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!