Law and Order: "Fault Lines" (Dick Wolf Productions, Universal, NBC-TV, aired March 17, 2022)

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

At 8 p.m. I put on the three Law and Order shows in sequence, watching the original Law and Order as rebooted by NBC and Dick Wolf with Rick Eid (and with two members of the original cast when it went off the air 12 years ago, Anthony Anderson and Sam Waterston; I’m fascinated by the fact that Anderson had a hugely successful TV show of its own, Blackish, for eight of the 12 years between the original Law and Order and this reboot) and then Law and Order: Special Victims Unit at 9 and Law and Order: Organized Crime at 10. Though the abused victim of a family-court ruling making her father her conservator is a young Black tennis star rather than a white singer, this Law and Order episode, “Fault Lines,” was quite obviously based by the writer or writers on the Britney Spears case. This time the murder victim is the family-court judge that imposed the conservatorship in the first place six years earlier after the young woman lost control of her mental state folliwing a major tennis match. The cover-up unravels when the defense calls a so-called “expert witness,” Dr. Stewart Moore (Wayne Pyle), who supposedly diagnosed the tennis star, Lucy McDaniel (Chrisen Shance), as having bipolar disorder so severely that she needed to be under her father’s conservatorship.

Then a Black woman who used to work at the clinic, Dr. Norah Gustafson (Stephanie Weeks), turns up and tells the cops that the doctor who supposedly treated her was in fact the overall head of the clinic but never actually provided Lucy with care. The flash point came when Lucy asked the family-court judge for permission to marry her (white) boyfriend – and the judge, acting on orders from her father/conservator, refused. So she grabbed a nearby fire extinguisher and clobbered him with it, killing him. Assistant district attorney Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) decides that the killing of the judge constitutes manslaughter rather than murder, since it was unpremeditated and based on an ill-thought-out emotional outburst, but her father Tom (Kevin Mambo) and the attorneys he’s hired for her turn the offer down. Then Samantha lets slip to Lucy herself that the plea offer has been made, and she elects to take it in the hopes that after a 15-year prison sentence she can still come back, marry her boyfriend and put together the various pieces of her life. The episode ends with Lucy announcing in open court that she wants to change her plea, her attorneys trying half-heartedly to talk her out of it, her dad under investigation himself for abusing the terms of the conservatorship, and Samantha’s boss, executive assistant district attorney Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy), saying, “If you do anything like that ever again, I’ll fire you.” Given some of the stunts Sam Waterston’s character, Jack McCoy, pulled in the earlier incarnation of this show, this somehow doesn’t sound like that big of an issue to me!