Law and Order: "Folk Hero" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired March 20, 2025)

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

Two nights ago (Thursday, March 20) I watched the latest episodes of Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. The Law and Order show was called “Folk Hero” and was quite obviously based on the real-life killing of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson by Luigi Mangione on December 4, 2024. In this fictionalization the victim is called “Logan Andrews” (Laird Macintosh) and the killer is “Ethan Weller” (Ty Moback). The show actually begins with a scene between three police officers, including series star character Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) and his commanding officer, Lieutenant Jessica Brady (Maura Tierney), all in a patrol car together bitching about American health care and the difficulty in accessing promised benefits from health insurance companies. Then Andrews gets shot outside the offices of the (fictitious) health insurance company he ran by a figure wearing a camouflage hoodie. The cops have to deal with a red-herring suspect, a man who’d been chief operations officer of the company and had resigned after a fight with Andrews over Andrews’s insistence that the company “delay, deny, defend”: i.e., contest virtually every health-care claim met against it and deny claims right and left, confident that their clients either would be too sick or too ignorant to know they could appeal it. (The real Luigi Mangione is claimed to have inscribed a variant of that slogan, “delay, deny, depose,” on the bullets with which he allegedly killed Brian Thompson.) The killer, Ethan Weller, turns out to be a young man who was raised by his mother as a single parent after his father died when Ethan was four. Then his mom got metastatic breast cancer eight months before the main action. Her oncologist told her and Ethan that the only drug that could save her life was a recently approved one that was hellaciously expensive. Naturally her insurer, Andrews’s company, denied the claim and Ethan’s mother died of her disease.

Even after the police identify Ethan as the killer, they have a hard time running him down. A barista at a coffeehouse where Ethan stopped for a coffee and snack flatly refuses to help the cops, calling it a “hard no” because, while she got a look at his face, she won’t cooperate in giving the police a description because to her he’s a folk hero. Later on a number of people start wearing the same sort of camouflage hoodie Ethan had on when he killed Andrews to throw the police off his trail. Ultimately they arrest him, but his attorney, Megan Stratton (Laila Robbins), cooks up an unusual defense. She claims that Ethan killed Andrews under the “necessity” exemption to the homicide laws, saying that Andrews’s policies put thousands of people in imminent danger. Prosecutor Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) argues that the “necessity” defense to a murder charge only applies when the killer was in the immediate presence of the victim and the victim was literally threatening the life of the killer or a third person. The case draws a progressive judge, William Moscatello (Benito Martinez), whose rulings are just about everything the defense could ask for. Though I was a bit surprised that Megan didn’t call the health insurance executive who had resigned from Andrews’s company rather than go along with his “delay, deny, defend” plans, the case goes to trial and the jury ultimately returns a verdict. Unfortunately, we don’t get to hear what the verdict is because producer Dick Wolf and writers Rick Eid and Scott Gold abruptly cut to the closing credits just as the jury’s African-American woman foreperson (Keisha T. Fraser) is about to announce it. Maybe the writers themselves disagreed on what the just and proper outcome should have been, but it was still an annoying cop-out at the end of an otherwise quite well-written and well-dramatized (the director was Carlos Bernard) episode. I remember Charles and I were watching a TV news report on the real United Healthcare CEO murder and, as we heard some talking head on MS-NBC say, “There are good reasons for Americans to hate health insurance companies, but murdering their CEO’s is not a solution,” and I immediately talked back to the TV, “No, single-payer is the solution.”