Law and Order: "Guardian" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired November 13, 2025)

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

Last night (Thursday, November 13) I watched my usual cycle of three TV shows in the Law and Order franchise: the flagship Law and Order; Law and Order: Special Victims Unit; and Law and Order: Organized Crime. The Law and Order episode was called “Guardian,” and it began with a shot of a middle-aged Black busker singing W. C. Handy’s “Beale Street Blues” a cappella. After the wax-lined paper cup in which he was collecting contributions from passers-by gets knocked over, a nice-looking young Black man named Omari Kemp (Robert Brown) comes along, picks up the cup, and puts a $100 bill in it. Naturally, any hardened Law and Order watcher will instantly know that this nice young man (only 15, we learn later, but already better off financially than most of his brethren because he’s a star high-school basketball player and he’s already receiving scouting money from various colleges anxious to recruit him) is not long for this world, and we’d be right. Minutes after he turns the corner on the busker, there are noises and it turns out that Omari was beaten to death by an unknown assailant with a conveniently available metal pipe. The busker is the only witness, and at first he tells the cops he can’t be sure what color the killer was or whether it was a man or a woman, but ultimately the police in charge of the investigation, detectives Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) and a new character, Theo Walker (David Ajala), who’s just been transferred from narcotics enforcement and is summarily told by his new boss, Lieutenant Jessica Brady (Maura Tierney), to wear a tie in the squad room, learn that Omari was a hot-shot basketball prospect.

Among their suspects are his coach, his girlfriend Tamara Wise (Deja Unique), and a rapper named “Hollow Point” (true name: Creston Reeves, and played by Michael Lynche, a regrettable name for an African-American actor; maybe that’s why he added “e” to the end of it!) who’s branching out into sports management and looked at Omari as a potential client. It turns out he was actually killed by his adoptive father, Jim Pickett (Ryan Nan); though white, Pickett adopted Omari after his birth father was killed in an accident. Pickett and his wife Kate (Lindsey Broad) have a biological child as well, Tyler (Payton Michael), who’s a hauntingly beautiful presence but also sits to one side as the cops interview his parents. There’s no doubt that Jim Pickett killed Omari, but at trial his attorney, Sanford Rems (Dylan Baker), claims he did so in self-defense. As disgusted prosecutor Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) glumly notes, in making his case Rems trots out every nasty stereotype white people have against Black people, including that they’re all crooks and violent psychopaths. It turns out Pickett’s motive was that Omari was about to fire him as his manager and sign with Hollow Point, and Pickett was appalled by that, especially since he’d been looking on Omari’s likely NBA success as his meal ticket. It was an O.K. Law and Order, and in some ways the most haunting (and haunted) characters were the ones on the periphery: Kate and Tyler Pickett and Tamara Wise. Ultimately the jury finds Jim guilty and don’t fall for his self-defense act, but overall this isn’t as good a story as a previous Law and Order in which a white-supremacist couple marry and adopt a Black child just to kill him for the life insurance policy they’ve taken out on him, thus getting a double whammy: a massive payout and one less n****r in the world.