'Law & Order' Murdered Stephen A. Smith

we have all the Law & Order classics in here, buddy

Let’s start with the facts. The facts will help.

Law & Order ran for 20 seasons from 1990 to 2010. It got canceled and spun off and sent to Los Angeles and then it got canceled again and then it came back to its New York roots in 2022 for a revival. It’s currently in its fourth season since this return, which everyone is just referring to as “the 24th season of Law & Order” as though the 12 years in between were blipped out of existence. Maura Tierney is on the show now. So is the president from the show Scandal. And in the most recent episode, they murdered Stephen A. Smith, a character actor known for his work on General Hospital as well as other television appearances.

This last thing is why I’m talking about Law & Order today. The show really did bring on Stephen A. Smith as a hard-charging sports agent named Ted Hunter, let him steal an entire scene right at the beginning, and then leave him murdered in the park with stab wounds in his chest. That’s why I decided to watch the episode. Just the curiosity of it all. And in doing so, I learned two things:

• Stephen A. Smith is a pretty decent actor

• Law & Order is still doing the most Law & Order stuff you can imagine

The first one isn’t that much of a surprise, at least not if you think about who Stephen A. Smith is and what he does every day. The man is a performer. He spends, by my estimation, 18-20 hours a day in front of a camera. He’s always delivering a monologue. He’s always selling his whole deal. It makes sense that this could translate to a fictional role in another context better than, say, an athlete or another non-actor public figure. The man knows how to hit his marks. You don’t even need the video to hear his voice. Look at these screencaps of a speech to a client about cutting his posse loose to protect his finances.

And that’s what this whole newsletter was going to be about, the Stephen A. Smith part of the episode. But then something funny happened, which I should have seen coming given how many afternoons of my life have been lost to four-hour Law & Order marathons on TNT: I got sucked into the episode itself. I actually forgot Stephen A. Smith was the murder victim at one point. In my defense, this episode was an absolute banger for Law & Order aficionados. It had everything: classic stock characters, twists from current events, dirtbike chases, all of it. Examples will help. Let’s do examples.

Did we have “the nightclub owner who doesn’t want to talk to police about the guy who was in an altercation at his club the night before the murder”?

Yup.

Did we have “the potential suspect who flees the cops on a dirtbike and almost runs over a lady pushing a stroller”?

This screencap is blurry so you’ll have to trust me, but that’s him.

Did we have “a youth football coach who reveals a very important piece of information like way too far into his questioning by the homicide detectives and ends up blowing the whole case open”?

There he is. I like that they gave him a stopwatch to wear around his neck. You know, just in case the whistle and matching hat and jacket and the fact that they’re talking to him on a football field wasn’t enough to tell you he’s the coach. Can’t be too careful.

It wasn’t just the stock characters, either. There were also other classic Law & Order moves littered throughout this sucker and, yes, I think you know that means we are Ripping Plots From The Headlines, baby. Look at the lawyers go.

Yes.

YES.

AI THERAPIST PATIENT CONFIDENTIALITY DILEMMA.

It’s so beautiful I could cry. Like a hot bowl of chicken noodle soup on a rainy day. I was actually kind of mad at myself for NOT seeing “AI therapist encouraged the hard-charging sports agent’s younger son to stab his father because the father was putting him through physically dangerous training so he could be as successful as his older brother, who was on the verge of being a first round pick in the NFL Draft” coming. That’s what happened in the episode, by the way. That’s where we ended up after we saw Stephen A. Smith as a corpse in a park. I am so proud of everyone involved in this show for their continued commitment to whatever exactly it is they do.

“But wait,” you say. “There’s an investigation with a bunch of suspects and a contested point of law and also this is an episode of Law & Order. Shouldn’t there be a judge denying motions and granting motions and telling lawyers she’ll see them in chambers and saying things like ‘I’m allowing it’ after very little deliberation”?

Oh, buddy. Oh, does this episode have you covered.

Three things in conclusion:

• Everything in John Mulaney’s Law & Order bit from 2009 remains true today

• The ending of this episode was actually a little sad and it made me hate the guy who is the show’s new Jack McCoy

• I might start watching one episode of this show every year just to check in on all my favorite stock characters

I hope Guy Who Works At The Docks is doing okay. He is my favorite.

STUFF I CLICKED ON

— Claire McNear went on a hunt for the last cans of Four Loko

— David Dennis Jr. wrote a really good, really touching love letter to Around the Horn

— “How Dozens of Brazilians Made Decatur the Capital of American Bull Riding”

— the new pope is a White Sox fan from Chicago, which led Michael Baumann to ask a pretty good question: How Many Wins Is A Pope Worth?

—Brian Phillips also wrote about the pope and gave us even more to ponder, including but not limited to: “How many popes have eaten a hot dog, and which pope ate one first?”

— powerful collection of words from the new season of Poker Face

— here’s an article about Max cracking down on password sharing, which I only mention here to point out that Max Crackdown would be a terrific fake name

— just as we all suspected, there will be a Creed car in the Indy 500

— John Mulaney wants Weird Al in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and… you know what, now I do, too

— the Cannes Film Festival has banned nipples

— some dude won $52,000 betting on who would be the next pope

— you don’t have to actually click on this because it’s just a story about cicadas, but I do need you to know that this is the headline the always subtle New York Post chose: “Red-eyed zombie bugs emerge hungry for sex after 17-year slumber — and they’re set to take over these states”

— capybara on the loose

— RIP to the Louisiana Crawfish King

— YouTube is maybe, possibly, finally cracking down on fake movie trailers

— I have been saying this sentence to myself for hours: “I looked at my bee cameras and I thought, holy smokes, there’s a bear in my bees”

— in the future, every child will be named Liam or Olivia

— see now this is a good post

Okay, that’s it for this week. Please share and subscribe and shout “OBJECTION” at the top of your lungs.