A new season of NBC's Law and Order premiered last night with an episode about a conservative journalist who helps his friend murder an innocent woman.
The victim, Macy Harper (Antonia Timbol), is a district attorney who was prosecuting a conservative senator.
In the episode, "Catch and Kill," Harper is found brutally murdered in her home. Police initially arrest an illegal immigrant who lives in a hotel shelter nearby.
Of course, the illegal immigrant turns out to be innocent. He was wrongly suspected because he was wearing a sweatshirt that had been thrown in the trash outside Harper's home. He tells the police that he saw a white man with a beard yelling at the woman outside her house.
Unsurprisingly for network television, every creepy guy from this point onward in the rest of the episode is a white man. White men must always be the perps on crime dramas nowadays. As the episode progresses, the audience learns that the biggest villains aren't just white guys. They are conservative or conservative-adjacent white guys.
Jeff Sanders (Ari Blinder), the man who yelled at the victim outside her house, has posts on social media saying, "Harper sits in her liberal mansion on the Upper East Side thinking she can do whatever she wants. It's up to us to let her know that she's wrong."
Sanders tells the police that the victim was "a puppet of the deep state who weaponized her position to take down [conservative] Senator Holt." He has a valid alibi though, so he is crossed off the list of suspects.
Eventually, police discover that the victim's wealthy fiancée, Dylan Phipps (Bill Barrett), is the real killer. He murdered Harper because she was breaking up with him. Phipps had help from a "right-wing" journalist friend named Kenneth Lane (Michael Esper).
Phipps had abused Harper long before the night of the murder and his rage was caught on hotel cameras. Lane had bought the videos of abuse to protect Phipps. In many ways, the fictional video shown in the episode is similar to real video released this year of rapper Sean "Diddy" Combs attacking his girlfriend in a hotel hallway.
Lane also provided Phipps with an alibi and helped him trick Harper into opening her door the night of the murder. As the episode makes clear throughout, Lane is arrogant and a liar. When assistant district attorneys Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) stop by his office, he condescendingly refers to Maroun as "girl."
Lane: Look, I already told the police what happened.
Maroun: No, you told them what you wanted them to believe.
Lane: Well, your girl's got a bad attitude.
Price: Excuse me?
Lane: Sorry, that came out wrong.
Maroun: No, I'm pretty sure that came out exactly the way you meant it.
Lane: [Sighs] I wish I could help. Macy was an amazing girl, but she and Dylan were happy. They were in love.
Maroun: No, he was abusing her.
Lane: What the hell are you talking about?
Maroun: She was staying at a shelter for abused women. People don't go there because they're bored or to get a spa treatment.
Lane: I find that impossible to believe. In any event, I need to get back to work. So, if you don't mind-- -
Maroun: One last question. Why are you covering for this bastard?
Even before the full extent of Lane's role in the murder is discovered, the episode infers he must be a bad man because he runs a popular right-wing media site. Maroun says, "Lane sells right-wing porn wrapped up as news."
Such nasty right-of-center characters are on brand for Law and Order. In real life, the Democratic presidential candidate's husband was recently accused of slapping a former girlfriend in public. Yet in Law and Order's fictional world, it is conservative men that women must fear.
Left-wing Hollywood is a sea of filth and misogyny, but the entertainment industry is always projecting and accusing conservatives of being vile like them.
