Law and Order: "Filtered Life" (Dick Wolf Productions, Universal, NBC-TV, aired March 10, 2022)

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

Last night I watched the three Law and Order shows in sequence on NBC: the original Law and Order at 8 p.m., Law and Order: Special Victims Unit at 9 and Law and Order: Organized Crime at 10. The Law and Order episode, “Filtered Life,” is about Amanda Larson (Mary Callahan), who becomes one of the “influencers” on social media and builds millions of followers of her video blog until she makes the mistake of dating a really possessive and crazy guy, Daniel Garrett (Christian Mallen). We already know Garrett is a slimeball because he has at least 12 different profiles on 12 dating apps, all of them under different names and phony résumés, including ones in which he claims to have graduated at the top of his class in medical school when he never went to college at all. Garrett gets pissed off at Amanda when she decides to go on a date with him but turns him down for a second date because she’s going to a trendy party that will make a cool feature for her vlog. So Garrett gets excited, tracks her down and kills her, after having bought a bag of lye and other supplies to help him dispose of her body.

The case is complicated not only by the absence of a body (which almost always makes getting a murder conviction harder because the defense can argue that the person isn’t really dead – and in Amanda’s case a photo turns up purporting to show her on a beach in Bermuda after she was supposed to be dead, though her friends argue that the picture has to be a fake because the real Amanda would never had photographed herself like that or allowed another person to send it to her site) but by the presence of Amanda’s parents Josh (Chris Hietikko) and Valerie (Molly Lloyd). When Garrett’s attorney, Lisa Element (Sarah Jo Provost), offers to plead out Garrett’s case – in exchange for a manslaughter plea and a 15-year sentence he will let the elder Larsons know where he buried their daughter – the Larsons urge the prosecutors to accept it, but district attorney Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston, who along with Anthony Anderson is one of the two actors in the original Law and Order who are also in this reboot) vetoes the plea deal on the ground that when Garrett gets out he will be in his late 30’s and there is a good chance he’ll go back online and re-offend. The case goes to the jury and they promptly return a guilty verdict despite the attempts by the defense that Amanda faked her own death to generate more publicity and more hits for her vlog.