Law and Order: "Dream On" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired January 15, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, January 15), when I got home from the Bears San Diego dinner party, I settled in to watch the Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episodes. I missed the first 10 minutes of the Law and Order show, “Dream On,” but what I saw was a quite compelling tale of an aspiring pop singer, Zina Worth (Lana Love), who was living with Leo Brady (Alex Neustaedter, a quite compelling young actor who has the James Dean stare down pat), son of one of the series “regulars,” squadron commander Lt. Jessica Brady (Maura Tierney). By the time I picked up the show Zina was already dead, so I don’t know whether they gave her a number to perform so we could see how good she was or not. Zina and Leo had been together long enough to have an eight-year-old daughter – unless we were supposed to believe the girl was Zina’s daughter by a previous partner, which is certainly conceivable. But their relationship got sidetracked when Zina met Sean Chase (Ryan Broussard), an African-American drug dealer and aspiring music mogul who offered to produce an album for Zina. Alas, Sean got her back on drugs after both she and Leo had successfully rehabbed, and Leo’s concern for her mixed with his jealousy over whether Zina was having extra-relational activity with Sean (I can’t help but wonder if the writers deliberately named the Black villain after Sean Combs, a.k.a. Puff Daddy, a.k.a. P. Diddy, a.k.a. Diddy), which she probably was since his defense as to how her blood got under his fingernails was they were having rough sex and he scratched her until she bled out a minor amount. Leo is desperate not only to avoid being convicted of Zina’s murder, which he swears he didn’t do, but to be allowed to keep custody of Zina’s daughter instead of having to relinquish her to Zina’s sister Izzy (Delaney Anne Cuthbert), who wants to raise her. There’s a brief red herring, a long-time stalker named Danny Cole (the quite cute Harrison Bryan) who’d been going to all Zina’s performances but left the last one she ever gave, on the night she was murdered, for reasons that remain unclear.

The police zero in on Sean as Zina’s killer even though the evidence against him is virtually all circumstantial. There’s one eyewitness, a Black woman, but she only saw the killer from far away while he was running away from her. His motive was that she supposedly stole a kilo of cocaine from him, and there’s video surveillance footage of her walking out of his apartment with a white satchel that later turned up in her and Leo’s apartment and contained the coke, but there’s the nagging question of what she would have done with it. Use it all herself? Possible but highly unlikely. Try to sell it? Hard to believe she could without the sort of infrastructure a professional dealer like Sean would have. Sean Chase’s attorney goes to the max presenting the idea that Leo actually killed his girlfriend and the police are covering for him because he’s the son of a police lieutenant. Leo insists at first that the night Zina was killed he was at home alone with the daughter all night, but eventually his mom discovers that for two hours, from 10 p.m. to midnight, he was relapsing at a bar called Lucky’s (an ironic name) while the eight-year-old was left home alone. In the end Sean is duly convicted, but there’s a bittersweet tag; Leo pleads with his mom to testify for him in the custody hearing over the daughter, but mom refuses and flatly tells Leo he’s not ready to be a father and the girl would be much better off being raised by her aunt Izzy and Izzy’s husband, decent people without histories of alcohol or drug abuse. I’d really like to see more of Alex Neustaedter; he made his screen debut in a short called Railroad Ties in 2009 and had his breakthrough role in Meg Ryan’s directorial debut, Ithaca, as a 14-year-old telegraph operator in 1942 who comes of age in a hurry since his older brother is off fighting in World War II. Here he turns in a tough, no-nonsense performance as a legitimately complex character, and Maura Tierney and he had previously played mother and son in an Amazon Prime TV miniseries called American Rust that might well be worth looking up.