Law and Order: "Turn the Page" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired February 1, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, February 1) I watched three consecutive episodes in Dick Wolf’s surviving Law and Order franchise, starting with a show on the flagship Law and Order series in which a young woman named Celeste Clark (Mellisa Goodwin) is cornered on a dark, deserted city street well after dark by an assailant in a bright red jacket. He strangles her with some sort of metal something-or-other, with such force he breaks her hyoid bone, and the next time we see her she’s a corpse and the lead detectives, Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks) and newbie Vincent Riley (Reid Scott), show up to investigate her murder. The police first interrogate the white victim’s Black ex-boyfriend, Mason Smith (Anthony Chatmon III), but let him go after DNA testing clears him. The cops then do a search for other victims killed similarly, and they come up with three Black twenty-something sex workers who were all murdered the same way. Detective Riley has a history with one of these cases since he was the original investigator on it, and the father of the victim whose killing he was assigned is still upset that the New York Police Department is making such a big effort to find the killer of a white woman while it did comparatively little to find the killer of a Black one. Ultimately they trace the crimes to Bruce Elliot (Paul Scanlan), who like Celeste was a devotée of a private sex club as well as someone who made their living in the financial services industry. Elliot is finally arrested in a restaurant after he’s taken a young woman (Nicole Callender) hostage and tried to trade her life for a getaway car.

Prosecutors Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) take the case to trial even though they’re only going to indict Elliot for Celeste’s murder since they don’t have enough evidence against him for the killings of the three Black women, though after Judge Arnold Pappas (Tyrone Mitchell Henderson) rules a key piece of evidence against Elliot inadmissible, the prosecutors ask for and receive permission to introduce evidence of Elliot’s previous crimes as “prior bad acts.” The trial is disrupted big-time when the Black victim’s father makes an outburst in court denouncing Elliot and his attorney, Rachel Horn (Allison Thomas Lee), as liars, but the case gets hairier when Horn calls Detective Riley as her first defense witness and gets him to admit that he considered Elliot a suspect in the earlier murder but decided he was a fine, upstanding citizen with no criminal record and therefore didn’t pursue him any further. Nolan Price decides to go after Riley on cross-examination and gets him to admit that he was once suspended from the police force for punching a superior officer, though the reason was because he made a sexist comment about the woman officer who later became Riley’s direct supervisor, Lt. Kate Dixon (Camryn Manheim). Price’s boss, district attorney Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston, the only cast member of the first 20 seasons of Law and Order who’s still on the current show), is worried that going after a cop so aggressively will hurt their long-term relations with the police, but after the trial and the almost inevitable guilty verdict Riley himself offers Price forgiveness and says laconically, “You did what you had to do.” This Law and Order, directed by Michael Smith from a script by old Law and Order hand Rick Eid, wasn’t particularly ground-breaking but it was a good episode that told a tight-knit story and told it well.