Law and Order: "A Perfect Family" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired April 3, 2025)

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

Last night (Thursday, April 3) I watched episodes of Dick Wolf’s remaining Law and Order series: Law and Order itself and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. (They’re reviving Law and Order: Organized Crime, but only as a “streaming” exclusive on NBC Peacock – barf.) The Law and Order show, “A Perfect Family,” proved to be a challenging tale about a supposedly perfect family that unravels when the mother, Melinda Chapman (Allison Miller), gives birth to new daughter Sophie a decade after having had her previous two girls, Emily (Riley Vinson) and Amanda (Delaney Quinn). This sends her into post-partum psychosis big-time; she hears voices telling her “demons” are out to kill Sophie, and Emily has been taken over and possessed by one of them. We first see Emily out for a walk with her father, investment broker and former Navy SEAL Derek Chapman (Brett Zimmerman), who’s telling her to be strong and assertive in ways that make this seemingly innocuous advice sound toxic. There’s an intriguing red herring in the person of Walter Jeffries (Todd Gearhart), Emily’s volleyball coach, who takes an interest in her above and beyond the call of duty. They exchanged text messages on an app that deleted most of them within hours, but her last one survives and reads, “I just can’t take this anymore.” Had this been a Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode he’d have been the culprit, a nasty pedophile who’d been driven from several previous schools for taking an undue interest in his 12-year-old female charges. Instead both the cops investigating the case, Detective Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) and his immediate supervisor, Lieutenant Jessica Brady (Maura Tierney), and we are shocked when surveillance video surfaces showing Melinda herself killing Emily by pushing her off a high pedestrian bridge.

At first her attorney enters a not-guilty plea but then changes it to guilty by reason of insanity. Among the people they interview is a therapist Melinda saw just once, since at her husband’s insistence she refused to take an anti-psychotic medication, check in at the day clinic the therapist recommended, or do anything to report the danger she was putting her children in by her mental illness. The therapist tells the police that the husband was so insistent that his wife not go on psychotropic drugs he literally tore up the prescription as soon as the doctor ordered it and gave it to her. Accordingly, lead prosecutor Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) talks district attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn) into indicting Derek Chapman for manslaughter, second degree, in Emily’s death on the ground that if he hadn’t pressured his wife into not taking medications and getting treated for her post-partum psychosis, Emily would still be alive and Melinda wouldn’t have heard “voices” from inside her head telling her to kill Emily to save Sophie from nonexistent “demons.” Alas, the case doesn’t go well for Price because Derek’s lawyer is able to sow reasonable doubt by pointing out (correctly) that it was Melinda who actually killed Emily and she’s acknowledged herself insane under oath, so not a word she says should be taken seriously. Rather than call the psychiatrist who said she saw Derek literally tear up the prescription she’d written Melinda for anti-psychotic medications, Price figures that the only way he can get Derek’s hostility towards psychiatric treatment in general and treatment for his wife in particular is to call their other daughter, 10-year-old Amanda, to the witness stand to testify against her dad. Oddly, writers Rick Eid (an old Law and Order hand and one who was credited with the reboot of this series after it was off the air for nearly 12 years from 2010 to 2022) and Jennifer Vanderbes do a major cop-out here: they have Price have a crisis of conscience about grilling Amanda himself and even more of one about subjecting her to cross-examination. So he excuses her from the witness stand without asking her any questions, the jury acquits Derek, and the reason I thought this was a cop-out is that whatever traumas Amanda would have faced on the witness stand, having her dad acquitted and having to go back and live with him and his asshole ways would be far more traumatizing both short- and long-term.