Law and Order: "Catch and Kill" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, 2024)

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

Last night (Thursday, October 3) my husband Charles and I watched the two returning Law and Order shows, the flagship Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. The Law and Order episode, “Catch and Kill,” was actually quite good. It didn’t begin well; writers Rick Eid and Art Alamo and director Eriq LaSalle cut back and forth between new District Attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn) giving an interview with a typical blonde Right-wing bimbo who asks him about the allegedly politically motivated prosecution of a Right-wing New York state senator and the brutal murder of a Brooklyn ADA, Macy Harper (Antonia Timbol), whom the Right-wing talk show host had accused of being behind the prosecution. The Internet gets flooded with various assholes congratulating the killer, but after a few red herrings the cops zero in on Macy’s live-in fiancé, fashion magnate Dylan Phipps (Bill Barrett), who regularly abused her. Dylan’s alibi for the night of the murder was he was having dinner with Right-wing blogger Kenneth Lane (Michael Esper), but it turns out the two have had a long-standing business relationship. Every time Dylan beat Macy up in a public place and someone got a video of it, Lane would swoop down on them, make a six-figure offer for the video and then suppress it in classic “catch and kill” fashion (former National Enquirer publisher and Donald Trump friend David Pecker is name-checked in the dialogue).

Phipps reached the breaking point when she decided to leave him once and for all, and Phipps and Lane essentially killed her together when she moved into a battered-women’s shelter and returned home just long enough to get her things. The two used Lane to trick Macy into opening the door, and then Phipps came in and beat her to death. With one-third of the episode’s running time to go, Dylan Phipps kills himself in his palatial New York apartment and the prosecutors, Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) – who has a personal stake in the case because her sister was beaten to death by an abusive boyfriend 10 years earlier – decide to indict Kenneth Lane as a co-conspirator. But they’re unable to convict him because Lane successfully bribes the one witness against him, limo driver Jimmy Boyd (Charles Gray), into refusing to testify. I liked the way writers Eid and Alamo were able to work in the current political controversies into the script without getting preachy about it, and Baxter’s final speech to the prosecutors that sometimes the broader interests of justice mean letting a bad guy go free – after a climactic scene in which Price literally tracks down Maroun on her way to Lane’s apartment, apparently to mete out extra-judicial punishment – is a sad commentary on how the real world works and how certain individuals can simply buy their way out of accountability for their actions (can you say “Donald Trump”?).