Law and Order: "Crossing Lines" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired March 13, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, March 13) my husband Charles and I watched my usual cycle of crime shows on Thursday night: Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit on NBC and Elsbeth on CBS. The Law and Order show was called “Crossing Lines” and dealt with the murder of the influential 50-something James Powers (Benjamin Eakeley), son of Senator George Powers (Richard Hughes) and his wife Frances (Denise Cormier). He was found dead at the foot of a stairway in Riverside Park with his head bashed in three times with a rock. The killer turns out to be a journalist named Julia Gallo (Caroline Pluta) who was about to publish a negative story about James Powers that would have meant an end to his political ambitions. He was planning to run for governor on the strength of his dad’s name, and Gallo’s article – revealing that though he posed as an environmentalist, he was also a big-game hunter and, it was hinted, a sexual predator – would have destroyed his chances. Just before he was killed, we saw James Powers talking rather animatedly on his phone as he walked the streets and nearly got run over by a few drivers, telling the unseen and unheard (by us, anyway) person he was talking to that if they persisted in going all-out to destroy his career, he’d destroy them, too. It turned out that James really did have devastating ammunition on Julia; eight years before she’d had an affair with a rock star while still married to someone else, and though she’d denied under oath in the divorce proceedings that she and the rock star had had sex, either he or a paparazzo posted a video online that showed them getting it on. When Gallo is finally busted for the crime, naturally this gets brought up in court by her attorney, Rose Gregory (Jackie McCarthy). Things get further complicated when it turns out that Rose Gregory is also the new girlfriend of New York District Attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn), only they keep ending up discussing the case on their in-home dinner dates even though they both know full well they shouldn’t be doing that. And they get even more complicated when Senator Powers weighs in on the case and tries to get testimony about James’s alleged sexual assault on Julia – she’s claiming she killed James in legitimate self-defense after he tried to rape her – excluded. Senator Powers even tries to get Baxter to offer a plea deal so the salacious details about his late son don’t come out in court. The judge in the case, Sydney Bolden (Gary Pérez), tries his best to be level-headed and fair, but the hatreds in the courtroom in all directions prove to be almost too much for him. In the end Julia is convicted of second-degree murder, but there are really no winners in this rather sordid tale of power, sex, and political influence. If nothing else, it shows that there’s still life in that unimaginably ancient program and its writers (here, Pamela J. Wechsler and Marley Scheider) remain good at tweaking the old formulae of this show and creating something warm and genuinely moving with it.