Two nights ago, on March 30, NBC showed another round of three new episodes of the Law and Order franchise shows: Law and Order, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Law and Order: Organized Crime. My husband Charles came home from work early on during the SVU episode and later proclaimed, to my surprise, that Organized Crime is his favorite of the three shows. The reason that startled me is that my own opinion is that Organized Crime is the weakest, partly because it’s the one on which Dock Wolf and his show runners and writers have pledged allegiance to the Great God SERIAL I personally find it irritating in the extreme when I’m told by the producers of a TV series that I’ll have to watch all the episodes so trhe show will still make sense; tell me to watch all or none of your show’s episodes and my usual reaction will be to watch none. My favorite of the three shows run on March 30 was the flagship Law and Order episode, “Bias,” not only because it was a complete story in itself but because the plot was quite compelling. Directed by Alex Hall from a script by Keith Eisner, “Bias” told the story of Rachel Bender (Robyne Parrish), who in the opening scene is found dead by her former colleague in the public defenders’ office turned executive assistant district attorney Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy).
The police detectives, series stars Frank Cosgrove (Jeffrey Donovan) and Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks), assigned to the case run through the usual red herrings and round robins before finally settling on Judge Judge Raymer (Tim McKay) as the likely killer. Judge Raymer had been dating the victim for two years or so after going through an explosive and nasty divorce from his ex-wife Laura (Kate Goehring), who took out a restraining order against him after he kept stalking her even after their divorce was finalized. Unfortunately, the judge Price draws for the case is an old law-school buddy of Judge Raymer. When Price notices the photo of the two judges and their wives next to each other on a beach, he immediately files a request to hve the judge recuse himself – and the judge not only denies the motion, he turns against Price in a fury and does what he can to wreck the case against his old friend. Throughout the trialt he judge repeatedly rules in favor of the defense on countless occasions, including banning Raymer’s ex-wife from testifying against him. Price wanted to call her to establish “a pattern of bad behavior” – Judge Raymer is a man who does not take rejection well – but the trial judge rules that the prejudicial impact of that testimony would outweigh its probative value. Raymer’s attorney calls Price as a witness – thereby forcing him to drop off the prosecution teams nd allow his second chair, Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi), to take over – and gets him to admit on the stand that Price and Rachel Bender had an affair,m albeit briefly, ten years ago when they were both working as public defenders.
After making he rather preposterous suggestion that Price matt have killed Rachel himself – after all, he was the one who found her body and first reported the crime to the police – the defense attorney suggests that even if he wasn’t Rachel’s murderer, he framed Judge Raymer out of jealousy and frustration over having lost too many cases in Raymer’s courtroom. I was surprised when the jury actually returned a verdict of guilty. I was expecting either the jury to acquit or the trial judge use his rarely exercised power to set aside the verdict ont he ground that the evidence the jury found was not legally sufficient to establish a crime. Then Judge Raymer would have shaken his fist at Price and threatened him, saying, “You’ll be sorry” and making it clear that he’d organize all his friends on the brunch to sabotage all Price’s other cases, and Price would have to resign from the district attorney’s office in disgrace after admitting that Judge Raymer could make it impossible for him to do his job. I even wondered if this would be the way Dick Wolf and his show runners would write Hugh Dancy off the show – but instead they had the jury find Judge Raymer guilty and presumably allow Nolan Price to continue his career relatively unscathed. Despite the weak ending, though, this was still quite a good Law and Order and a great kickoff to the evening.
