Law and Order: "Free Speech" (Dick Wolf Productions, Universal, NBC-TV, aired April 7, 2022)

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

At 8 p.m. I turned on the cycle of three Law and Order series making their return to NBC after a three-week hiatus. First up was the “Free Speech” episode of the reboot of the original Law and Order, which for some reason got a nasty review on imdb.com: “I love everything Law and Order. This revival falls flat. I keep watching and find myself disappointed every episode. The characters don't have the same rapport as before. Where's Briscoe when you need him? Yeah.” Briscoe left the series several years before it ended when Jerry Orbach, who played him, left the planet – and yes, I was thinking at the time that the original series never recovered from losing Orbach to cancer even though some of his replacements, notably Dennis Farina, Jesse L. Martin and Anthony Anderson, were quite capable actors in their own right, and Anderson returned to the current incarnation after 12 years, eight of which he spent as the lead on ABC’s hit situation comedy Blackish. Anderson is one of the two old Law and Order hands who returned for the new version: the other is Sam Waterston, who got promoted to district attorney towards the end of the original series and we’re supposed to believe is still there desp;ite the political enemies he’s made over the years.

One actor I’m sorry did not return is S. Epatha Merkerson, who played the commander of the police precinct out of which the lead detectives worked (and, unlike Jerry Orbach, she’s still alive). Though Camryn Manheim, who replaced her (a heavy-set Black woman being replaced by a heavy-set white one – I guess no one thought of having Merkerson be appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court), turned in a marvelous performance as the principal villainess in the Lifetime movie Cruel Instruction, she’s a lot less interesting playing a character we’re actually supposed to like. But I’ve generally liked the new incarnation of Law and Order, and this episode, “Free Speech,” was quite well done. A local New York computer magnate, Derek Hoyt (Jonathan Cable – the character’s name is “Nicholas Hoyt” on the imdb.com page but I distinctly remember hearing him called “Derek” on the actual soundtrack), goes on the Right-wing podcast of Jordan Reed (Jeffrey Nordling) and is needled by the host over QAnon-like allegations that the entire Democratic Party is led by cannibalistic pedophiles. (A major glitch is Reed’s references to “the Democratic party” – virtually all Republicans and Right-wing activists today call it “the Democrat party.”) Then Derek Hoyt is killed when he’s pushed in front of a bus. His killer is a heavy-set construction worker named Manny Lopez (Jorge Chapa) – though the writers don’t make much of this it’s ironic, given what the modern-day American Right thinks of immigrants in general and Mexicans in particular, that a man named “Lopez” who presents as Latino would be so much in thrall to a white-supremacist talk-show host he’d be willing to commit murder on his behalf.

It soon develops that Derek Hoyt was being accused of pedophilia on the basis of several photographs uploaded to the Internet, but these were faked, rather crudely, with Photoshop and it turns out Jordan Reed is the faker. He put out a series of podcasts claiming that it was the duty of any true patriot to take out that scumbag – though in order to keep himself in the clear legally he stopped short of outright calling for Hoyt’s murder – and the case against Reed for ordering Hoyt’s murder unravels when Manny Lopez is found hanged in his prison cell. Officially he committed suicide, but remembering the real Jeffrey Epstein case (and others) I immediately got, “Yeah, right,” and I concluded it was at least possible that Jordan Reed got a politically sympathetic prison guard to off Lopez for threatening to testify against him. The prosecutors, Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroud (Odelya Halevi), are finally able to nail Jordan Reed when a video recording of one of his rallies at a private restaurant surfaces, surreptitiously filmed by one of the waiters, which shows Reed actually egging Lopez on to kill Hoyt.

It’s fascinating that a show originally created by Dick Wolf to appeal to Right-wing audiences – he reasoned that shows about crusading defense attorneys, from Perry Mason to The Defenders, were politically de trop because times had changed, the country had become more Right-wing and in particular more “tough on crime,” and therefore he would do a show where the heroes would be police officers and prosecutors, and a running theme of the show would be how guilty people use the “loopholes” of the Constitution to escape justice, has become solidly Left in its political orientation. In this episode the Rightists are clearly the villains and the Leftists are the heroes, and one of the reasons I started watching the original Law and Order and its spinoffs was how sensitively they depicted Queer people and their issues (though there aren’t any Queer references in this episode except for a snotty reference from Jordan Reed about how Republicans were talking about the real issues that affect people’s lives – inflation, immigration and crime – while Democrats were hyper-concerned about pronouns). I won’t pretend that the increasing alignment of Dick Wolf and his writing and show-running staffs with my political orientation has nothing to do with what I like about these shows (though I also watch and enjoy Blue Bloods, with a dramatically different view of the police and how they should function in the American democracy, while Charles finds Blue Bloods too police-friendly even to be in the same room when I watch it), but I enjoyed this episode and in particular its presentation of how and when violent rhetoric crosses the line from mere speech (and therefore constitutionally protected) to incitement (not constitutionally protected).