Nurture

Episode aired Feb 21, 1997
TV-14
1h

IMDb RATING

7.6/10

298

YOUR RATING

Crime Drama Mystery Thriller

Stone is reluctantly forced to pursue criminal charges against a woman who kidnapped a young girl and took her away from an abusive foster home, even though he thinks she should receive psyc... Read allStone is reluctantly forced to pursue criminal charges against a woman who kidnapped a young girl and took her away from an abusive foster home, even though he thinks she should receive psychiatric care instead.Stone is reluctantly forced to pursue criminal charges against a woman who kidnapped a young girl and took her away from an abusive foster home, even though he thinks she should receive psychiatric care instead.

See production info at IMDbPro

IMDb RATING

7.6/10

298

YOUR RATING

5User reviews

See production info at IMDbPro

Trivia
This episode was originally written to have the girl sexually abused by a male kidnapper. However, shortly before shooting was to have begun NBC felt uncomfortable with the storyline and asked for it to be changed. The writers quickly rewrote it so that the kidnapper was a female who believed she had the best interests of the child at heart. All the locations that had been set up for the original script were used in the episode. The rewrite of the script seems to coincide with the battle Janet Reno was waging for censorship of TV violence, song lyrics, etc....This censorship was the reason that Michael Moriarty (E.A.D.A. Ben Stone) gave as his reason for resigning from the series at the end of season 4, causing his character to resign on the show. This was disputed by show creator Dick Wolf, citing erratic behavior on the part of Moriarty as the reason for the departure of the character E.A.D.A. Stone, and had nothing to do with a censorship battle between the network and Reno, which he stated would not effect his show Law and Order anyway. The timing of an entire script rewrite at this time though does seem to lend some credence to Moriarty's claims of censorship as an issue.

Goofs
At her arraignment Arnette Fenady is charged with, among other things, endangering the welfare of a child in the first degree, implying there are different degrees of seriousness to the crime. However in New York state endangering the welfare of a child doesn't have different degrees, there is only one, it is a class A misdemeanor.

Quotes
Detective Lennie Briscoe: So how did she endanger the kid? Drinking sherry while playing pick-up-sticks?

Connections
References Mary Poppins (1964)

User reviews5

Review

Featured review

7/10

Routine Plot, Great Child Actors

Really good casting for the little kids in this one, but the plot gave me deja vu.

Boiled down: Little girl goes missing from school, and she may have been kidnapped by a well-to-do author. Given the state of her foster home, where she's ignored by a cruel, cigarette-smoking Camryn Manheim and occasionally even beaten, perhaps she's better off with the kidnapper.

The wrinkle: Is the kidnapper (played by Lisa Eichorn, who I recognized as the victim-turned-hitwoman in season 3's "Point of View") doing the deed out of pure altruism, or out of a sense of dissociation from reality, where she's perceiving the kid (played excellently by Stephi Lineburg) to be her own dead daughter who died when she was only a few months old?

The other standout child actor in the episode is Zelda Harris, playing Lineburg's classmate who initially reports her missing. The kid's got acting chops for sure, more than holding her own in scenes with the other adult actors and in a one-on-one park bench interview with Jerry Orbach. And Christine Baranski (currently one of TV's most prestigious actresses with starring roles on "The Good Wife" and "The Good Fight") isn't bad at all as the defense attorney.

Still, this is an average episode, that doesn't really do anything unique. There are better episodes pitting prosecutor Ben Stone's rigid principles against the reality of the cases he pursues. While there's some tense excitement in the detective segment, when Logan and Briscoe still aren't sure exactly what happened to the vanished child, things become more routine once the plot starts settling into familiar territory.