User Reviews

I just wanted to mention here than no one in the comments here has mentioned that this is a combined "ripped from the headlines" story of BOTH Naomi Osaka and Brittany Spears. Somebody mentioned Simone Biles and that just isn't the case here. All black women atletes are not the same.

This episode appears to have been influenced by the recent court battle between Britney Spears and her father regarding her guardianship. Aside from murder that takes place in the episode.

It's a mediocre episode and so far the show is starting out a little slow but hopefully it picks up or else I don't see it surviving past this season.

Just can't get into the new one. But watch it due to my parents. Though my mom can't stand McCoy and though my love-hate relationship with Jack is leaning towards the former as he has mellowed out a bit, guess that comes with age.

But it is about the Britney Spears thing. Over a tennis star and her father controlling her. And unlike the real life thing, the Family Courts NY Judge is corrupt as heck.

And it gets him murdered and how that her father controlling the young star there, as she must take a chance to save her freedom and plead guilty to manslaughter or that of life without parole.

The new ADA takes a risk to ensure to get the tennis star out of her father's controlling ways.

Bottom line: another unoriginal, un-interesting story. I'm not still not liking several of the new characters;the only two I like are the returning Anthony Anderson and Samuel Waterson.

NBC : Please STOP having stored based on news. We've already seen the story on the news over and over and over again. Taking a story and adding another twists and tweaks is not interesting, enjoyable television. Go back to original stories.

Not a bad show here. They tackled the Britney Spears issue so they're trying to be relatively topical, but the writing still feels a little weak. It seems like Law and Order: Organized Crime is lapping the other two series at this point.

I understand Dicky Wolf's problem: He's made these huge franchises aimed at White audiences starring mostly White casts and that over the years showed in particular how White cops, lawyers, and juries run the system to their privilege, with minorities and the poor usually paying the price. It helped make us believe only Whites mattered and were heroes.

But now America is changing (or, rather, people are finally recognizing it was diverse all along). Oh, my goodness, there are minorities in this country, and they don't necessarily like being treated as second- and third-class citizens! How scandalous! They might -- gasp -- be full fledged human beings. And the Dicky Wolf's would do what any other cynical corporate shill would, which is just change the product to fit what they think is the audience.

The problem is, we know it's a lie, even those of us who've had to live in such an imbalanced world. As obscenely tilted as TV and movies have been for, oh, decades, the sudden switch to every cop and lawyer being a crusader for social justice -- while, of course, mostly still being White characters -- comes across as mere pandering. Again, the question is how diverse is the writing and producing staff? Who's in charge that gets to make the final decision?

This is yet another episode that suffers from a little more than 40 minutes of programming. That's right -- a third of this show is nothing more than commercials. To put that in perspective. The original Star Trek episodes ran 50-52 minutes, depending on which source you consult and whether you count the credits.

If that extra 8 to 10 minutes doesn't sound like much to you, wait until next time you really, really have to go to the bathroom -- and then wait another 8 to 10 minutes. You'd be surprised how much time that is, including to tell more story.

And that's what's missing here. There are bits and pieces, but the cohesion is missing. Then what remains is characters giving what amounts to speeches about the latest social justice outrage. The shame of it is that the outrage is often legitimate. There are literally hundreds and hundreds of studies that show how the media and justice system treat Whites differently than minorities, usually to the former's advantage and the latter's disadvantage. We're even seeing it now in how fawning the media is to Ukrainian resistance (which isn't a commentary about Ukraine or the war) and suffering when they didn't do half that much empathetic covering for Syria, Bosnia, Myanmar, etc. Erin Burnett didn't squirt tears over someone whose family was wiped out in the Congo. She didn't even bother to interview anyone.

So those are reasons so many longtime fans are having visceral reactions to the hollowness of these later episodes. It's clear the writing and producing team are not up to snuff for how to tell a story within the limitations of time or reality, and it's clear NBC would push even more commercials if they could figure out how without making Law and Order a half-hour (I mean, 19-minute) sitcom. The amateurish acting, the maudlin music, the tinny scripts -- it's just a shell of the former greatness.

This episode bites off more than it can chew. Then it has to race between the commercials to punctuate what little it can to tell the story. There's a murder in a parking garage. There's some banter between the two arrogant and yet somehow boring cops and their lumbering boss. Then the lawyers get ahold of things. They don't really have a case, but in the fantasy world that Law and Order has ventured into (remember when it used to actually have some semblance of being a procedural?), they go to trial anyway. Does anyone have a realistic understanding of just how time consuming and expensive that is? Then, it turns out things aren't what they seemed. That's a wrap, everybody.

The writing is so bad. After telling the court that she bashed a judge's head in with a fire extinguisher, the defendant insists "I'm a good person." That's not said with irony. She means it. And the director treats it that way, too. This after she we're let to believe her using an insanity defense is wrong . . . When sane people don't go around bashing people's heads in with fire extinguishers. The writing and directing act as if all this is literal. There's no attempt at irony, no awareness of the bizarre, contradictory nature of the script.

I had real trepidation about this series returning. It was always the best in the franchise. Now it's a testament to mediocrity like the others, though Organized Crime is getting slightly better. No doubt, some genius will say the usual straw man of "It's only a TV show!" as though that's a rational argument. Oh, Dick, Dick, Dicky Wolf, what have you done?

... the sun is shining bright, the band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light; And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout,

But there is no joy in L&W fandom -- mighty Dick Wolf has struck out. (with apologies to Mr. Thayer)

This is not Law & Order - this is an SJW/BLM indoctrination film featuring the L&W cast.

We have the murder of a white man in a parking garage, bludgeoned to death with a fire extinguisher.

Lt. Dixon is all hand-wavy because "Oh-Pee-Pee" is calling her every two-hours asking where they are in the investigation. Then we get the BLM shoutout of the week: Bernard laments that all the stops come out when a white male judge is murdered, but some black kid from Flatbush gets killed there's just no money in the budget. Now, this is utter garbage, and something no police officer ever would say, but the writers need to carry BLM's water.

The police get video of someone in the garage and question him. He was there to get $100K cash from the victim - who is a family court judge - to pay a gambling debt. Behind the glass, Dixon tells Anderson that a single hair was found on the murder weapon that indicates it's from a woman. So they ask the bookie if he saw anyone else. Just so happens as he was leaving the street exit of the garage, he saw a woman wearing sunglasses (at night) get out of a black SUV and he held the door for her. The cops check the video and - behold! - there's the girl. Gee, it's great they asked that bookie if he saw anyone, otherwise they'd never think to check the surveillance footage in front of the garage. I mean, they checked inside, so why check outside?

They get the plate number from the video, track down the owner, question him, and that leads them to his girlfriend who is some tennis super star who happens to be black with an overbearing coach/father. She won't submit to a DNA test - so Donovan steals her sweat towel and then they have their suspect.

They immediately go to trial. They have no motive, and their case is completely circumstantial. It's during the trial that they learn that the judge presided over the defendant's guardianship case. So, expectedly, the defense changes their defense (they're 4/4 for this "twist" thus far - damn lazy writers) to an insanity defense, and then Maroun does her monologue about how the father is controlling his daughter in order to capitalize - to the tune of $10MM per year - on her success. And then she preaches and laments and diatribes about how the MAN is controlling the WOMAN and how the WOMAN is under control of the MAN and how horrible it is, etc. Etc. Etc. Note that she has the most screen time by far. So, what's this show about?

Note also that it's a very real problem that corrupt judges collude with purely evil people to rob senior citizens of their possessions and freedom by getting court orders to become their guardians - completely without their knowledge. There was a real opportunity here to shine light on a real problem, but instead it's all about me-too and fighting the patriarchy. Screw that, screw NBC, screw the writers, and especially screw Dick Wolf.

Anyhow, the defendant decides to "take her life back" and plead guilty to manslaughter, and says she killed the judge because he wouldn't consent to letting her get married.

And no one ever asks the question as to how she came to go to that parking garage at that time to confront the judge. Oh, that has to do with story telling and that's not what this show is about.

Here's some stats: the running time was 42 minutes, split in to six acts, with fifty-three commercials. Act four was four-minutes long - so here you had four minutes of commercials followed by four minutes of content followed by four more minutes of commercials. Now that's entertainment!

I find it very interesting that another crime show like Criminal Minds can tell a full and coherent story in 44 minutes - with opening and ending credits - and not preach to the audience. This L&W seems hell-bent on using its airtime to push SJW talking points instead of entertain, and furthers the pain by subjecting the viewer to FIFTY-THREE commercial messages. Not worth the effort - at all.

All involved should be ashamed, and I'm done with this garbage.

Fault Lines could have been a contender, the episode to bring the Law and Order revival up to par, with tennis and all and Flushing Meadow. But not to be, because it appears the writers took the "ripped from the headlines" mantra quite too literally with the conservatorship and sisters thrown in along with the kitchen sink. It was like trying to desperately squeeze all the big jigsaw pieces together and voila, we bring back the original spirit of the series.

I am a big fan of Law and Order and I'm thinking perhaps the writers bring back Chris Noth and S. Epatha Merkerson to bring some credibility back.

I chuckled how Anthony Anderson's character was aghast that people would think he's a fan of tennis (or the winter olympics) rather than the NBA or NFL or baseball.