Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: Two Episodes (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, 2012)

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

After the Academy Awards Charles dashed into the bedroom hoping to get some sleep in, while I ended up watching a couple of reruns of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit from 2012, just after Christopher Meloni left the show and dick Wolf’s casting director hired the lame Danny Pino to replace him. (I liked Pino a lot better in his next series, the short-lived BrainDead, a bizarre political and science-fiction drama on CBS that was basically The West Wing meets Invasion of the Body Snatchers.) One of them, originally aired February 8, 2012 (five years before the #MeToo movement first emerged after the meltdown of Harvey Weinstein), was called “Father’s Shadow” and dealt with a woman who’s found drugged and comatose in a park. She’s being fondled by a young man with a furry fetish, but it turns out he merely took advantage of her after she was already unconscious and a much older man actually violated her. The older man turns out to be reality-show producer Fred Sandow (Michael McKean), who won a prestigious international documentary award in1992 but since then has decided there’s no money in documentaries. He’s become a reality-TV show producer not only because there’s also more money in it but also more nookie; he’s got a well-oiled seduction machine down pat that consists of him “auditioning” wanna-be actresses behind closed doors and sending his son Eddie (Cameron Monaghan) and his secretary,who’s also Eddie’s live-in girlfriend (in an apartment Daddy is paying for) out of the room, feeding the would-be star champagne laced with Quaaludes and then having his way with her while she’s powerless to resist. The woman eventually rats out Fred after the cops threaten to charge her as an accomplice, but Eddie freaks out at his dad’s incarceration and holds both the secretary and her daughter (presumably by someone else) hostage in their apartment. Eddie demands to see his dad, but dad will only come if the authorities give him full immunity and drop all charges. Then-Detective Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) recruits Eddie’s other relatives – including his mom,whom he’s been conditioned by his dad to hate, and his sister – and they finally persuade him to give up after he wounds his girlfriend and Nick Amaro (Danny Pino) talks him into letting him come in so the wounded woman can be extracted and taken to a hospital.

The other episode I watched,”Dreams Deferred,” featured an absolutely great performance by Patricia Arquette as Jeannie Kerns, a street hooker for over a quarter-century who’s somehow managing to turn tricks for a living even though alot of the newer, younger hookers make fun of her age. It turns out she’s the only lead the cops have to Craig Rasmussen (P. J. Brown), a laid-off bus driver who’s already killed his wife and a few random victims and who’s been “dating” Jeannie for all the tiem sh e’s been working. Arquette gives real pathos to this character as she works to attract Rasmussen, wearing a bugged crucifix (she’s intensely religious and regularly goes to a Roman Catholic church where the priest is a hunky Black guy).The FBI agents assigned to the case shoot and kill Rasmussen while he’s in the car with Jeannie,and her face ends up splattered with his blood. Benson is determined to do whatever she can to get Jeanie off the streets and into legitimate employment, even if th is means busting her for prostitution. She;’s anxious to keep what she does for a living a secret from her son,who’s in the military, but it turns out he’s known all along, ever since he was in grade school. The other kids teased hom for having a prostitute for a mother, and he defended his mom’s honor, but then one night he followed her out of their home and discovered it was true after all. Arquette’s sincerity and power in the role of the stereotypical hooker-with-a-heart-of–gold character made this an unusually good SVU and raised it above this show’s already usually high level.