Family 61 Law & Order episodes
Crimes rooted in family relationships, including adoption, divorce and family loyalty.
- Season 1 · Episode 16
The Torrents of Greed: Part 2
Barred from retrying the mob boss for murder, the prosecutors look for another way to reach him.
- Season 1 · Episode 19
The Serpent's Tooth
When a businessman and his wife are murdered in their home, everything points to the sons who stand to inherit.
- Season 2 · Episode 2
The Wages of Love
A double murder in a Manhattan bedroom leaves detectives choosing between a hot-tempered ex-boyfriend and a wife who says she still loved her husband.
- Season 2 · Episode 3
Aria
A young acting student who never touched drugs dies of an overdose, repeating that she didn’t want to do it.
- Season 2 · Episode 12
Star Struck
A woman found beaten and strangled in Central Park turns out to be a daytime soap star.
- Season 2 · Episode 14
Blood Is Thicker...
A society wife’s killing seems to fit a string of muggings, until her husband’s alibi and his mother’s influence start to look suspicious.
- Season 2 · Episode 19
The Fertile Fields
A diamond dealer’s burned body is found in an Upper West Side alley after witnesses see a group of Black teenagers running from the area.
- Season 2 · Episode 20
Intolerance
A 17-year-old honors student from Chinatown is shot three times in a dead-end courtyard on his way home from school.
- Season 2 · Episode 21
Silence
A well-liked city councilman falls from a bridge onto 10th Avenue, and the evidence suggests he was murdered first.
- Season 3 · Episode 1
Skin Deep
A fashion photographer is found stabbed in his loft, and his secret business pimping out models past their prime points detectives toward one of his women.
- Season 3 · Episode 4
The Corporate Veil
A teenager dies when his pacemaker fails, and the investigation moves from a dealer in recycled devices to the family that runs the manufacturer.
- Season 3 · Episode 20
Securitate
A Romanian immigrant’s murder exposes his brother, a former secret police officer, and the brother’s own killing brings a novel insanity defense.
- Season 4 · Episode 6
Pride and Joy
A Manhattan building superintendent seems to die stopping a burglary, until the evidence points to his gifted teenage son, who says he was defending himself from an abusive father.
- Season 4 · Episode 12
Snatched
A real estate magnate caught carrying millions in cash says his son has been kidnapped, but the case turns back on the son himself.
- Season 4 · Episode 13
Breeder
A young woman who gave birth alone says her newborn has vanished, and the search for the baby uncovers several couples who each paid her expecting to adopt it.
- Season 4 · Episode 18
Wager
A rising baseball star’s father is killed over huge gambling debts, and the bookie charged with the murder may not be the one who struck the fatal blow.
- Season 5 · Episode 4
Family Values
A wealthy publisher disappears in an apparent suicide, and the case exposes her husband’s affair with her teenage daughter.
- Season 5 · Episode 7
Precious
A reported baby kidnapping turns into a murder case against a mother whose earlier infants also died suddenly.
- Season 5 · Episode 11
Guardian
A young heroin addict from a wealthy family is found dead outside a daycare center, and the trail leads to the man who manages her family’s money.
- Season 5 · Episode 15
Seed
A woman shot in a bank leads detectives to a fertility doctor who faked pregnancies and secretly fathered dozens of his patients’ babies.
- Season 5 · Episode 21
Purple Heart
A radio-car driver with a Purple Heart is shot dead in his cab, and the robbery behind it starts to look like a contract killing.
- Season 5 · Episode 22
Switch
A free-clinic psychiatrist is beaten to death after hours, and the case turns on a patient diagnosed with multiple personality disorder and her estranged father.
- Season 6 · Episode 4
Jeopardy
A triple shooting at a computer magazine points to the editor’s wealthy brother, but a judge dismisses the case midtrial, and the reason turns out to be a bribe.
- Season 6 · Episode 5
Hot Pursuit
Police end a deadly robbery spree and free the gunman’s female partner, a Connecticut kidnapping victim, but McCoy believes she became a willing accomplice.
- Season 6 · Episode 14
Custody
The killing of a corrupt social worker leads to a birth mother who took her son from his white adoptive family, and former ADA Paul Robinette defends her by putting the system on trial.
- Season 6 · Episode 20
Girlfriends
A senior is found dead in her college library, and the search for a campus rapist turns into a case about a student escort ring and a father’s shoe business.
- Season 6 · Episode 22
Homesick
A five-month-old dies of nicotine poisoning after a jar of strained plums, and suspicion falls on his unhappy English au pair.
- Season 7 · Episode 7
Deadbeat
A father who skipped out on about $200,000 in support is shot in a Midtown hotel, and the evidence points to the grandfather of his son, a boy with leukemia.
- Season 7 · Episode 8
Family Business
The finance chief of a family-owned Manhattan department store is shot in his office, and suspicion falls on both of the owner’s daughters.
- Season 7 · Episode 10
Legacy
A professional hit man’s near miss on a T-shirt printer leads to the grandmother who hired him, and to her son’s death five years earlier.
- Season 7 · Episode 13
Matrimony
A wealthy philanthropist is strangled in his townhouse, and suspicion falls on his 22-year-old wife, a former stripper whose marriage was arranged by his lawyer.
- Season 7 · Episode 21
Passion
A young book editor is found beaten to death inside a novelist’s loft, and suspicion turns to the novelist’s longtime companion, a lawyer who insists their relationship was intact.
- Season 7 · Episode 22
Past Imperfect
A former supermodel is found dead before her own surprise birthday party, and a DNA clue points investigators toward a blood relative.
- Season 8 · Episode 2
Denial
Blood in a cheap hotel room leads to two college sweethearts who deny their newborn son ever lived, until his body is found in the middle of their trial.
- Season 8 · Episode 7
Blood
A drug executive’s young wife falls from their balcony weeks after giving up a baby who turns out to be part Black, exposing her husband’s lifelong secret and his ex-wife’s fears.
- Season 8 · Episode 16
Divorce
A hospital marriage counselor who evaluates Catholic annulments is stabbed in her office, and suspicion falls on an anxious ex-wife fighting her husband’s annulment while their divorce lawyers keep feuding.
- Season 9 · Episode 1
Cherished
A little girl dies days after her adoption, her troubled older brother is arrested, and new ADA Abbie Carmichael follows the case back to the couple and the Russian doctor who passed along a dying child.
- Season 9 · Episode 18
Juvenile
The shooting of a star newspaper columnist leads back to the 1978 death of a Broadway actress, a mobster wrongly imprisoned for it, and a killer who was a juvenile at the time.
- Season 10 · Episode 3
DNR
A judge is gravely wounded in what looks like a carjacking, and as the case turns to her husband, she defends him while seeking to end her own treatment.
- Season 10 · Episode 15
Fools for Love
The bodies of two teenage girls lead to a serial rapist and his girlfriend, the older sister of one victim, and a plea deal with her comes back to haunt McCoy.
- Season 11 · Episode 13
Phobia
A gay man is beaten to death and his partner’s adopted son is taken, and the case turns on whether the boy’s birth father killed for custody or out of hatred.
- Season 11 · Episode 20
All My Children
The shooting of a wealthy developer’s estranged son exposes a blackmail plot built on a paternity claim, and suspicion shifts from the young woman behind it to the father himself.
- Season 11 · Episode 21
Brother's Keeper
A medical-supply executive is shot at a Manhattan driving range, and the obvious suspect, a veteran Irish mobster, has two FBI agents vouching for his whereabouts.
- Season 12 · Episode 3
For Love or Money
A paroled thief shot in a West Side parking lot turns out to have been paid to kill a wealthy electronics retailer, and the trail leads to the man’s widow and her college-age daughter.
- Season 12 · Episode 16
Born Again
An adopted girl with severe behavioral problems dies during an unlicensed rebirthing session, and McCoy must sort out how much blame belongs to the therapist and how much to the mother who brought her there.
- Season 12 · Episode 20
Dazzled
When a much younger second wife plunges from a rooftop, the suspects include her husband, her former boyfriend and the husband’s embittered ex-wife, but the answer lies inside the family.
- Season 13 · Episode 10
Mother's Day
A prep-school girl’s hit-and-run death leads to the driver, a young man stabbed to death by his own mother, whose niece defends her by arguing she acted to protect others.
- Season 13 · Episode 15
Bitch
A charming stockbroker is killed in his home, and the case leads from his photographer girlfriend to her mother, a cosmetics tycoon and friend of DA Arthur Branch.
- Season 14 · Episode 7
Floater
A woman pulled from the Hudson turns out to be a family court clerk, and her husband looks guilty until the prosecutors find a divorce lawyer paying to get his cases before a favored judge.
- Season 14 · Episode 13
Married with Children
A motivational speaker is pushed from a hotel balcony, and suspicion falls on her former partner, who helped raise their daughter but has no legal claim to her under Florida’s ban on adoption by gay people.
- Season 14 · Episode 23
Caviar Emptor
A wealthy Persian Jewish caviar dealer dies in bed the day after his wedding, and a family fight over an autopsy opens a murder case against the daughter he was about to move out of his house.
- Season 15 · Episode 9
All in the Family
A diamond dealer cooperating with federal prosecutors is gunned down on a crowded sidewalk, and the hit leads from Russian mobsters to his wife, who was trapped in a marriage she could not leave.
- Season 16 · Episode 5
Life Line
A young journalist posing as a gang member is shot dead, and the trail leads to a Long Island real estate broker whose imprisoned son is at the mercy of the gang she was exposing.
- Season 16 · Episode 13
Heart of Darkness
A freelance journalist with a severe mood disorder is found drowned in a hotel bathtub beside a forged suicide note, and his girlfriend’s claim that she simply helped him die begins to crack when a video shows a third person in the room.
- Season 17 · Episode 3
Home Sweet
An eight-year-old girl is killed when an Upper East Side brownstone explodes, and suspicion falls on the owner’s ex-wife, who stands to profit from a battle over his land.
- Season 17 · Episode 12
Charity Case
A producer is shot dead outside an ice cream parlor as he holds the baby he and his actress wife adopted from Africa, and the case uncovers what became of the real child.
- Season 19 · Episode 2
Challenged
The killing of an engineer in a park known for drug dealing leads to a group home, a hidden witness with an intellectual disability, and a family that gave that witness up as a toddler 44 years earlier.
- Season 19 · Episode 8
Chattel
The murder of a married pair of divorce lawyers leads the detectives to a Haitian adoptee sent back home after a divorce, and then to a couple who brought Haitian children to New York to work as servants.
- Season 20 · Episode 4
Reality Bites
A mother of ten adopted special-needs children is beaten to death at home, and her husband’s eagerness to put the family on a reality show makes him the prime suspect.
- Season 20 · Episode 18
Brazil
The poisoning of a climate-change skeptic leads to his wife’s embittered ex-husband and a custody war over their daughter, one that puts Cutter’s own childhood on the record.
- Season 20 · Episode 22
Love Eternal
A reality show’s cameras arrive for a fashion makeover and find a murder scene, and the victim’s eccentric widow, whose first husband also died suddenly, becomes the obvious suspect.