Law and Order: "Almost Famous" (Dick Wolf Entertaiinment. Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired January 26, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

As usual with the three remaining series based on Dick Wolf’s Law and Order franchise these days, the original flagship, Law and Order, was by far the best. It was called “Almost Famous” and was a grim satire on the allure of the fleeting fame offered by social media and its real-world consequences. The prologue shows a 14-year-old boy, Eli Barone (A. J. Landy), alone on a couch with so-called “acting coach” Sean Kapinski (Andrew Kober). Sean hugs the boy and strokes his shoulder in a way that could be either legitimate comforting or a prelude to seduction. An then the opening credits come on. When the show resumes Eli is found shot dead in a stairwell of the apartment building in which he lived with his widowed mother (Claire Karpen). Though Sean turns out to have been living under an alias to conceal his decade-old conviction for possession of child pornography (which he insists was just a nude photo of his then-girlfriend), he’s just a red herring. Eli’s real killer is Virgfil Gilbert (Danny Garcia), who shot the kid in what he thought was self-defense – he heard the sound of someone kicking in the door of his basement apartment and fired without seeing who it was – but because he was afraid of being prosecuted for possessing an illegal gun (how 20th century since the current radical-Right majority on the U.S. Supreme Court is well on its way to declaring virtually all restrictions on gun ownership a violation of the Second Amendment!), he moved Eli’s body from in front of his door to the stairwell.

As the show’s principal cops, detectives Frank Cosgrove (jeffrey Donovan) and Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks), investigate the case they find it’s like peeling back the layers of an onion. It turns out Eli Barone was put up to kicking in Virgil Gilbert’s door because a friend of his named Max Brewer (Garrett Gallego, who looks strikingly like the young Beach Boys founder Brian Wilson) put him up to it because Max was living in a so-called “content house” run by an unscrupulous character named Jason Wheeler (played by Patrick Ball as a marvelous piece of controlled villainy). The members of the “content house” have to do increasingly dangerous stunts to stay in Jason’s good graces so they can get more views on social-media Web sites, and the cops trace the legal responsibility for Eli’s death from Virgil to Max and ultimately to Wheeler. They charge Max with manslaughter and actually start his trial, but as evidence given at the trial implicates Wheeler as the person ultimately responsible, they cut a deal with Max to testify against him. Only Max’s parents withdraw him from the case because Wheeler pays them $1 million, which Wheeler’s attorney says is not a bribe to keep Max quiet but merely accumulated royalties from his social-media posts.

Max's parents get ready to take him back to Florida, where they live, and prosecutors Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) take Wheeler’s case to trial, but without Max’s testimony they have no way to link Wheeler to Eli’s death. They try to get a young woman named Amber Koenig (Kiera Allen), who’s now permanently paralyzed and in a wheelchair because of the increasingly dangerous skyscraper climbs Wheeler sent her on, but she refuses to testify because Wheeler is paying her medical bills. Ultimately they force Wheeler to take a plea after they find enough of his victims who are willing to testify against him, but Wheeler draws only a five-to-10-year sentence and at the end Price and Maroun order Max to be arrested and re-tried for manslaughter because “a deal’s a deal” and by walking out on their arrangement, he’d left himself open to a 15-year sentence. One of Dick Wolf’s favorite themes over the years of Law and Order has been impunity: the protection being rich and powerful gives you from having to answer for your crimes. Though Wheeler isn’t completely consequence-free, it’s clear he’s got considerably less in the way of punishment than he deserves, and certainly less than the lower-level guy in the criminal food chain who’s getting far more harshly punished than Wheeler, who exploits the kids in the “content house” for 70 percent of their earnings, is!