Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: “Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing,” and Law and Order: Organized Crime: “Forget It, Jake, It’s Chinatown” (Dick Wolf Productions, Universal, NBC-TV, aired June 3, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 9 p.m. I put on NBC to watch the season finales of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Law and Order: Organized Crime, followed by a rerun of an episode of a Jimmy Fallon Tonight Show from April that featured Organized Crime star Christopher Meloni in a brief interview via Zoom as well as Saturday Night Live alumna Maya Rudolph in the studio (with an invisible but certainly audible live audience) wearing dresses that looked like they’d been made from leftover PRC wallpaper. The SVU was actually a quite good tale about the apartheid apartment buildings in New York City, where developers are required by city regulations to set aside a few units in each new building for “affordable housing” but allowed to structure the building so that the “affordable” tenants go in through a separate Jim Crow entrance and never mix with the affluent people who are paying full market rate. Entrance into these “affordable” units is supposed to be by lottery, and naturally there are several thousand applicants for each one, but the Special Victims Unit stumbles on a scheme to get young mothers into these units ahead of the line if they agree to supply sexual favors to highly connected men in exchange.

The SVU becomes aware when a heavy-set Black woman who earned her place in the building in an above-board way complains that the women are working as prostitutes, but it doesn’t take long before the SVU detectives realize that the women are actually being trafficked: they’re not collecting money for sexual services but are being rewarded by being allowed to live there, and are petrified with fear that if they don’t “put out” they’ll be thrown out of the building and end up back either on the streets or in shelters. The principal in this scheme is Dr. Catalina Machado (Zabryna Guevara), who became a city heroine when she worked herself up from homelessness to college and a Ph.D., only as soon as we hear her too-good-to-be-true origin story we just know that the writers (Denis Hammill and old Law and Order hands Julie Martin and Warren Leight) are going to have Mother Teresa turn out to be Cruella de Vil. She set up the scheme to pluck particularly delectable morsels of young womanhood off the streets and give them nice apartments in exchange for sex with the network of politicians and city officials she relied on to get her projects funded – with the building superintendentm, Pauly Banducci (Saverio Guerra), as both a participant in the sex trade and the building’s on-site pimp.

Christopher Meloni makes a brief appearance in this story even though it and the Organized Crime episode that followed weren’t really a “crossover event” the way two previous pairs of these shows have been. He’s there to attend the wedding of officer Odafin Tutuola (Ice-T) and his partner Phoebe Baker (Jennifer Esposito), though at the end they decide to stay together but not get married after all – Law and Order: The Soap Opera rears its ugly and annoying head again! There’s also a subplot in which deputy chief Christian Garland (Demore Barnes) gets reamed a new one by the white police chief and a phalanx of white male assistants because he gave a deposition in support of the wife of the (female, Black) head of the Organized Crime squad who’s suing the NYPD because a white officer stepped on the hand of her nephew and thereby ruined his potential career as a guitar player (obviously the attempt of Dick Wolf and his writers to do an analogue to the George Floyd murder), and the old white guys who run the department have come together to form the thick blue line, shield themselves, their officer and the department from any accountability and maintain the climate of fear in the Black community where Blacks are told over and over again that to the cops, Black lives really don’t matter.

The Organized Crime episode that followed was a picturesque mess in which super-criminal Richard Wheatley (Dylan McDermott), arrested at the end of the previous episode for murder, racketeering, dealing in contraband COVID-19 vaccines and all manner of other crimes, gets if not a get-out-of-jail-free card, certainly a pass on more lenient treatment from a federal attorney who’s running for office and has taken contributions from Wheatley, who arranges for Wheatley to get leniency in exchange for his testimony against political figures and organized crime officials from other countries. The script features two attempts to assassinate Wheatley’s ex-wife despite the 24/7 police protection she supposedly enjoys (Wheatley is able to offer two of the cops on her detail multi-million dollar bribes to sneak poisons into her room, one at least disguised as a mouthwash) as well as a hit squad going after Wheatley himself. When he’s being transported from New York jail to the federal prosecutor’s office, at first we assume that a squad of his gangsters is going to hijack the transport and break him out. Instead it’s a Black gang, recruited from prison by Wheatley’s own son Richard, Jr. (Nick Creegan), and they’re there not to rescue him but to kill him – and the Organized Crime Squad officers end up in several shoot-outs trying to preserve Wheatley, Sr.’s life so he can be held accountable judicially (or not) instead of just being knocked off.

The script also indicates that even though they were never physically intimate, Mariska Hargitay’s character was the great love of Meloni’s character’s life – I remember when Meloni was still on SVU Dick Wolf and his staff reported getting a lot of letters from viewers who wanted his and Hargitay’s characters to become lovers, which they wisely resisted – but now, with both of them single, it seems like they’re beginning to drop hints in just that direction, though when Meloni’s character is burned out on the job the woman he goes on a date with is his boss even though she’s a) married and b) Gay. The Jimmy Fallon episode we watched featured Meloni discovered working on a canvas in his home and wearing a spectacular multi-print shirt I wished I could find a copy of, though the show was filmed just before the premiere of Law and Order: Organized Crime and Meloni had little to say other than that he and Hargitay meshed together as actors as if they’d been working together yesterday instead of a decade ago. I still think the role Meloni should have played as a follow-up to SVU was as Jack Reacher in the film series based on Lee Child’s novels – in which Reacher is described as overwhelmingly tall and physically robust – instead Paramount went with the excruciatingly awful Tom Cruise even though, no matter what you think of Cruise as an actor (not much, in my case, though I’ve liked a lot of the films he’s been in mainly because he and his staff have picked good projects for him – the reverse of Ben Affleck, a far more talented actor but one who’s been cast in a lot of total garbage with only brief respites of quality like Hollywoodland, The Accountant and Argo) – there’s no way Cruise can intimidate someone with sheer physical size the way Meloni can.