Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Law and Order: Organized Crime (Duck Wolf Productions, Universal, NBC, episodes aired January 20, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

My husband Charles and I watched the latest two episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Law and Order: Organized Crime. The SVU was an interesting offtake on an episode they’d done earlier in which a star National Football League quarterback who’s secretly a Gay man plans a big coming-out event, only he’s murdered before he can stage his big party and the killer turns out to be his manager and personal coach, whose motive is all the money he’s going to lose if the athlete comes out and it destroys his career. In the 2022 version the athlete is a mixed martial-arts fighter, Tommy Baker (Cole Dornan), who was beaten badly by another contender and is now ready for a rematch. He’s married to a woman from back home in the Southern small town he came from, Chrissy (Dana Melanie, one of those oddball names which sounds backwards), but she’s O.K. with his being Gay and content with being his “beard.” Alas, she wants her ashes hauled at least once in a while and the man she’s picked for this is Tommy’s sparring partner, Ricky Nowak (Ignacyo Matynia), and the guy is ripping Tommy off for the money he can get out of him.

The writers seemed to be setting up the league’s owner as the villain, but it turns out that not only is the man not a homophobic asshole, he was actually going to promote Tommy’s Gayness and offer him to the world as the “Rainbow Warrior.” When Tommy doesn’t turn up for the big fight – he’s found badly wounded in his truck and taken to the hospital (which made it seem like a busman’s holiday to me right now!), the cops investigate and soon find out that Tommy’s predicament was caused not only by Ricky but by Tommy’s own partner, Phil Diaz (G. K. Uman), a physical trainer who nursed him back to health after his shoulder was dislocated in the previous fight and fell in love with him, only to be blackmailed by Ricky into plundering Tommy’s bank balance. The writers didn’t make clear just how much of a hold Ricky had over him, but at one point they have Ricky complain, “Tommy wasn’t even the man in their relationship – Phil was!” The Organized Crime that followed it was actually a better program, even though a) the show suffers from his obeisance to the Great God SERIAL and b) because NBC is telecasting the Winter Olympics from Beijing, the next in sequence will not be aired until February 25.

The main issue raised during the previews for this episode was Elliott Stabler’s (Christopher Meloni) attempts to piss off Richard Wheatley (Dylan McDermott) by making it look like he’s having an affair with Wheatley’s once and (it seems) future wife Angela (Tamara Taylor, who’s important enough to the cast list she’s billed third, after Meloni and Danielle Mone Truitt as Meloni’s openly Lesbian superior on the police force). But it was just part of Stabler’s overall war against Wheatley, who the writers work into such levels Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty sound like golfing buddies by comparison. Among the cops’ tactics against the crooks are installing a pair of computer hackers in the apartment upstairs, a male whom they caught as a hacker who’s agreed to turn state’s evidence and the dedicated and sworn female police officer who’s been assigned to work with him. (Predictably, he’s got the hots for her but she couldn’t be less interested in him “that way.”) The cops find that Wheatley staged a 15-minute power outage at the building that houses the New York Stock Exchange and is using it to make himself billions of dollars – as well as millions for his partner in crime, Sebastian McClain (Robin Lord Taylor), though to Wheatley’s disgust McClain has a Robin Hood complex and insists on giving the money away to everyone from legitimate non-governmental organizations to people he’s run into at random from his redoubt at the New York Public Library. (Though I have no idea whether they intended this or not, I was struck by the irony that McBride is staging his computer crimes from a redoubt of the old information-storage technology computers have largely displaced.) The show moves quickly to a satisfying cliff-hanger and I was disappointed only by the fact that we’ll have to wait over a month to find out how it turns out!