Law and Order: "The Great Pretender" (Dick Wolf Productions, Universal, NBC-TV, aired May 12, 2022)

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

At 8 p.m. I switched on NBC for the three Law and Order programs: the flagship Law and Order, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Law and Order: Organized Crime. The Law and Order episode, “The Great Pretender,” deals with the murder of a 24-year-old woman who calls herself “Ella Whitlock” and claims to be from an old moneyed family in New York, but when the police investigate the crime (she was killed when she was pusled off the balcony of a space in the warehouse district she was having renovated as a nightclub) the lead detectives, Kevin Bernard (Anthony Anderson) and Frank Cosgrove (Jeffrey Donovan), go to notify the Whitlock parents about the death of their daughter and they’re told they never had a daughter, just two sons. Further investigation based on an image of “Ella” recovered from social media reveals that her real name is Mary Costello, she’s a working-class woman from New Jersey and she doesn’t have the proverbial pot to piss on; she’d been running up credit-card charges all over town to pay for her “nightclub” and had left a lot of people holding the bag for her. The police winnow down the plethora of suspects and find that the killer is the genuinely rich Wyatt Ackman (Patrick Heusinger), who dated “Ella” for a while until he realized she wasn’t who and what she said she was, whereupon he pushed her off the balcony of the “nightclub” and left her to die.

Only Wyatt Ackman’s attorney offers prosecutors Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) a deal: in exchange for allowing Wyatt to plead out to manslaughter instead of murder, Wyatt will agree to rat out his uncle Charles Ackman (Ian Blackman), makers of Oxycodone, to which Wyatt got addicted along with millions of other Americans nationwide. Among the victims was Eric Howe (Graham Powell), Wyatt’s sponsor in his rehab program (which he attended three times) until he relapsed, overdosed and died. The prosecutors indict Charles Ackman for manslaughter based on a tape Wyatt made of a conversation with his uncle in which Charles admitted that he knew Oxycodone was addictive but he not only marketed it anyway, he essentially bribed doctors to tell their colleagues that it was safe. Unfortunately, the judge in the case rules that the tape is inadmissible because, while Wyatt was in New York when he recorded it (and New York law requires only one-party consent to recording a phone call), Charles was in Massachosetts, which requpres the consent of both parties. Nonetheless, Price and Maroun get their conviction, albeit only because at Wyatt’s request Maroun went to Wyatt’s home and obtained a box of Oxycodone pills from his housekeeper because he was jonesing badly and needed the pills to be able to testify. Charles’ attorney learns this and tries to use it as part of his cross-examination, but the judge rules it inadmissible and Charles Ackman is duly convicted and hauled off to prison in the sort of wish-fulfillment climax we get to see on Law and Order episodes but almost never in real life. (Tell me, is anyone so naïve to think that Donald Trump will ever serve so much as one afternoon in jail for all his multiple crimes?) And I was also surprised that writer Pamela Wechsler got to use the name of a real drug instead of a fictitious one.