Two nights ago (March 23) NBC finally re-started the Thursday night marathon of Law and Order programs, starting with an episode of the flagship Law and Order program, "Dead;ine," that was quite well done and compelling. It dealt with them ruder of Jewish-American journalist Jacob Ackerman (Alex Michael Shafer) after a neo-Nazi wanna-be named Lucas Hobbs (Forrest Weber) spray-painted the word “JEW” on the outside of Ackerman’s building. Jacob goes out to investigate the spray-painting and is confronted by a person whom we don’t see, and he later ends up dead with two stab wounds to the chest. The police arrest Hobbs but he has an alibi, and they arrest him for vandalism. He’s also being held for trian for assaulting a 19-year-old Jewish woman and beating her so severely she required reconstructive surgery. The police learn that Jacob was working on an article exposing the contractor responsible for installing safety doors on a housing project in Harlem, as part of a city contract for which they were paid about $1.5 million. Only the police investigate the company and find it literally doesn’t exist. There’s not even a pro forma contractor billing the city for work they could have done but didn’t. All there is of it is a shell address and a phone number they poached from someone else.
It turns out the contract to this nonexistent company was granted by New York’s deputy mayor, a woman, though the reporter and his African-American woman assistant were on the trail of the corruption and were about to expose it when the villain of the piece, the con-man owner of the dummy corporation, David Costa (Andrew Rothenberg) puffed the deputy mayor and then killed Jacob Ackerman. Police detectives Frank Cosgrove (Jeffrey Donovan) and Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks) search Costa’s apartment and find the knife Costa used to kill Ackerman, but a judge rules the knife inadmissible because of defects in the search warrant. The only way prosecutors Nolan Price (HughDancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) can convict Costa is by giving the hateful neo-Nazi Lucas Hobbs immunity from prosecution for his wanton and unprovoked assault on a 19-year-old Jewish woman, which they eventually do so he can testify (accurately) that he saw Costa holding the murder weapon as he fled from Ackerman’s apartment after having killed him. There was a subplot involving the Black woman journalist’s confidential source , whom she won’t reveal even if that means letting a murderer go free, and where I thought this was going was she’d call him (or her) and they would eventually testify. Overall, this Law and Order, directed by Martha Mitchell (not the same one!) from a script by Art Alamo and Gia Gordon, was one of the better recent ones, full of the conflicts between characters and between ideals that make this still hte most worthwhile police show on television.
