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 • 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.