(Sorry this post may go on a bit. Believe it or not but I edited this thing down a lot. But I get verbose when I'm pissed off about something.)
(Spoiler alert: I'm pissed off.)
As a big fan of the original Law & Order and a very frequent consumer of it's ubiquitous reruns on various cable channels, I was thrilled to hear that the original show, the mothership, was to be revived for a new 21st season after being ignominiously cancelled back in 2010.
I was eager for any news or glimpse of Sam Waterson as the venerable New York City district attorney Jack McCoy or Anthony Anderson as Detective Kevin Bernard. I was anxious to meet the new characters filling out the roster.
I was really happy the show was returning and looking forward to premier of the original Law & Order.
Then I saw it.
And I'm left to wonder:
What the hell?
Why did the producers decide that after 12 years of no new original Law & Order, this is the story they wanted to start with?
The murder of the week centers around an African American singer named Henry King who (like Bill Cosby) was beloved by millions of people before his reputation was destroyed when it's revealed he raped 40 women. King goes to prison for 2+ years but is released on a technicality and is now making the talk show rounds pleading his innocence and seeking justice for black men in America.
He winds up dead outside his brownstone in NYC with 5 bullets in him, 4 in the chest and 1 in the groin.
We immediately have 40 suspects, any one of the 40 women he raped. Now in true classic L&O fashion, the actual killer would be someone else.
Nope, it really is one of the 40 women Henry King raped.
Which means for our first new episode of Law & Order in 12 years, we get:
- a most unsympathetic murder victim
- a very sympathetic murderer, Nicole Bell, a victim of rape who is lied to by a police detective (male, of course) to coerce a confession, is prosecuted by the district attorney's office and who is found guilty of by a jury so yeah, our team... wins?
Look, Law & Order is no stranger to this kind of thing. There have been episodes where the murder victim is total scum and totally deserved to die and the person who killed them had every reason to do so. But the case that attorneys like Ben Stone, Jack McCoy & Mike Cutter made over the years is that whatever the cause, it is against the law for one person to murder another.
Sometimes the DA's office won those cases and sometimes they didn't.
This felt like a case that should've been lost.
Yes, Nicole Bell murdered Henry King and that is against the law. The jury finds her guilty because they followed the law. But is it justice?
The case is challenging on legal and moral grounds and would make for thought provoking television. But it seems poorly handled and is certainly a strange choice to open a season with for a show missing new episodes for a dozen years.
Never mind the questionable story material for this episode. The new characters are iffy at best and in one case, an undeniable asshole.
Say hello to Jeffrey Donovan as Frank Cosgrove, an undeniable asshole.
For anyone out there who believe in ACAB (All Cops Are Bad), well, Cosgrove will do nothing to disavow you of that observation.
From jump, Cosgrove is blunt and belligerent who thinks everyone (especially black youth) should just jump to attention the second he flashes his badge. He makes a point of saying what he thinks which he makes a point of saying a half dozen times in the episode. ("I say what I think!" Translation: "I am undeniable asshole!")
It's Cosgrove's behavior towards Nicole Bell during interrogation that marks the character as completely reprehensible.
Over hundreds of episodes of L&O, I've watched as detectives would finagle getting on the "good side" of a suspect, empathizing with a serial killer or a disgruntled employee why those bitches or that bastard had to do die. They bend the truth a bit. "We know" (suspect but we have no hard evidence) "that you killed them and we understand why" (you are one sick person).
Cosgrove doesn't bend the truth, he breaks it.
He tells her bluntly that they have video of the murder itself with her face clearly visibly in the gun flash. (They do not. They have video evidence that clearly places her in the vicinity of the murder but not at the murder scene itself.)
He tells her emphatically that the district attorney does not want to prosecute her. (Well, no, they are not looking forward to this case but they will do their job.)
And if she just tells them what happened, she can go home. (No spinning that one.)
When she confesses and is formally charged with Henry King's murder, Nicole sobs, "You said I could go home!" Cosgrove replies with a sneer, "Guess what? I lied!"
Pulling that shit on a serial killer suspect is one damn thing but this is an emotionally distraught woman who shot her god damn rapist.
Frank Cosgrove is a god damn son of a bitch and maybe the absolute worst character on any TV show ever.
Not that anyone else is looking all that good on this show.
Camryn Manheim’s Kate Dixon does not make a good impression as the squad's lieutenant, mostly by acting annoyed and contributing little of substance to the investigation. To be fair, she is working against the memory of the much beloved S. Epatha Merkerso as Anita Van Buren whose squad lieutenant had a quasi relaxed den mother quality; she wasn't easily rattled but she made sure her detectives knew who was in charge. Unlike Donovan's completely reprehensible Cosgrove, I am willing to give Manheim's Dixon a chance to grow into the role. Manheim is usually good in whatever she does and she's already played this sort of role very well in the late and still lamented Stumptown.
Hugh Dancy's Executive Assistant DA Nolan Price seems easily flustered and out of his depth. His decision to try the case without Bell's confession makes sense to me; his assessment of Cosgrove's methods are absolutely correct and any decent defense attorney would tear it to shreds. But Price is doing this without any support from District Attorney Jack McCoy who reminds Price that it’s perfectly legal for cops to lie. This is not a new viewpoint for McCoy who has argued for cops to bend the truth to get a confession. But Price asserts that there are different degrees of lying and the idea of cops lying to get the job done should be assessed on a case by case basis. Which seems reasonable but also makes Price seem feckless.
A moment about Jack McCoy. God knows Sam Waterston is a national treasure and it just seems right to see him back as District Attorney Jack McCoy in the Law & Order universe once more. But there is no denying that Waterston is hella old now and looks way more exhausted than Steven Hill ever did as DA Adam Schiff. And Jack McCoy's hackneyed critique of “defund the police” is more than a little tone deaf when in real life the New York City police budget increased last year.
Odelya Halevi as Samantha Maroun, Assistant District Attorney, is pretty much a non-entity. Her initial assessment of Cosgrove's elicited confession is that it was perfect, contradicting both the view of her boss and any damn person with a shred of conscience watching this shit show on TV. Maroun gets some back story shoe horned into the last act when she reveals in her close to the jury (Price backs out of delivering the closing statement) that her sister was raped and murdered in Georgia 9 years prior. Which makes Maroun sympathetic to Nicole Bell needing revenge against Henry King. But Bell still needs to answer for murdering King.
And the jury agrees.
Waterston and Anderson are not the only L&O alum to put in a return appearance. Carey Lowell returns as Jamie Ross.
- Ross left the DA’s office to work as defense attorney.
- She was last seen as a judge in Law & Order: Trial By Jury.
- So why the hell did she take up being a prosecutor again for the DA's office?
Ross was the prosecutor who put Henry King away for raping 40 women. Unfortunately, it's her case work that leads to the technicality that springs King from jail. Ain't nobody on any side of this happy with her.
And at one point, Ross is a possible suspect in King's murder. Having a former main cast member as the murderer would've been genuinely interesting. To bad we didn't go in that direction.
If they had gotten Angie Harmon back as Abby Carmichael, her I could believe would shoot that son of a bitch.
There's no information on what happened in the intervening years between the end of season 20 and the start of season 21. Bernard does say he's only been partnered with Cosgrove for 2 months and there is some suggestion that Price is relatively new to his position as Executive ADA. I suppose we may get some hints in the future what happened to Lupo, Van Buren, Cutter and Rubirosa.
I noticed the episode was co-written by show creator Dick Wolf and it's my suspicion that much of the ham fisted dialogue, poorly constructed conflicts and tone deaf plotting are due to his influence. I think that show creators are not always the best caretakers of their show, something I call the Roddenberry Rule.
I will continue to give the revived L&O a try for awhile in the hopes of some kind of pay off that Cosgrove will find redemption or at least die in some excruciatingly painful and embarrassing manner.
And that wiser heads will prevail going forward who remember what made L&O great in the first place.
Next week in the Touchbase, I catch up on the debut of Killing Eve's new and final season.
Until next time, remember to be good to one another and try to keep it down in there, would ya? I'm trying to watch TV over here.
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