of a confession is enough. Then the defense attorney does such a good job making her client seem sympathetic that the prosecutors worry Nicole is going to be acquitted, so McCoy and Price ask the other prosecutor who’s sitting second-chair, Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi), to handle the closing argument, apparently deciding that the jurors will be more likely to convict if the last voice they hear telling them to is a woman rather than a man. They get their conviction, but Samantha has guilt feelings about the way she was used and asks Price to get the lowest sentence possible.

The credits for this Law and Order lists Rick Eid as having developed the show but Dick Wolf, who created the entire Law and Order franchise, co-wrote the script himself with Eid, and veteran Law and Order hand Jean de Segonzac directed. The show was quite well-done and a welcome introduction to the revived series,,which from the look of the first new episode tap into the same complexities of police work and law enforcement in general – particularly how the constitutional protections of due process and equal rights work in actual cases – which led the late science-fiction writer Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. to recommend that anyone who wanted to get an idea of how the Constitution worked in real life could get it by watching Law and Order.