LAW & ORDER: TRIAL BY JURY: THE ABOMINABLE SHOWMAN {ROUGH CUT} {SERIES PREMIERE} (TV)
Summary
The first in this series of police dramas—a spin-off of "Law & Order"—about the criminal trial proceedings of the New York City judicial system, showing both the defense's and prosecution's points of view. This asset is a rough cut and does not contain credits. In this episode, famed theatre producer and "King of Broadway" Kurt Lascher, suspected of killing missing actress Dede Blaylock 18 months previously, is forced to surrender to the police. He is released on $5 million bail, and D.A. Arthur Branch questions his team about the circumstantial evidence of his guilt, including the revelation that Dede was pregnant, presumably with Lascher's child, when she vanished. Investigators Lennie Briscoe and Hector Salazar question Dede's former roommate Karen Masters, who is reluctant to testify, as well as the maître d' from the restaurant at which Dede and Lascher were last seen. He confirms that Lascher drank heavily and then uncharacteristically called for a rental car, not his usual driver, before departing with Dede.
Karen tells the grand jury about Dede's naïve belief that "notorious" older lothario Lascher would marry her when she informed him of her pregnancy, and they agree to indict him on second-degree murder. The team then learns that Lascher is actually a disgraced former attorney himself, while elsewhere Lascher fires his attorney, Peter Behrens, and hires Maggie Dettweiler, feeling that he needs a woman's presence to win over the jury. Dettweiler bluntly states that she "doesn't care if he did it," but Lascher coldly confesses to attacking and strangling Dede and dumping her body in a well upstate. When a highly unflattering Vanity Fair profile of Lascher hurts the defense's case, they decide to smear Dede's reputation instead, suggesting that she was something of an international call girl. Briscoe warns Homicide Bureau Chief Tracey Kibre that the defense has unearthed a plausible alternate suspect, Matt Mandebach, who may have been involved with another woman's disappearance and was known to Dede at the time in question.
Lascher hires an expensive "jury consultancy" team to stack the deck with sympathetic figures, and during the selection process, Kibre questions potential jurors about their take on "May-December romances." Dede's mother Lynn denies ever hearing Mandebach's name, but Dettweiler runs some tests and decides to focus on the lack of a dead body rather than on the alternate-killer theory. As the trial gets underway, Kibre attempts to prep witness Penny Sterba, another actress ex of Lascher's, who claims that Lascher "terrorized" her and threatened to make her "disappear." Dettweiler panics when Sterba recalls Lascher making a disturbing comment about strangling a dog, and though Judge Amanda Anderlee orders the jury to disregard it, Kibre knows that they won't forget such a damning fact. Lascher insists that the comment was mere hyperbole to wrench a convincing performance from the untalented Sterba, but Kibre then reveals that Lascher once unnecessarily euthanized three of his dogs simply to avoid the trouble of managing them in the city. Dede's body is finally discovered in the well – a few days too late for the jury to hear about it – but after much debate, they finally agree upon a guilty verdict, and Branch is impressed that a claim of animal cruelty managed to seal the deal. Commercials deleted.
Details
- NETWORK: NBC
- DATE: 10:00 PM
- RUNNING TIME: 0:41:35
- COLOR/B&W: Color
- CATALOG ID: B:85408
- GENRE: Drama, police/detective
- SUBJECT HEADING: Drama, police/detective; Trials; Murder
- SERIES RUN: NBC - TV series, 2005-2006
- COMMERCIALS: N/A
CREDITS
- Walon Green … Executive Producer
- Peter Jankowski … Executive Producer
- Dick Wolf … Executive Producer, Created by, Writer
- Arthur W. Forney … Co-Executive Producer
- Richard Pearce … Co-Executive Producer
- Rick Eid … Supervising Producer
- Barry M. Berg … Producer
- Chris Levinson … Producer
- Tim Deluca … Co-Producer
- Tony Phelan … Co-Producer
- Joan Rater … Co-Producer
- William Burns … Associate Producer
- Jean de Segonzac … Director
- James Grissom … Writer
- Mike Post … Music by
- Bebe Neuwirth … Cast, Tracey Kibre
- Amy Carlson … Cast, Kelly Gaffney
- Kirk Acevedo … Cast, Hector Salazar
- Fred Thompson (see also: Fred Dalton Thompson) … Cast, D.A. Arthur Branch
- Jerry Orbach … Cast, D.A. Investigator Lennie Briscoe
- Annabella Sciorra … Cast, Maggie Dettweiler
- Tony Bill … Cast, Kurt Lascher
- Donald Moffat … Cast, Judge Matthew Sherwood
- Cady Huffman … Cast, Penny Sterba
- Lisa Emery … Cast, Lynn Blaylock
- Tom O'Rourke … Cast, Defense Attorney Peter Behrens
- Sam Waterston … Cast, E.A.D.A. Jack McCoy
- Ben Shenkman … Cast, Irv Kressel
- Candice Bergen … Cast, Judge Amanda Anderlee
- Patricia Mauceri … Cast, Judge Francesca Caruso
- George Loros … Cast, Maitre d' Salvatore
- Jill Flint … Cast, Karen Masters
- Rebecca Mader … Cast, Melani Ferris
- Lynn Chen … Cast, Lin, Kressel's Assistant
- Bo Dietl … Cast, Toni Stotti
- Alyssa Rae … Cast, Dede Blaylock
- Nikki E. Walker … Cast, Jury Foreman
- Tony Cucci … Cast, Juror #1
- Chris McGinn … Cast, Juror #2
- Janis Dardaris … Cast, Juror #3
- Ana Maria Jomolca … Cast, Juror #4
- Maria Smith … Cast, Karen Phelps
- Lev Gorn … Cast, Mr. Dushinsky
- Antonio D. Charity … Cast, Bailiff
- David Rogers … Cast, A.D.A. Ted Hearn