Last night’s episode of
Law and Order: Special Victims Unit was not as bad as I expected. It contained a number of features that could have made it bad – a special guest star, a disabled child, a terrorism subplot – but I managed to watch the whole thing without uttering, “I hate this show.”
And that’s the main thing that makes me sad about SVU: It’s best assessed these days in degrees of bad. I take no pleasure in derogating the only network show I watch religiously. (Mariska Hargitay is just too lovely to abandon.) But the show tries my patience. A lot. Although I was initially reluctant to watch “the rape show,” I eventually got into it and have remained faithful. But the show seems to have forsaken its loyal viewers.
Here’s why the show makes me sad.
5. There are too many special guest stars.
Special guest stars are an indication of jumping the shark, and SVU
is definitely guilty of abusing this practice. Almost every episode features one. (Last night’s was Aidan Quinn. Last week it was Melissa Joan Hart.) Sometimes they’re good. Cynthia Nixon did a creditable job a few weeks ago. (Here’s a clip.) But there are just too many of them. Did we really need Bob Saget, or Jerry Lewis as Munch’s homeless uncle?
4. They seem to have a problem with scope.
In the early years, the show was about the investigation of a crime – either a sex crime or a crime against a child. They didn’t even have a dedicated A.D.A. in the first season. Then they brought Alex Cabot (Stephanie March). How I miss her. But that’s not really my point. The point is that the case often seems to be a pretext to get to some enormous issue such as how the army treats its soldiers, or homeland security or the diabetes epidemic. When an episode begins with a hostage standoff and ends with a Manhattan A.D.A. issuing a subpoena to Donald Rumsfeld, you know the show has gotten out of control.
3. They go overboard with the diagnoses, conditions and defense theories.
So far this season alone, we’ve had Williams Syndrome, sex-somnia, juvenile sex-addiction and brilliantly-faked Dissociative Identity Disorder. The sex-somnia and juvenile sex-addiction were respectively successful and unsuccessful justifications for rape. I realize this is supposed to be Manhattan and thus you’re going to see a little bit of everything, but enough already.
2. Their personal lives intrude too much.
One of the hallmarks of the
Law and Order franchise is that it’s not about the personal lives of the detectives and lawyers. We get glimpses of their lives (and sometimes we get to see them awkwardly come out as they get fired). But the show is not really about their personal crap. Until the last few seasons. Then Elliot’s wife left him and he turned into Andy Sipowicz – always brooding and scowling and turning into rogue cop. And Olivia got obsessive about her father and newly discovered brother, and she became a rogue cop, too. Then there was the whole will-they-or-won’t-they dynamic between Elliot and Olivia that led Olivia to briefly and bizarrely join the computer crimes division. Then they complicated matters even further by bringing in Detective Dani Beck. Of course, to get Olivia (pregnant Mariska) out of the way for a while, they had a special guest star (Marcia Gay Harden) send her deep undercover to fight eco-terrorism.
(For the record, Mariska does not expect Elliot and Olivia to ever actually do it.) But the bottom line is that both principal characters got seriously out of control. I am, however, cautiously optimistic that they’re getting reined in. At least Elliot is back with his pregnant wife. But he’s not really happy about it.
1. The writing is god-awful.
The other four reasons are essentially subsets of this one, but I thought it deserved special mention. Yes, the show is in its ninth season, and there are probably only so many stories to “rip from the headlines.” But that doesn’t mean the stories have to be stupid or that the writing has to be lazy. For example, last season ended with every character in major crisis and becoming a source of scandal for the department. They deal with that this season by sacking the captain for one episode and having a member of the troubled department take over. Chaos ensues. So they bring the captain back at the end of the episode. Uh-huh.
However, not everything is bad.
Mariska’s hair looks good again this season. There’s Tamara Tunie. It’s easy to like her.
And Law and Order: SVU was the inspiration for a brilliant, albeit surreal, Sesame Street sketch: “Law and Order: Special Letters Unit.” Watch the clip here. The Munch Muppet is perfect!
What do you think? Is the show getting better, or is it down for the count?
