Law and Order: "Black and Blue" (Dick Wolf Productions, Universal, NBC-TV, aired May 19, 2022)

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

Last night at 8 I turned on NBC-TV for the last new episodes of Dick Wolf’s Law and Order cycle: the original Law and Order, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Law and Order: Organized Crime. The Law and Order show was called “Black and Blue,” and it was about the killing of New York police detective Jimmy Doyle (Daren Donofrio), an old friend of Detective Frank Cosgrove (Jeffrey Donovan). The only time we see Detective Doyle is in the opening scene, in which he chats up a Black woman in full hooker regalia, obviously wanting to have sex with her, an important clue whose significance we don’t realize until well into the episode. The lead cops investigating the case, Cosgrove and his Black partner Kevin Bernard (Anthony Anderson, one of the two actors who carried over from the original Law and Order into this reboot), investigate several people, including a Black man who says he saw a white man fleeing the scene, and said white man, a rich Wall Street operator named Scott Gleacher (Nathan Darrow), who has given over $1 million to a charity that helps at-risk teenage girls. Unfortunately Scott’s real motive in helping this charity is in helping himself to the girls, particularly 19-year-old Regina Daniels (Morgan Wardlaw), who shows up with a cut and a bruise over one eye courtesy of a fight she got into with Scott.

Scott says he actually saw Detective Doyle get shot but will only give the police the name if he gets full immunity from prosecution for anything involving Regina, including his assault on her. Ultimately he gets his deal and tells the police that the real murderer is Regina’s older sister, Kendra Daniels (Ashley Nicole Blake), who happened to have a gun with her to scare off Scott from dating her sister and ended up shooting and killinjg Detective Doyle when he tried to arrest her. She says she did it because she was in fear of her life – George Floyd almost inevitably got name-checked in the dialogue – especially since Doyle started yelling racial epithets at her, including what is annoyingly referred to euphemistically as “the N-word.” It also turns out that Doyle broke up with his white wife three years earlier and just three months previously to the murder had started dating a Black woman, whom the prosecution puts on the stand to prove Doyle wasn’t a racist. Given the racial animus at the root of the crime, prosecutor Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) decides to put Kendra Daniels on trial only for “aggravated manslaughter” rather than murder – which not surprisingly pisses off all the cops involved in the case, especially Cosgrove, who can’t believe the prosecutor is pulling back from a murder charge out of exaggerated racial sensitivities from the poteltial jurors.

Kendra hires a Black lawyer who plays the race card to the max, including playing a birthday video Doyle recorded for his Black girlfriend in which he boasts, “Brown sugar is the sweetest kind there is.” (Who was writing his dialogue, Mick Jagger?) Aside from explaining just why he was chatting up the Black hooker in the opening sequence, this sufficiently shocks the jury that they find Kendra not guilty of first-degree aggravated manslaughter but guilty of second-degree, which like King Solomon threatening to cut the baby in half pisses off both sides equally. This Law and Order was quite well done and a fitting end to the first season of the reboot, and it benefited from some moral ambiguity created by the screenwriters even though Doyle, both from what we saw of him in the first scene and the way he’s described by his fellow officers who quite naturally wanted to see his death avenged, comes off as an old-school cop who carries his racial prejudices into the field even while mostly aiming his epithets against real criminals who happened to be Black.