Law and Order: "The Hardest Thing" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired January 30, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, January 30) I watched the latest episodes of Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and the return of the CBS-TV show Elsbeth after the winter hiatus. The Law and Order show was called “The Hardest Thing” and began with a Gothic scene of Charles Harper (Rich Henkels) alone in his New York apartment listening to a classical piece by Handel over headphones when someone breaks into his apartment by smashing a window, reaches over to unlatch it, enters and fires a gun from behind him, while Charles has the music on so loud he hears none of this. The police initially suspect it was an attempted robbery gone wrong, but suspicion soon fastens onto the rich financier’s adult children, Sean Harper (Jack Cutmore-Scott) and Victoria Beyer (Katie Lowes). The police at first think it was Sean because he’d been arguing with his dad over the old man’s refusal to bail him out from a bad startup investment, but eventually they fasten on Victoria and indict her for the murder. The cops are convinced Victoria did it because Charles was pissing away her potential inheritance (though Victoria and her husband were successful in their own right) by having fallen for a scam in which a person calls and says they’re from the Department of Homeland Security and needs their bank-account and credit-card information to continue their investigation. Of course it’s a “phishing” scam and Charles has fallen for it big-time, but it turns out the reason he was vulnerable was because he has a rare and terminal illness which robs you of your mental faculties before it kills you. The implication was that Charles would never have fallen for this scam if he’d been in full possession of his faculties.

About 45 minutes into the one-hour show, Victoria and her attorney make a proffer in which she explains that she did kill her father, but only because he wanted her to: he had decided he didn’t want to live as a vegetable and wanted her help in killing himself. Rather than giving him lethal drugs, she bought a gun and shot him so it would be quick and relatively painless, and also because that way they could still collect on his life insurance, which they couldn’t have if it had been an out-and-out suicide. The case is being prosecuted by assistant district attorneys Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi), and midway through the action Nolan’s brother Tom (Justin Chatwin) shows up and tries to talk to him about their father, who by coincidence (or scriptwriter’s fiat; the writer is old Law and Order hand Art Alamo) is also terminally ill. Nolan has dad’s medical power of attorney, and he and Tom are arguing over whether they should authorize a feeding tube, since dad has lost the ability to swallow food normally, or they should just let nature take its course and let their old man die. Though previously he’d been dead-set against letting Victoria plead to a lesser charge, the experience of losing his own father in similar fashion causes Nolan to have a change of heart and allow Victoria to plead out to manslaughter, with a five-year sentence instead of the 15-to-life she’d have got on a murder conviction. This was a well-done Law and Order, and despite the blatant bit of coincidence-mongering it made its point effectively; the fact that this show can still come up with storylines that compelling even after 25 years of continuous production (despite the five-year hiatus between seasons 20 and 21) is a remarkable testament to the strength of producer Dick Wolf and the crew he has behind him as storytellers.