Law and Order: "Accidentally Like a Martyr" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired April 30, 2026)

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

Last night (Thursday, April 30) I watched the two remaining shows in the Law and Order franchise: an episode of the flagship Law and Order called “Accidentally Like a Martyr” (after a song by Warren Zevon off his third album, and second for a major label, Excitable Boy) and a Law and Order: Special Victims Unit show called “Old Friends.” The Law and Order “Accidentally Like a Martyr” show begins with the 30th birthday party of Angela Cole (Annette Berning), in which her father Evan Cole (Eric Stoltz) cuts in on her husband Lucas Peters (Kyle Harris) and demands the first dance of the night with her (to Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together” – I’ve often been fascinated by the difference between the two major versions of this song: Green’s is an ode to a smoothly functioning relationship while Tina Turner’s is a desperate plea from someone whose partner is about to dump her). Of course we instantly know that someone in that group is not going to make it out of the evening alive, and it turns out the victim is Angela. Dad is briefly a red herring since he never liked Angela’s husband anyway, and he also seemed to be coming on to her in an almost incestuous way. But he’s innocent and the real killer, at least we’re led to believe, is Alan Ross (Jack Mckinney – that’s how the name is spelled on imdb.com), a nerdy hanger-on who has a closet full of 30 photos of Angela, mostly framed (which itself puts him one tick above the usual little nerd stalker we see on shows like this, who just stick the pictures of their unrequited crush object on the walls and don’t bother to frame them). Ross actually confesses to the cops, but the judge in the case, Roberta Hines (Angela Desal), rules the confession inadmissible because the police in general, and Lt. Jessica Brady (Maura Tierney) in particular, essentially tricked Ross into making the confession by saying, when he called for a lawyer, “You’ll really need a magician to make evidence disappear.”

Ross’s attorney has another suspect in mind, rock star Cash White (Zach McGowan), who two years earlier was living with Angela in a relationship and beat her up so badly she required stitches and he got arrested for assault. The morning of Angela’s party Cash came to the venue where it was supposed to be held and asked her to do lunch with him. When she refused, he got so outraged he literally put his fist through a glass window and got it inches away from her face. The prosecutors, Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Odelya Halevi (Stephanie Maroun), discover that Cash’s assault on Angela took place at the end of a long evening in which they were both doing cocaine, and it was because Angela was using drugs that night that she didn’t report the assault to the police. But Price refuses to introduce this information to the jury on the understandable ground that he doesn’t want to traduce Angela’s memory, especially since she’s dead and therefore in no position to defend herself. As a result the jury hangs, there’s a mistrial, district attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn) royally chews out Price and tells him in no uncertain terms that the purpose of their office is not to see that justice is done in the abstract but to win cases, and the closing shot is of Nolan Price getting a phone call from Angela’s widower Lucas, which he refuses to answer. It was a well-done Law and Order episode and a worthy entry in this series’s canon, though I can’t help but wonder if there’ll be a sequel several months down the road that finally resolves the case one way or the other. Incidentally I looked up the lyrics to Warren Zevon’s song “Accidentally Like a Martyr” online at https://genius.com/Warren-zevon-accidentally-like-a-martyr-lyrics, and it’s a bitter song from the point of view of a lover who’s pissed off at a breakup. If it applies to anybody in the dramatis personae of this episode, it’s Cash White!

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Old Friends" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired April 30, 2026)

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

Afterwards on Thursday, April 30 I watched a Law and Order: Special Victims Unit show called “Old Friends,” about one of the series’s recurring themes: the ability of the rich, powerful, and well-connected to avoid accountability. (Given how the U.S. is currently being run, and by whom, it’s a theme that’s all too timely.) Though the imdb.com page on this episode is woefully inadequate and some of the most powerful actors on the show are, alas, uncredited on it, it’s a gripping tale about a 16-year-old woman named Emma who’s thrown out of a Mercedes-Benz minivan in front of a hospital, where she’s treated for both external and internal injuries. She was at a wild party with plenty of underage drinking and screwing going on, and at one point she and her quasi-boyfriend Matt ended up in the guest bedroom having a sexual encounter, though neither of them remembered the details when they finally came to. Both Emma and Matt had residue of a date-rape drug in their systems, but neither of them were drug users and so they had no idea how the substance had got there. It turns out the party was actually hosted by the mother of one of the guests, who let teenagers come over to her place and do their drinking there on the ground that it’s better they do it in a controlled environment than outdoors in some alley. It also turns out that the mother’s real motivation was to watch her daughter and her daughter’s friends have at it sexually on a video camera hidden in a lamp inside That Room, so she could get her own kinky thrills from it. Unfortunately, the mother is also the daughter of a well-respected retired judge who had been a mentor to just about every sitting judge in New York City. He not surprisingly pulls every string he can to ensure that mom doesn’t have to suffer the indignity of a criminal conviction, including assigning the case to Judge Lance Ryan, an old friend of his who stacks the case against the prosecution big-time. The case turns on Emma’s testimony, only Emma has a dark secret of her own: when she was a child she was regularly sexually molested by a rich uncle. Emma told her mother what was going on, and her mom responded by making sure she and the uncle were never alone together again, but she refused to report the crime to the police because the uncle bought her silence by agreeing to pay for Emma’s dad’s cancer treatments.

Emma tells all this to Captain Olivia Benson (series star Mariska Hargitay) but swears her to secrecy, and Benson keeps that vow even during an intense trial session in which Judge Ryan demands that she answer the question, she refuses, and ultimately Judge Ryan orders her held in contempt of court and arrested and handcuffed on the spot. Fortunately for the case, this shocks Emma into releasing Benson from her vow of secrecy and testifying fully for the prosecution, and the Kinky Mom is ultimately convicted. But there are two intriguing subplots to this episode, both involving a Black woman who’s been appointed Chief of Detectives for the entire New York Police Department. For some reason she’s convinced that Benson is a dirty cop and is determined to destroy her career, and to that end she’s installed a young protégé of hers on the Manhattan Special Victims Unit to get the goods on Benson so the Black woman chief of detectives can fire her, or worse. The young male detective to whom she gave this assignment joined the police force in the first place to exonerate his father, who was previously forced out for an allegedly “bad” shooting of an unarmed suspect – only the suspect was actually armed and the young man finds the gun in the evidence room in the police archives. At the end of the episode, just as Kinky Mom has been convicted in spite of Judge Ryan’s best efforts to rig the case in her favor, and the SVU detectives are in the office celebrating, the Black woman chief of detectives, whose animus towards Benson is left powerfully unexplained by writer Justine Ferrara (and though it might have been explained in an earlier episode, I can’t recall any such thing and I watch this show regularly enough I think I would have noticed), suddenly strikes back. She announces that because Benson was held in contempt of court and arrested, she’s suspending Benson indefinitely and demanding that she surrender her badge and gun. I doubt if this is going to last long, because after “Old Friends” ended NBC showed a trailer for next week’s episode and Benson was back on the job as usual, but it still seemed like an outrageous plot twist and a decidedly unfair one given that we’ve seen no indication that Benson ever acted inappropriately on this case or any other.