Law and Order: "Tough Love" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired May 8, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, May 8) I watched what I think are the next-to-last episodes of this year’s seasons of Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. The Law and Order show was called “Tough Love” and it begins with an argument between African-American sports manager Ted Hunter (Stephen A. Smith) and one of his clients, NBA basketball player Jackson Dean (Dushaun Thompson). Hunter tells Jackson he isn’t a major star at the level of LeBron James and he doesn’t have the money to keep paying 11 old friends he’s put on his staff just for companionship. The next scene shows Ted Hunter stabbed to death in a local park. Then, after throwing us that big red herring in the person of Jackson Dean and his protégés, writers Pamela J. Wechsler and Scott Gold show us Hunter’s family. He’s raising two teenage sons, Eric (Dasan Frazier) and Josh (Arthur McAlpine III), to play football since football was Ted’s sport during his days as an athlete himself. (Their mother isn’t in the picture because she died sometime before.) Ted’s rough coaching has built up Eric to the level of a major college-level player and a seemingly sure spot in the NFL, but Josh is so uninterested in a career in football that he’s faked a knee injury as an excuse not to play in high-school practices. Every time Josh flakes out on an exercise routine, Ted pushed him harder until Josh literally started vomiting under the strain.

Josh was scared to death of telling his father he didn’t want to play because, as his brother Eric put it, “In our house football is a religion.” Ultimately it turns out that Josh was the one who stabbed his father Ted to death, and at the trial Josh’s attorney tries to make a case that Josh killed his father in self-defense because, even though he wasn’t in immediate danger from his dad when he killed him, dad’s systematically abusive conduct made Josh think that if his dad lived, the strains dad would put him through would literally kill him. Concerned that Josh’s harrowing account of his father’s abuse on the witness stand might lead the jury to acquit him, prosecutor Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) subpoenas Josh’s brother Eric to testify against him as a hostile witness, then persuasively argues to the jury that Eric survived their dad’s training regimen and therefore Josh could have, too. As the proverbial kid who never did well in P.E. and hated almost every moment of it, I could readily identify with Josh and his torment. If I’d had a parent who’d tried to make an athlete of me whether I wanted it or not, I’d have been so angry with him I just might have killed him myself. This wasn’t an especially good Law and Order – most of the rest of this season’s episodes have been stronger – but it hit home for me.