Law and Order: "Report Card" (Dick Wolf Enterprises, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 31, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, October 31) I put on the two remaining shows in Dick Wolf’s Law and Order franchise: Law and Order itself and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. The Law and Order episode, “Report Card,” was unexpectedly good, and until a regrettable surprise twist at the end from writers Ajani Jackson and Pamela J. Wechsler it came as close as this show ever has to a story in which none of the characters are demonstrable heroes or villains, but rather legitimately complicated human beings with mixed motives who do even criminal things for understandable reasons. The episode opens with a young straight Black couple getting into a ride-share vehicle being driven by another Black man, Walter Rhoades (Brian Simmons). The two passengers get into an argument with each other and Rhoades threatens to call the police on them, but the male passenger pulls out a gun and shoots out the driver’s dashboard camera. Then the driver is found murdered about half an hour later. It turns out he was a middle-school teacher and a Gay man married to another man, investment broker Terry Clausen (Mike Doyle), who had been after him for years to join him in the finance industry and not waste his time on a job so unremunerative as teaching that forced him to drive ride-shares on nights and weekends.

Police detectives Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) and Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks) run through the usual set of red herrings, including the man in the car that night – who turns out to be a rapper about to leave on a major European tour – and also Lawrence French (Markuann Smith), who had reported Rhoades to the school board for allegedly molesting his son Justin (Chance K. Smith) and “turning him Gay.” His evidence for this was a meeting Justin had at the school with Rhoades in which Rhoades broke school policy by closing the door while he was alone with Justin – but Justin himself tells the cops that nothing sexual happened between him and Rhoades. He was just seeking the teacher’s help because he’d already realized he was Gay and thought Rhoades could give him some advice on how to come out to his dad. Then the cops trace a rap track online dissing Rhoades and threatening to “hammer” (i.e., shoot) him. They find the man who made the beats for it and he explains he just records beat tracks and sells them to people who want to rap lyrics over them, and it turns out the lyrics were by 13-year-old Anthony Turner (Colton Osorio), who’s been in and out of multiple foster homes and has already started building up a criminal record when he made the track. Ultimately Turner confesses to the cops that he shot and killed Rhoades so Rhoades wouldn’t report him to juvenile authorities and get him sent back to a detention facility, and prosecutors Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) decide to try him as an adult.

Later they change their strategy when they discover that the school’s principal (Rockmore Dunbar) had intercepted Turner in the school hallway while he was carrying the gun in his backpack – the gun itself was a so-called “community gun” left lying around in an abandoned building to be picked up by anyone who wanted to use it – but had done nothing. Price and Maroun decide to put the principal on trial and give Turner a 10-year sentence in exchange for his testimony against him. Terry Clausen, Rhoades’s widower, is understandably upset that Turner won’t be punished to the full extent of the law and instead the prosecutors are going to use him to nail someone else who wasn’t the shooter. But the trial proceeds and Turner testifies, among other things, that he didn’t know the gun was loaded when he picked it up – “Bullets are expensive,” he says – and just took it to threaten Rhoades, not kill him. Then, in the unfortunate plot twist I mentioned above, the cops do fingerprint testing on the remaining bullets in the gun and find Turner’s fingerprints on them, indicating that he did too intend to kill Rhoades and bought and loaded bullets for the gun for that purpose. Ultimately the prosecutors get a plea bargain from the principal – who had earlier testified in court that he didn’t intervene because he’d previously been investigated and threatened with being fired for physically searching a student and he didn’t want to do that again – and refile the full adult murder case against Turner because he lied under oath on the witness stand. Among other things, this had me thinking of just my reaction would be if Charles were murdered for no particular reason – just as I remember reacting to real-life mass shootings in grocery stores with particular fear and hurt because that could have been my husband getting shot – and it also had me feeling sorry for the principal, who was literally damned if he did and damned if he didn’t. In order to keep his job, he bypassed the chance to stop a homicidally inclined student who’d already targeted someone with a rap track the principal knew about – and lost not only his job but several years of freedom for having not reacted.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Economics of Shame" (Dick Wolf Enterprises, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 31, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that followed, “Economics of Shame,” wasn’t as good as the Law and Order “Report Card” but it was marvelous in its own way. It begins with a young, attractive female New York newscaster, Kelsey Sommers (Elizabeth Aldefers), on a hot date with a young man she’s met at a bar after months of cruising him online. The man is – or at least calls himself – “Tyler Camden” (Jessie Allen Hitner), and they rent a room together and have wild, intense sex both that night and the following morning before Kelsey has to put the same dress she was wearing the night before so she can make it to work on time. That day, Kelsey gets an extortion demand for $50,000 and is told that a video clip of them having sex will be released and sent to her bosses and all her phone contacts unless she pays up. It turns out she’s fallen victim to a well-organized “sextortion” scam run by Greek immigrant brothers Basil (Mark DiConzo) and Constantine (Leo Georgallis) Koutris. The cops set up a sting operation to trap the gang by having Kelsey pay the money (or a mockup thereof, we’re not sure which) as per her instructions, which are to put it in a rental car parked in a city park. The man who picks it up is not the man whom she had sex with that fatal night, but a schlub named Neil Marsh (Travis Przybylski) who was entrapped by the gang himself and, since he didn’t have the money to pay them, was told he could “work it off” by running errands for them.

The cops ultimately nail the Koutris brothers by having SVU Detective Joe Velasco (Octavio Pisano) impersonate a rich man and go undercover to entrap them, since they’re equal-opportunity extorters who go after rich people of both (mainstream) genders. They arrest Basil Koutris at the airport and are able, since he’s clearly a flight risk, to have him held without bail. There’s also one other victim, a college student who was extorted out of the $50,000 she’d received from a settlement for the accident in which both her parents died. She was entrapped by a man who posed online as a grieving widower whose wife had died of cancer, and she’s wasting her life away because she’d intended to use the money to go to college. When the case breaks Kelsey Sommers’s first reaction is to attempt suicide – Lieutenant Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) blocks her from doing so in a transparently phony sequence that had both my husband Charles and I thinking that if this had been real life, both would have fallen off the roof of Kelsey’s building – and even after the case breaks, when Kelsey whines to Benson, “What am I going to do with the rest of my life?,” I joked, “You’re going to get a six-figure book deal and write a sleazy tell-all memoir that will be a best-seller.” I was almost right; the real way writers Julie Martin, David Graziano and Brendan Feeney ended it was to have Kelsey go on air pretending that she’d only got involved with the “sextortion” ring as an undercover reporter to expose them.

Elsbeth: “Devil's Night” (Nemorino Studios, King Size Productions, CBS Studios/Paramount, aired October 31, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

After the two Law and Order shows I’d briefly considered showing something from the Universal horror collection as a celebration of Hallowe’en, but instead I switched channels from NBC to CBS for the latest episode of Elsbeth, a quite good mystery show also set in the New York Police Department, or at least a precinct thereof. This was a Hallowe’en-themed episode called “Devil’s Night,” about a former child TV star named Mackenzie Altman (Brittany O’Grady), a young Black woman who along with three other Black girls played on a recently cancelled TV sitcom about a white guy raising four Black female foster children. She’s accused of murdering a drug dealer named Sonny Miller (Geronimo Frias, also known as Geronimo Ambert) who’d been having an affair with her when they were both doing drugs. Now, under the influence of her maniacal and controlling manager, Danny Beck (Ryan Spahn) – who’s also her agent and her attorney, both in civil court and her likely criminal trial – she was secretly slipped scopolamine during a Hallowe’en party and sent off to kill Miller while under the influence of scopolamine, colloquially known as “devil’s night.” I’ve heard a lot about scopolamine over the years, ranging from Edward G. Robinson saying in his 1973 autobiography that his wife’s doctors had used it in the 1930’s as an anesthetic to ease the pain of her giving birth to their son; its use as a so-called “truth serum” in the 1940’s and 1950’s; its use as a recreational drug more recently and, as here, its use by an unscrupulous villain to get an enemy killed by someone else via remote control and leave the killer with no memory of having done the deed (and, of course, no legal responsibility).

Altman comes back from a wild Hallowe’en night with a tattoo on her shoulder with the names of two people she’s never heard of before, and with her gun missing from the lockbox where she kept it. To no particular surprise, the drugged-out killer is Mackenzie Altman herself; the victim is her former drug dealer and lover; and the man who slipped her scopolamine so she’d kill on cue for him is [no surprise here!] Danny Beck, who had been embezzling from her by claiming he was investing her money to build a super-resort on an island off the coast of Africa when he was really stealing it for himself. Sonny Miller found out about this when Mackenzie offered to loan him the island as the setting for a rap video he wanted to shoot, only when Sonny checked it out he found that the so-called “resort” actually didn’t exist. Sonny threatened to tell Mackenzie that Danny was ripping her off, but Danny figured out a way to eliminate him and frame her for the crime by having Mackenzie shoot him and have no memory of this. The plot is unraveled by Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston), the show’s leading character, a former attorney turned consultant to the New York police, who solves the case while dressed in the famous black costume and designer straw hat Audrey Hepburn wore in the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s. (It is Hallowe’en, after all.) I’d avoided Elsbeth in the first season because the promos for it made the character of Elsbeth seem all too annoyingly scatterbrained, but I’ve seen two episodes of it so far and I’m really enjoying it. I was also wondering if this story was similar to the 1947 film Fear in the Night, a “B” noir from Paramount based on a story by Cornell Woolrich in which a young man is hypnotized into actually committing a murder but believing he only dreamed the crime. It was later remade in 1956 as Night World with Kevin McCarthy from Invasion of the Body Snatchers as the hypnotized killer, but in the 1947 version he was played by the young DeForest Kelley, who rather ruefully noted that after Fear in the Night all he got offered to play were young psycho killers – until Gene Roddenberry cast him as Dr. McCoy on the original 1960’s Star Trek series, whereupon all he got after that were roles as doctors!