Law and Order: "No Good Deed" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired May 9, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, May 9) NBC showed the next-to-last episodes of all three remaining shows in Dick Wolf’s Law and Order franchise: Law and Order, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Law and Order: Organized Crime. The flagship Law and Order episode was called “No Good Deed” – as in “goes unpunished,” and the first person for whom her good deed goes very much punished was the opening murder victim, prison psychotherapist Angela Hart (Stephanie Gibson). One night Angela gets a food delivery and tells the delivery person just to leave it in front of her door rather than knock on it and make her open it. The delivery comes through fine and she starts having her meal and drinking a glass of wine when the intercom on her building phone rings again from someone purporting to be the delivery person, pleading with her to let him come up so he can use her phone, since his own has supposedly run out of power. The next thing we know, Angela is a corpse, badly battered and bloodied, on her living-room floor. The investigating detectives, Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) and Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks), initially suspect Angela’s boyfriend, Mark Salerno (Kellan Rhude), because a) he used to work as a bar bouncer and in doing that job was twice arrested (though not convicted) for battery, and b) he sent threatening texts to Angela the day she was murdered. He says he did that only because he was up for an acting role he didn’t get, and his alibi – that he was at a bar that night – apparently checks out. Then the finger of suspicion points to Shawn Payne (Tyler Eliot Burke), a convicted rapist whom Angela treated in prison and became convinced he had a shot at a law-abiding life. Riley and Shaw arrest Payne for Angela’s rape and murder at the halfway house where he’s staying, but they have trouble building a prosecutable case.

It turns out that Payne was eligible for parole because assistant district attorney Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) pled out his previous case for the rape (but not murder) of Chelsea Shell (Chloe Lanier), and as a result the newly appointed New York D.A., Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn), insists on trying the case himself. Alas, he draws a hyper-cautious judge, Steve Nelson (Sam McMurray), who’s so concerned about being reversed on appeal (especially since he’s secretly up for a potential appeals-court promotion himself) he bends over backwards to favor the defense in his rulings. There are some great shots of Payne and his aggressive no-nonsense African-American woman attorney, Vanessa Carter (Michael Hyatt), who’s got Payne dolled up in court so he looks like a choirboy inexplicably accused of dire crimes. After an ex-girlfriend of Mark Salerno’s testifies for the defense and claims that he struck her and that’s why she broke up with him, Payne testifies in his own defense and the prosecutors are desperate to come up with a way to impeach him. Finally Nolan Price spots something on the photos of both victims: on Chelsea Shell’s leg there’s a wound in the shape of the letter “S” and on the same part of Angela’s dead body there was a similar, but not complete, mark, both made with a knife. Baxter pleads with the judge to allow Chelsea Shell to testify as a witness under the “prior bad acts” exemption – which became unexpectedly controversial when a New York appeals court just reversed Harvey Weinstein’s rape conviction on the ground that the judge had erred in allowing testimony from victims of rapes Weinstein was alleged to have committed but for which he wasn’t being tried. In the end Chelsea Shell testifies, and after a lot of hesitation she identifies Payne as her rapist; Payne ends up being convicted but Shell is so overcome by the experience that she attempts suicide and ends up in a hospital emergency room. This is an unusually tough-minded Law and Order show, and while rape cases are ordinarily the province of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, this one became unexpectedly timely because of the Weinstein reversal, far more so than writer Rick Eid (a long-time Law and Order hand) probably imagined when he was working on it.