Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Video Killed the Radio Star" (Dick Wolf Productions, Universal, NBC-TV, aired March 3, 2022)

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

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that followed, “Video Killed the Radio Star,” was also quite good, though it fell back on a cop-out ending they’ve used all too often before. This time the perpetrator is Bob Flynn (Jake Weber), a combative radio talk-show host and social-media star who mostly avoids politics (at least so we’re told in the script by Denis Hamill and Monet Hurst-Mendoza, based on a story by old Law and Order hands Warren Leight and Julie Martin; the first part of his show we actually see and hear is a rant against so-called “critical race theory” – or what the Right-wing media mean by “critical race theory,” which is basically any teaching that argues that American white people have anything to be ashamed of over their historical treatment of people of color – and this puts him definitely on the Rightward end of the political spectrum). I knew a real-life Bob Flynn in my days in junior college – he was the administration’s official liaison to student government and he was an odd character (I believe he had also briefly dated my mother; certainly she identified him as a “friend” when I went to school there) – but this one is not only a scumbag who says a lot of scurrilous things on the air, he’s also a serial grabber and groper of women. He seems to believe that the entire female (slightly more than) half of the human race has been put there just for his experience and delectation, and he shows this off by putting a heavy cruise on any even remotely attractive women that crosses his path, at times including out-and-out rape.

Detective Amanda Rollins (Kelli Giddish) goes undercover to bust him by cajoling him into making a pass at her, but even she is shocked when as part of his bedroom talk he claims that he actually shot someone and killed them, then had the hottest sex of his life with the woman he’d just made a widow. Rollins withdraws but later, after the police have referenced their open but “cold” murder cases and figured out who Flynn’s victim was, she poses as a private investigator and ultimately offers to broker a “hit” against the widow, Lola Simenon (Diane Farr). She gets another police officer, Detective Joe Velasco (Octavio Pisano), to pose as the hit man, but the assistant district attorney in the case, Dominick Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino) – who in previous episodes has also been established as Rollins’ lover – didn’t feel they can get a conviction, especially since Rollins, a recovering gambling addict who’s given birth to two children by two different men, would make a terrible witness. In the end Flynn is shot and killed by Mitch Kaplan (Jim True-Frost), husband of Ellen Kaplan (Laura Kai Chen), whose rape complaint to SVU had started the investigation of Flynn in the first place. I am not fond of this extra-judicial comeuppances the SVU writers sometimes come up with to nail their perps; granted it would have been a difficult case to win, but I’d rather have seen Flynn held to account by legal process instead of being taken out by a crazed vigilante whom the police will have to arrest and who’s just ruined his chance at a normal life.