Law and Order: Organized Crime: "All That Glitters" (Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired November 10, 2022)

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

Once again,the Law and Order: Organized Crime episode that followed this, “All That Glitters,” was disappointing compared to the other two even though Christopher Meloni, though not exactly as hot as he was in his SVU days, is still an arresting (no pun intended) screen presence and a lot of fun to watch. At least ick Wolf and his writers are retreating a bit from their new-found worship of the Great God SERIAL and pretty much wrapping up one major intrigue per episode, which is nice. It’s true they’;re still sticking in plot lines in the various episodes and having them carry over – including the by-now thoroughly boring intrigue between Teddy Silas (Gus Halper), eldest son of the mega-developer who has somehow got approval to build an upscale Vegas-style gambling casino in the middle of Manhattan, and his put-upon girlfriend. But the main villain in this episode is Michael Abramoff (Mark Ivanir) – or, as his character name is spelled on the show’s imdb.com page, “Mikael Abramov,” I guess to make him seem Russian – who’s involved in an absurdly complicated scheme. Apparently he’s smuggling gold into the U.S., using the gold to make jewelry which he sells for 80 cents on the dollar, and then collects the purchase price for the jewelry and uses it to finance other criminal enterprises, including human trafficking of women to work in his jewelry factory. My husband Cahrles wondered just why he felt it was a good idea to run so complicated a criminal scheme and how he was making money off it.

The big scene is one in which Abramov decides to get rid of a possible weak link in his network – a jewelry-store owner who’s been interrogated by the police about Abramov’s merchandise – by literally pouring molten gold on him as two of his men hold him down. There are some clever bits in this show, including a scene in which two of the people on the Organized Crime Control Bureau pose as a couple contemplating a wedding to crash the jewelry store, and another in which detective Bobby Reyes (Rick Gonzales, easily the sexiest guy on this show apart from Meloni) posing as a crook to infiltrate Abramov’s operation. But for the most part this is a pretty ordinary Organized Crime story and I’m O.K. withit not having a lor of open-ended possibilities for sequelae! The quirkiest character on the show is an Italian police detective named Tia Leonetti (Ayelet Zurer, whom I’ve actually heard of elsewhere) whom Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni) apparently had an affair with when they were working together in Italy during his sojourn there between his departure from Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and his arrival on Law and Order: Organized Crime. This was a bit of a surprise since during MSVU days they had occasionally tempted him with other women (including the alternative partner, played by Connie Nielsen, he had briefly while Mariska Hargitay was off the show to have her real-life baby) but Dick Wolf and his writers kept Stabler sexually exclusive with his wife – only here he was having extra-relational activities with this woman detective while his wife was still alive in the show. You’ll recall the Organized Crime series kicked off with her murder with a car bomb, and this changed Stabler from a sometimes rough but dedicated cop to a revenge figure that actually quite got rather dull during the early part of this show’s run before the writers toned it down with him and once again started evoking some of the moral complexity that had helped make him interesting on SVU.