Showtime (Season 7, Episode 17)
Premise: Eddie Newman’s murder trial becomes a media spectacle as his defense team builds a case against a Hollywood psychiatrist and Ross fights her ex-husband for custody of their daughter.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 7, Episode 17
- Detectives
- Det. Lennie Briscoe (Jerry Orbach), Det. Rey Curtis (Benjamin Bratt)
- ADAs/DA
- Exec. ADA Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston), ADA Jamie Ross (Carey Lowell), DA Adam Schiff (Steven Hill)
- Guest stars
- Scott Cohen as Eddie Newman, Keith Szarabajka as Neil Gorton, Franchelle Stewart Dorn as Defense Attorney Joyner, Paul Hecht as Dr. Dan Duvall, Carolyn McCormick as Dr. Elizabeth Olivet
- Director
- Ed Sherin
- Writers
- René Balcer & Ed Zuckerman & Gardner Stern
Summary
The Investigation
“Showtime” opens the murder trial of director Eddie Newman, whose lawyers Neil Gorton and Ms. Joyner fill the courtroom with associates and reporters. Lawyers in the harassment suit against Mattawin Studios bring McCoy a tape of an executive meeting in which one man says someone should kill Heidi Ellison if she turns on the studio. An executive identifies the speaker as CEO Ben Hollings, and Ellison’s assistant says she meant to testify about his behavior, but Hollings was at a London film opening that night.
In court, a cabdriver admits he learned where he dropped Newman from McCoy, and Joyner accuses Curtis of steering the case against Newman because of an affair with studio executive Lisa Lundquist. Curtis, trying to save his marriage, turns Lundquist down, and she hands him studio memos showing Ellison had shelved Newman’s long-planned “Madame Bovary” film. Newman’s expense report shows he dined with his therapist, Dr. Dan Duvall, an hour before the killing.
The Trial
Duvall’s notes and other evidence reveal that the studio paid him $3,000 a week as a consultant and that he passed Ellison’s confidences to Hollings and talked her out of testifying. When McCoy objects to Ross leaving the office to be with her daughter while Gorton seeks custody, she quits. Judge Callahan orders the material turned over, and Gorton argues Duvall killed Ellison because she discovered his betrayal.
McCoy exposes Ellison’s assistant as a paid tabloid source to show such betrayals could go unnoticed, then asks Ross to come back, and Hollings testifies that Duvall worked on Ellison without her knowledge. Newman testifies that he went to Ellison’s apartment drunk with Duvall, was given tranquilizers there, woke beside her body, and was told by Duvall that he had killed her and how to dispose of her. On cross-examination McCoy puts the barong in Newman’s hands and draws out his bitterness over the film Ellison refused to make.
Spoiler, the ending: The jury convicts Newman of first-degree murder and later sentences him to death. Gorton offers to drop his custody motion if McCoy forgoes the death penalty, and Ross refuses to trade on it.
Why it stands out
- It concludes the three-part Heidi Ellison story, with Newman backed by a high-priced defense team.
- Ross briefly quits the DA’s office mid-trial as Gorton seeks custody of their daughter, then returns at McCoy’s request.
- The defense turns the prosecution’s own disclosure fight over the Brady rule into an alternate theory naming Ellison’s therapist.