Kudos to NBC's "Law & Order" which inexplicably has been relegated to Friday nights. I inexplicably found myself at home on a Friday night so I watched the long-running drama which featured the murder of Jeff Cantwell, an aspiring gay actor who was an escort on the side. The actor was threatening to expose Rev. Sterling, a handsome young pastor (and big closet case) of a big church who was preaching the homosexuality is a sin.
The killer tried to make the death look like a suicide of a man who was tortured by his gayness. But as detectives started questioning his former lovers, they found that to be far from the truth: "He was the gayest man I ever met. Proud and strong," a handsome young banker who had dated Jeff for six months told detectives.
What I liked about the investigation scenes was that the detective simply did their jobs asking questions like, "He's a good looking young actor in New York. He wasn't seeing ANYONE?" There was no judgement, no uneasiness when asking potential witnesses about Jeff's personal life including romantic entanglements. I like the way it was handled so kudos there.
As for Rev. Sterling, he was the Ted Haggard type who preached on thing and did another. He was a real player with the guys while posing as a family man with his pretty wife by his side. Their church was big business. In the end, it wasn't Stering who killed Jeff, it was his wife who wanted to protect the lucrative church empire they had built.
What was most disturbing about the episode was just how plausible so much of the plot it was. Hopefully there won't be any murders like that depicted on "Law & Order" but it does call into question, bigtime, the motives of some of the people who run these big church empires.