Law and Order: "Bad News" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 22, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Law and Order episode that followed SVU’s “Anonymity” last night (Thursday, October 22) starts out with some footage of Alexander West (Robert Lee Harvey) nervously pacing around “The Ramble,” a well-known Gay men’s cruising ground in New York’s Central Park. The next time we see him his body is being pushed off a land bridge in the park, where he falls on his head and dies almost immediately. New York police detective Theo Walker (David Alaja) arrives on the scene late to find his new partner, Detective Rob Calvino (James Badge Dale – with a middle name like that he would be playing a cop!), who replaced his old one when the former partner, Detective Vincent Riley (Reid Scott), was unexpectedly killed during last week’s episode (usually when they’re going to replace a leading actor on a show like this, they do so at the end of a season), has already beat him there. The two find out from the victim’s wallet and cell phone, both of which were left behind by whoever killed him, that Alexander West was married and had the obligatory three children (for a while I was wondering if every Hollywood actor playing a Gay man had to have exactly three children, like Tom Hanks in Philadelphia, to establish his real-life hetero bona fides). He was also the news editor of the New York Ledger (a fictional paper that’s been part of Law and Order from its beginnings and is quite obviously based on the real-life New York Post). Among the people who might have had a motive to kill him was Zayne Hassim (Ahmad Kamal), who ran a legitimate taxi company in New York who lamented the good old days when a taxi medallion (the official license to drive a cab in New York City) was worth $1.2 million before the successive competition from ride-shares and Waymos made it virtually worthless. So he’s reduced himself to hiring undocumented immigrants to drive for him, which is illegal, and that was the story Alexander West and the Ledger was working on to expose. The use of an illegally run taxi company as the MacGuffin hearkens back to one of the very first Law and Order episodes from the early 1990’s, which was loosely based on the 1986 suicide of then-Queens borough president Donald Manes after he was exposed for his role in a scandal involving the New York City Parking Violations Bureau and his steering city contracts for collecting parking ticket fees to a company he co-owned.

But eventually Hassim turns out to be a red herring and the real killer is [spoiler alert!] West’s associate on the Ledger staff and close friend Mark Lancer (Derek Webster). Lancer turned against West partly because the Ledger’s publisher gave him an ultimatum to cut the newsroom staff by 40 percent as part of a plan to rely mostly on artificial intelligence to write most of the paper’s stories and keep humans on only to “tweak” the AI copy to make it seem more credible as coming from real people. They also crossed swords over a piece the Ledger was doing about Tanner Hunt (Andrew Burnap), a surprisingly competitive young Democrat running for a U.S. Senate seat in South Carolina. Hunt’s chief of staff, Brandon Rex (Patrick K. Dooley), was leaking information about an alleged sexual abuse scandal involving Hunt and a woman from 10 years earlier that, if exposed, would sink his campaign. (That’s one difference between the two major parties for you; a Republican politician exposed as a sexual abuser not only doesn’t have to worry about his voters turning against him, there’s a strong chance it will establish his credentials as a “real man” and actually help him with base voters, as it did for Donald Trump.) The biggest surprise for me is that Hunt’s alleged victim was a woman; Andrew Burnap played him as so Gay-presenting I thought the big secret would be that Hunt was Gay, that he was in the Ramble for sexual satisfaction, and this was what Rex was alternately covering up and finally becoming ready to “out” him in both senses of the term. Rex had agreed to become a confidential source for the Ledger and Lancer wanted to go ahead with the story even though it would destroy Hunt’s chances at the South Carolina ballot box. But West wanted to maintain the cover-up because he and the Ledger management believed that Hunt’s election to the Senate would be a good thing for the country. Between those two things, Lancer got so mad at West he pushed him off the bridge, then oddly confessed to it in open court during his trial under cross-examination by prosecutor Nolan Price (series regular Hugh Dancy).

That almost never happens in real life; real defendants, even guilty ones, under cross-examination usually spin an increasingly complicated web of lies that ultimately undermines their credibility with jurors. It’s a leftover of the old Perry Mason myth in which defense attorney Mason was regularly shown cross-examining the real perpetrator of the crime his client was on trial for and ultimately wresting a confession out of them. (This was one of the quirkier aspects of Perry Mason; it convinced a lot of people, including my late ex-roommate and ex-home care client, that the job of a defense attorney was not only to exonerate their clients but figure out who did commit the crime. In reality, most defense attorneys know their clients are guilty and their task is to mitigate their punishment, often in plea negotiations with prosecutors before the cases even get to trial.) The script for “Bad News,” written by old Law and Order hand Art Alamo, raised a lot more questions than the show could answer in a 45-minute running time (an hour time slot less commercials), including what happens to our general awareness of the world we live in when great chunks of what we think we know about it are being secretly fed to us by computer algorithms and written by robots. It also dramatizes the dilemma journalists often face: do we print everything we know about someone or hang back and protect them against revealing information that could trash them and hurt our overall interests in seeing good triumph over evil?