The pandemic continues, World War IV might be underway and, worst of all, the baseball season will likely be canceled. But there’s a sliver of good news: “Law & Order” (Thursdays, NBC) is back for its 21st season, 12 years after the network canceled it in a head-scratching move.
Catching up on the news
Well, good news in the sense that one more quality TV show is on the air. The episode itself, “The Right Thing,” is filled with depressing news as writers Dick Wolf and Rick Eid catch up on a decade of headline-ripping: police violence, racial tensions and #MeToo. It also illuminates an issue I didn’t know about: Police investigators can legally lie to suspects and still enjoy the fruits of what the fib leads to.
NYC staple Sam Waterston, as District Attorney Jack McCoy, and Anthony Anderson, as Detective Kevin Bernard, return, both appropriately looking like the intervening years have been challenging. Detective Frank Cosgrove (Jeffrey Donovan, “Burn Notice”), makes a great partner for Bernard. Well, actually, he makes a horrible partner for Bernard’s sanity, but a great partner for viewers wanting to be entertained.
“Law & Order” Season 21 (2022)
Thursdays, NBC
Creator: Dick Wolf
Stars: Sam Waterston, Anthony Anderson, Hugh Dancy
Cosgrove is a gruff person but a great character, one who we might begrudgingly admire as the series goes forward. In the clunky early going (before the high drama and twists), Cosgrove manhandles a black witness in the streets. He and Bernard exchange unnaturally on-the-nose dialog about the role of police, and Cosgrove begrudgingly admits video cameras are a good thing.
“L&O” recognizes flaws in policing, but it has always been sympathetic to the state. This is also seen when “the district attorneys who prosecute the offenders” take center stage. McCoy notes with a scoff that some people want to defund the police. But one benefit to McCoy being older: He doesn’t literally pull out a soapbox and climb on it.
Jack is back
McCoy has always been a roguish statist (if you’ll forgive the oxymoron). He’s all about justice in the legal sense, not in the moral sense. McCoy allows his Executive D.A. Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy, “Hannibal”) to try the case against a #MeToo victim who murdered her rapist without using the confession that Cosgrove obtained via trickery. But only if Price is sure he’ll win anyway.
Price will be a strength of “L&O” going forward. Unlike McCoy, he struggles with doing the right thing, and Dancy is perfect for the role – headstrong yet vulnerable. The lightly accented Odelya Halevi backs him up as Assistant D.A. Samantha Maroun. She’s on the same page as Price but offers a gender and racial counterpoint that proves key when appealing to a diverse jury.
Rounding out the sextet is another familiar face: Camryn Manheim as Lt. Kate Dixon, the cops’ boss. More so than Waterston and Anderson, Manheim looks the same as she did a decade-plus ago, as a lawyer on “The Practice.”
That series was a left-leaning counterpart to “L&O’s” right leanings, and a line of dialog soothes longtime “L&O” fans. Dixon assures us that Jamie Ross (guest star Carey Lowell, formerly a regular) is not a liberal crusader, she’s a solid by-the-book A.D.A. I think Wolf and Eid are commenting about “L&O” itself: It will be ripped from the headlines, but it won’t be precious about those headlines’ liberal-media spin.
Hasn’t missed a cha-chung!
“L&O” certainly acknowledges society’s recent push toward kinder and gentler policing – Bernard lightly pre-empts Cosgrove before he can taunt the cold-open corpse. But with Cosgrove and McCoy present, we’re assured that the show won’t wholly embrace that aesthetic.
Notably, “The Right Thing” raises the intriguing issue of the police’s right to lie and shows Price and Maroun are not comfortable with it; they want to win fairly, not merely legally. A quick web search tells me Colorado is trying to pass a law to restrain police from lying while questioning minors, who are most vulnerable to making false confessions.
“L&O” holds Justice with a capital J as sacrosanct, but it’s aware that Justice can and does trample justice. The series functions as a teaching tool about the state’s excesses, even if it’s not an advocate for change.
And it entertains while teaching. This new sextet (braced by two oldies) is a winner, with colleagues of different viewpoints already chafing against each other in ways that make me grin. The O.G. “Law & Order” missed 12 years (during which six “L&O” spinoffs aired), but it hasn’t missed a beat. Cha-chung!