Law and Order: "Brotherly Love" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 30, 2025)

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

Last night (Thursday, October 30) I watched the usual sequence of three Law and Order shows on NBC – they’re pre-empted the next week because of a big special, Wicked Above All, which looks like a concert performance of the musical Wicked to promote the upcoming release of the sequel, Wicked for Good, by Universal, which like NBC is a Comcast company. The flagship Law and Order episode was one called “Brotherly Love” in which police detective Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) became the latest cop in the Law and Order franchise to be given a scapegrace sibling: brother Matt Riley (Ryan Eggold), who when the episode opens has just been released from prison and has got a job as a waiter at a restaurant owned by Declan Dell (Neil Dawson). Unfortunately, Declan Dell is also a playboy and a compulsive gambler with a “thing” for white married women (Dell himself is Black), and no sooner do both we and Vincent meet him than he gets himself killed on the street. Vincent gets assigned to investigate the case along with his direct supervisor, Lt. Jessica Brady (Maura Tierney), who’s partnering him until they find him another person with whom to work. Dell, it turns out, had just left a high-stakes poker game run by another Black man, Shane Willis (Tobias Truvillion), which was attended by a high-profile set of influentials including a major film director, a judge, and NBA basketball star André Walker (Jerimiyah Dunbar), who broke up an incipient fight between Willis and Chaney.

None of them wanted to testify, so the only witness prosecutor Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) can use is Matt Riley even though in the previous case against him that led to his being sentenced to prison in the first place, perjury was one of the crimes he was charged with (though he wasn’t convicted of it). Despite both his reluctance and Price’s skepticism about using him as a credible witness, Matt agrees to testify – only the day he’s supposed to appear in court he’s knifed on the street in a nearly fatal attack by a Black guard who works at the jail where Matt was being held in supposedly “protective custody.” Not surprisingly, Matt is pissed off as all hell that someone tried to kill him to keep him from testifying, but because he’s caught a bacterial infection along the way he’s unable to appear in court, so they arrange for him to testify via video link from his hospital bed. Matt gives the jury in Willis’s case the information they need to convict him – he was at the poker party and saw Willis threaten Dell and say he was going to kill him if he didn’t at once come out with the money he owed Willis for losses in previous games – though afterwards his condition takes a turn for the worse and his doctors put him in a medically induced coma. As the show ends it’s touch-and-go whether Matt Riley will survive, but the implication is that by coming forward in the present case he’s redeemed himself for all the bad things he did earlier. My husband Charles was working at the computer on an online course while this was going on and he only got to see the last 10 minutes or so, though he joined me for the next two episodes in the various Law and Order franchises and quite liked the Law and Order: Special Victims Unit show that immediately followed it.