Law and Order: "Big Brother" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 17, 2024)

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

Last night (Thursday, October 17) my husband Charles and I watched the two remaining series in Dick Wolf’s Law and Order franchise: Law and Order itself and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. The Law and Order show, “Big Brother,” dealt with two separate crimes that came together for an especially powerful conclusion: the murder of a popular Hudson University basketball coach who’d attracted the ire of quite a few New York college basketball fans by considering an offer to move to Kentucky for a coaching job that paid twice as much; and a gun charge leveled at Matt Riley (Ryan Eggold), scapegrace brother of police detective Vincent Riley (series regular Reid Scott). Matt pleads with his cop brother to make the gun charge go away, and Vincent at first is unwilling to do so but relents when he sees a way to use Matt to make his case against Jack Costa (Chris Bauer), the local bar owner whom Vincent and his police partner, Detective Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks), are convinced killed the coach. Unfortunately, Matt is torn between his loyalty to his brother and his loyalty to the bar owner, whom he considers a friend, and the so-called “criminal code” of not ratting out your buddies to the law. Matt goes to a meeting with Costa with the assignment of extracting a confession to the murder from him. He’s wired, not with anything attached to his person – Costa would undoubtedly search him, as indeed he does – but with a bug concealed in a button he drops on Costa’s floor that duly records the meeting.

Only just before Costa confesses to the murder, Matt deliberately steps on the button, destroying the bug. Needless to say, Vincent is furious and tells Matt that unless he testifies against Costa in court at his trial and tells the jury that Costa told him he killed the coach, any help with the gun charge is off and Matt can just take his chances in prison like anyone else. Matt meets in private with lead prosecutor Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and tells the story the good guys want, but when he’s called as a witness in the actual trial he flakes out again and won’t implicate his bar owner “friend.” Despite the thinness of the case against Costa, the jury convicts him anyway – which surprised me: I thought where writer Rick Eid (an old Law and Order hand) was going with was that Costa would be acquitted and Vincent would be even more furious (and rightly so) that his brother’s twisted sense of “loyalty” to his crook “friends” would result in a murderer going free for all time. But when Matt once again recruits Vincent for help with his gun charge, somehow expecting that his brother will go to bat for him even though Matt double-crossed him big-time, Vincent wipes his hands of him and tells Matt he’s on his own. It was a neatly done show and this time Wolf’s writers did a better job on the cop’s-crooked-brother plot line than their counterparts on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, in which Lieutenant Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay)’s bad brother Simon kept coming back, with increasing irritation for both Benson and the audience, for episode after episode.