Law and Order: "Twelve Seconds" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 28, 2022)

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

With all that’s been going on in the life of me and my husband Charles the last few days, it’s taken me this long to have a chance to write about the three Law and Order shows I watched last Thursday night, October 28. The night began with an episode of the flagship Law and Order series called “Twelve Seconds,” and it opens with a nice-looking young man named James Pell (Jack Lynch) at 6 a.m. lifting his boat out of the water after having taken a rowing ride on the Hudson River. At first I thought he was going to be a guest body-finder, but it turns out he’s the victim, a 25-year-old law student who gets clubbed to death with a pipe laying by the side of the dock. Of course we don’t see who was wielding it, but as the police investigate Pell’s death it turns out he was a big asshole. Not only was he blackmailing a woman he’d dated for two months by threatening to post nude photos of her he’d taken when they were together, he was also involved with a much older man, a Hudson University law school professor named Ezra Nichols (Charles Parnell). This actor has a shock of gray hair that reminded me of David Brown, a Black Gay man I used to know in my days as a volunteer for the local AIDS organization Being Alive San Diego. Nichols is well known as a local attorney who’s done a lot of pro bono work (legal-speak for “free”) on behalf of civil rights causes, including what this script, following the dreadful modern parlance, calls “the LGBTQ community.” He also has a strange and incomprehensible relationship with James Pell, whom he has sponsored for a number of positions for which he’s unqualified, including editing the school’s law review.

Though Ezra Nichols is married to a woman named Michele (Hilary Ward) and has two sons, a 14-year-old named Cyrus (Isaiah Nicholas Pierce) and a five-year-old, the cops at first suspect Ezra of having a Gay affair with Pell and paying him for sex by recommending him to all those positions and honors. But testimony from Pell’s fellow students, including the man he beat out for those honors even though he was far more qualified than Pell, indicates that far from being in love (or at least in lust) with Pell, Nichols was barely cordial to him and made his distaste for him quite obvious every time they were seen together. The clue from which the cops finally piece the story together comes from a cocktail waitress who witnessed an incident at a banquet held to honor the first Afriican-American Gay man appointed to the New York Supreme Court, and the titular “12 seconds” during which Nichols called the appointee a “fag” and was recorded doing so on Pell’s cell phone. Pell threatened to post the clip online if Nichols didn’t reward him with all those plum assignments, but Nichols balked when Pell demanded that Nichols recommend him for a spot as a U.S. Supreme Court clerk. Unable to break Nichols’ own alibi for the morning, prosecutors Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) indict his wife, but it turns out that both are innocent and the real killer was their 14-year-old son Cyrus. Eventually Cyrus is turned over to family court, since he’s still well underage, and supposedly the Nichols family is destroyed – which they wouldn’t have been if Ezra Nichols had told James Pell to go to hell, confident that his name and reputation would survive the revelation that he’d once used a bad word to someone at a party. Dick Wolf and his writers were clearly attempting a statement about so-called “cancel culture” and its corrosive effects on society, but this time around the story they came up with just didn’t support their ambitions.