Law and Order: "Legacy" (Dick Wolf Productions, Universal, NBC-TV, aired April 28, 2022)

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

Last night I watched the run of three Dick Wolf-produced shows on NBC-TV: the original Law and Order in its current rebooted form, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Law and Order: Organized Crime. The Law and Order show, “Legacy,” was about a new headmaster at the elite Davenport private school who is found shot dead in his classroom the night the school performed the recent musical Dear Evan Hansen. The police at first suspect a number of the parents who were upset with the murdered principal for introducing “woke” curricula, including have the students take tests in the classroom about how they’ve either benefited from or been harmed by racism. But the police eventually trace the murder to Cooper Young (Christopher Bailey), a scholarship student who has been bullied by Bennett Richardson (Stephen Moran), a legacy admission (hence the episode title) who never let Cooper forget that he was there out of the sufferance of the people who gave him the scholarship and he didn’t “really” belong there. (George Orwell recalled enduring such snobbish bullying in his days as a scholarship kid in a British “public” school in his essay “Such, Such Were the Joys,” and Bennett is putting Cooper through the same snobbish nonsense Orwell described in his autobiographical story.)

It turns out Bennett Richardson actually shot and killed the teacher after previously got into a fight with Cooper on the soccer field. It also turns out that Bennett had previously filled out notebooks with drawings of violent fantasies, including one which he left in Cooper’s locker of himself holding a gun, and in one class Bennett went after his art teacher when the teacher questioned him about the violence in Bennett’s images. Of course dad gave the teacher a $10,000 settlement to keep quiet about it. Dad, John Rchardson (Darrell Goldstein), also gave his emotionally disturbed 17-year-old son the gun he used to kill the principal, which he bought when the family was at their vacation home in Wyoming, and when Cooper attacked Bennett at the soccer practice dad told him he had an obligation to fight back – which Bennett did by bringing the gun to school, threatening Cooper and killing the principal by accident when All Three Reached for the Gun. (Maurine Dallas Watkins, your plagiarism attorney thanks you for funding his fifth vacation home.)

The prosecutors, Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Haroun (Odelya Halevi), decide to charge John Richardson as an accomplice to murder and reach a deal with Bennett’s attorney offering him complete immunity in exchange for his testimony against his dad – only at the last minute Bennett can’t go through with ratting his father out and, since John Richardson’s attorney didn’t have a chance to cross-examine him before Bennett bolted the witness stand and the courtroom altogether, the prosecutors then focus on getting John’s wife (Bonnie Somerville) to testify against him. They have to clear the hurdle of spousal privilege to do so, but they get a ruling from the judge in the case and persuade her to testify by telling her that if her husband goes to prison, she’ll still have Bennett to raise. She makes the Faustian bargain and the jury finds John Richardson guilty – which rather surprised me since where I thought the writer, Pamela Wechsler, was taking this was they would find John Richardson not guilty because he had nothing to do with the actual killing, however much his actions may have facilitated it. If nothing else, Wechsler’s script did a good job of depicting the extent to which in certain families a father teaching his son to shoot is an acknowledged rite of passage, an initiation into manhood. This has seemed ultra-weird to me not only because I never really had a father in any but the strictest biological sense, but because I have never even held, much less fired, a real gun. But enough people I know had just that experience with their dads I know it’s a real thing.