Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Takeover" (Dick Wolf Productions, Universal, NBC-TV, aired March 10, 2022)

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

Once again, the Law and Order: Organized Crime episode that followed the SVU show seemed to be a letdown, even though it began powerfully with Detective Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni) being suspended indefinitely without pay for his various transgressions in going after Richard Wheatley (Dylan McDermott, whose character seemed to “die” at the end of last week’s episode but is obviously being held in reserve for future episodes). The opening seemed like Dick Wolf’s writer, Eric Haywood, was recycling the opening of the 1936 Edward G. Robinson vehicle Bullets or Ballots, in which Robinson plays a police detective who publicly punches out his commanding officer and is approached by New York’s gangsters to switch sides – only it’s a trap: Robinson is actually going undercover to infiltrate the Mob and his attack on his chief was a setup to make the gangsters believe he could never go back to the force. Mariska Hargitay turns up for one scene in which she rather grimly tells Stabler, “You’re going undercover. You’re just going undercover as Elliott Stabler.”

Stabler’s main assignment is to befriend and ultimately join “The Brotherhood,” a secret gang of corrupt cops headed by Detective Frank Donnelly (Denis Leary). The guys have a bond in that both their fathers were cops and befriended each other. Alas, the intrigue surrounding “The Brotherhood” goes sour very quickly when they steal bundles of cash from drug deals organized by a crew member for Preston Webb (Mykelti Williamson), an African-American businessman who has a “legitimate” construction company – though he obtains graft from crooked Congressmember Leon Kilbride (Ron Cephas Jones) by padding his expenses from ostensibly legal construction projects. But his real business is running “The Marcy Gang” of Black drug dealers – he boasts that they’ve driven out both the Albanians and the Italians from the business and taken over the city’s whole narcotics trade. By ripping off a crew employed by Preston Webb, Donnelly and the other members of “The Brotherhood” have committed a grave faux pas that could literally get them killed – though, in the one of Dick Wolf’s New York-based shows that swears allegiance to the Great God SERIAL, this plot line is left frustratingly unresolved at the end. There’s also the marvelous character of Webb’s wife Cassandra (Jennifer Beals, whom I hadn’t realized has had an extensive career since her explosive debut in 1983’s Flashdance, including executive-producing the groundbreaking TV series The L Word with Organized Crime co-producer Ilene Chaiken and the upcoming reboot The L Word: The Q Generation), an art gallery owner who doesn’t seem to have any idea where her husband’s money, which is funding her gallery, is really coming from.