Law and Order: 'New Normal" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired February 26, 2026)

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

Last night (Thursday, February 26) my usual crime shows returned to the airwaves on Thursday night and I watched new episodes of Law and Order, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, and Elsbeth. The Law and Order, “New Normal,” was a chilling tale that began with two young Black men walking down a ghetto street in Washington Heights when all of a sudden they’re accosted by a masked man with a gun who shoots and kills one of them. The victim was a young man who had nothing to do with gang life, but he had made what turned out to the fatal mistake of volunteering to tutor other young Black men in a neighborhood dominated by a gang called the Pleasant Valley Mafia. It was the other man he was with, a gangbanger who wanted to leave “the life,” who was the intended victim. His killer was Eric Robinson (Jason Lyke), and he’s arrested on information given to the police by a waitress who saw him and, though he was masked, she recognized his bright red sneakers and his green eyes, unusual for an African-American. But when Eric goes on trial the waitress recants her testimony out of fear for her life and that of her unborn son, symbolized by a character identified in the cast list only as “Intimidating Man” (Hank Strong) who sits in the courtroom and glares at her as she’s on the witness stand. The one person who can link Eric to the crime is a young Black man named “Book” (Nacqui Macabroad) who was wearing a multi-colored jacket in one of the crime-scene videos. It turns out “Book” is really Raymond Booker, a young police officer who’s been working undercover for two years to infiltrate the Pleasant Valley Mafia and bust them once and for all. Booker is initially reluctant to testify for fear that if he comes forward now, he’ll blow his cover and the two years’ work he’s put into infiltrating the gang will be rendered useless.

District attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn) and the prosecutors on the case, Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi), pull out all the stops to order Booker to testify, including going to his boss and his boss’s boss. It helps that the Black police detective working the case, Theo Walker (David Ajala), had himself worked undercover details before transferring to homicide. “New Normal” was a good Law and Order episode that could have been even better if the writer, Ajani Jackson, had done more to delineate the internal conflicts that beset a cop who for years has had to pose as a criminal and deal with the unending series of loyalty tests the gang’s leaders impose on its members. She could have done more to depict the inevitable conflicts of loyalties in a police officer working a long-term undercover detail and torn between his commitment to the law and his growing attachments to the gang members, to the point where it’s conceivable (though this is not an issue Jackson raises in her script) that at one point he stops thinking of himself as a cop and starts thinking of himself as a gang member. Still, “New Normal” was an effective episode and one which definitely highlighted the extent to which the well-intentioned housing projects of yesteryear degenerated into crime and drug dens. It’s become a staple argument of the radical Right that big housing projects never work – though New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani was fortuitously in the White House office of President Trump February 26 to talk about building more such projects in the city. It was fortuitous because Mamdani got word during the meeting that at least one New Yorker, an American citizen, had been detained by agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) posing as New York city police officers, and he was able to get Trump to order their release. It also begs the question of what Mamdani would do if Trump’s condition for authorizing the more than 12,000 homes Mamdani is asking for is that the projects all be named after Trump.