Law and Order: "Heroes" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Te;levision, NBC-TV, aired February 16, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago (February 16) I watched the usual three episodes of Law and Order and its spinoffs, including a quite good episode of the flagship Law and Order program called “Heroes.” It begins with what appears to be a mass shooting in a New York nightclub called Red Envy, in which a young man wearing a blue watch cap, blue jeans and red shoes walks into the club with a shiny metal gun and starts shooting people. At first I thought Dick Wolf’s production crew had decided to do another “ripped from the headlines” special about the spate of recent mass shootings (of which there had already been between 67 and 71 in the U.S. just during the first 45 days of 2023!), but it soon develops that the shooter and the victim were both known to each other and she was deliberately targeted. She was up-and-coming model who was there with her current boyfriend, rapper “King Matisse” (though why an urban hip-hop artist would take his stage name from a legendary but long-deceased French painter was never explained in the script) and the hiller was Bishop Bell (Shemar Jones), a rising basketball star in high school until he tore his knee out and could no longer play. He was bitter that the model dumped him for a rapper who could offer her the good life that had been once within his reach until his injury – though when the lead detectives, Frank Cosgrove (Jeffrey Donovan) and Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks), finally arrest Bell they’re surprised at how fast someone with a bad knee could flee from them.

When the case ends up before the show’s usual prosecutors, Nolan Price (British actor Hugh Dancy, who does a remarkably good job of suppressing his normal accent and talking like an American) abd Samantha Maroun (Israeli actress Odelya Halevi, playing an Arab-American), they realize that without a gun, surveillance footage (the club’s cameras were actually working, but King Matisse personally deleted the footage because it wouldn’t have accorded with his image as a fearless street thug that he ran away from the shooting) or a clear eyewitness description of the killer, they can’t successfully convict Bell. Their only hope is an on-duty uniformed officer, Nick Riley (Shawn Hatosy), who said he didn’t arrive at the scene until six minutes after the shooter fled the club. In fact he arrived three minutes later, enough time to encounter the shooter, only he froze and allowed the gunman to walk past his patrol car. Though the shooter had already done the deed and therefore Riley at least didn’t have any more lives on his conscience, and though he’d previously received commendations for his bravery, the fact that he froze that one time leads to his undoing.

He’s put on the witness stand and remorselessly cross-examined by Bell’s lawyer, who calls him a coward, and though Bell is ultimately convicted, as Price and Maroun are leaving the courtroom after the verdict Price is punched in the face by another officer and told, “You destroyed a good cop.” He asks Maroun what that was about, and Maroun tells him, “Haven’t you heard? Officer Riley committed suicide.” “Heroes” is a fascinating meditation on the nature of both courage and cowardice – the only real hero was the initial victim, who, thinking the assailant was a typical mass shooter (it’s a sign of the times that I can write the words “typical mass shooter” and not mean it as a description of a science-fiction hellscape), shielded one of the barbacks and gave him time to flee. It’s one of those remarkable shows from the Dick Wolf stable in which his writers manage to make comments on society and human nature within the confines of a cop show.