Eros in the Upper Eighties

Actor Lothaire Blutheau in two different stories in the Law And Order franchise played a pair of creeps. In a good SVU episode from the first season, Blutheau played a professor of French literature at St. Raymond's University which Dann Florek's alma mater. He was crushing out on a popular coed and when he witnessed her killing, he dragged her body out to some bushes and then shagged the corpse. Angie Harmon's reaction to this was priceless.

In this final Trial By Jury story Blutheau is now a doorman in a ritzy building and he saves one of his tenants who was being attacked by a homeless man and beats him to death. He's acclaimed a hero and Tristine Skyler is grateful and she even pays for his defense when he's arrested.

Fred Dalton Thompson figures let him go before a Grand Jury and they will vote no true bill and that would be the end of it. But the crack ADA team of Bebe Neuwirth and Amy Carlson uncover some evidence that doesn't make Blutheau look so heroic. In fact he's worse than he was in the SVU episode.

After his first lawyer quite on him, Blutheau gets Ron Silver as a lawyer who does pretty good for a while, impeaching at least one of the DA's witnesses. In the end though Blutheau pleads out, but the story is how the Neuwirth/Carlson team got him to do it.

I wish Trial By Jury had been given more of a chance, but I suspect that the audience wanted no one but the beloved Jerry Orbach and when he died the series really died with him. I'm also surprised that the regulars here weren't used on other Law And Order shows. Only the theme was cannibalized and used on Criminal Intent.