Now in its 25th season, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit stays the longest-running prime-time live-action series in American television history, which implies that Olivia Benson has now been on the job for 1 / 4 of a century. In that point, serving in her official capability because the lone good NYPD cop, she’s been run ragged. Benson (played by Mariska Hargitay) has been shot, been shot at, been nearly sexually assaulted countless times, been kidnapped a few times, been given a toddler only to have him taken away, adopted another loser kid I can’t begin to even attempt to care about, worn a whole lot of hot leather jackets, been suspended from work, been promoted to the highest—and in any case that, they still won’t let her kiss her former colleague Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni). A lousy technique to treat the officer saddled with the burden of being all the police force’s moral beating heart.
In the 25 years that SVU has been on the air, the characters have been steadfast, but all the things surrounding the show has modified. Creator Dick Wolf can have kicked off all the Law & Order universe because he believed that the cops were the great guys, but the general public isn’t necessarily on board anymore. Our understanding of policing has modified; Americans are less confident within the police than ever before, and while I don’t have clear stats on how all New Yorkers feel in regards to the cops, I believe the recent response (starting from understandably confused to certifiably cracked) to the entity often known as the “NYPD Dance Team” says all of it. There’s no money for Sunday library service in New York, but there are a bunch of dog-shit dancers being paid out of the town’s budget. I sleep easy at night knowing that.
And so, quietly, seemingly in response to the 2020 George Floyd protests, Law & Order shows have steadily attempted to inform a more accurate—or a minimum of a less inaccurate—story of how policing works in New York City. At best, the outcomes are jarring; at worst, they’re straight-up silly. The cops on SVU have at all times been the more compassionate breed amongst Wolf properties, however the show that after used the term “tranny hooker” with alarming abandon now features Benson in monologue after monologue opining about methods to treat “survivors” with care. The original Law & Order, currently in its 23rd season, now features Mehcad Brooks as Detective Jalen Shaw; his plot points are mostly relegated to how he’s policed as a Black man each time other cops mistake him for a civilian. Brooks isn’t the primary or only Black actor playing a cop on the show—Ice-T remains to be very much there, squint-acting like one of the best of them—but now these actors are given eye-rollingly tedious subplots about racism. Meanwhile, the prosecutors on the series are suddenly fighting moral complications surrounding their job, with more hand-wringing around, say, the morality of sending a young Black teenage boy to jail. (As for probably the most recent and worst offshoot, Law & Order: Organized Crime tries to avoid a human element altogether; the show seems to have been written by all of our dads after they read one book in regards to the New Jersey mob in 1998. Let us never speak of it again.)
It’s a tortured and inconceivable task, to walk this high quality line between the valorization of policing that Law & Order was built on, and the more progressive ideals that the show now desires to espouse. To have the franchise live for one more 25 years means it has to adapt. But how do you edit a show built on the flawed and sometimes cruel institution of policing in the primary place?
A recent SVU episode perhaps best encapsulates this strange attempt at mutation. Benson is pulled into an investigation after Chief Tommy McGrath’s daughter is assaulted. He handles it like a lot of the male cops do when considered one of their female relations is assaulted: He tries to get entangled within the investigation, making all the things harder for everybody else, bashing his thick skull through the legal process like only a person in power could. McGrath’s presence taints the investigation, and he’s immediately inclined to rage and violence when the cops have a suspect. (I desired to ask, In what world would the cops let the police chief take part in an investigation having to do together with his own daughter? Then I remembered that I live on this world.)
SVU old-heads will remember how the NYPD’s Internal Affairs Bureau has historically been represented on the show—for years, Robert John Burke portrayed the gruff and useless Ed Tucker, whose raspy throat did a lot of the acting work needed to point out that this guy sucked. He wasn’t effective at hunting down criminality among the many force’s own ranks, but he was good at railroading his colleagues, making life hell for the cops just trying to scrub this filthy city up. This season, he’s replaced with Aimé Donna Kelly as Captain Renee Curry, a Black police officer who, unlike her predecessor, is portrayed as competent and morally right. “I got into IAB hoping to make a difference,” she tells Benson. We consider her—hell, she even went to this point as to analyze our beloved Benson herself.
But look, this remains to be a show about cops. While Kelly’s character is likely to be an adroit addition to the NYPD, her plotlines to this point are about how hard of a time she’s having internally. The stories told on this context aren’t nearly how she’s finding corruption, but about how much inevitable internal pushback she’s experiencing. Here, the show keeps telling on itself: Why is it so hard for this one lone honest IAB officer to get anything to occur? Shouldn’t we be aware of how much resistance her attempts to right a incorrect are met with throughout the NYPD? Are we imagined to root for Ice-T’s Fin Tutuola when he berates a teenage suspect who seems to be innocent? (It seems the child had footage that exonerated him, but he was unwilling to provide it to the cops because he didn’t trust them. The cops are mystified at his silence, as in the event that they didn’t just attempt to bully him right into a false confession mere days earlier.) IAB is imagined to create checks and balances for the police force, but Law & Order has historically presented them as evil, unrelenting, and devious. Now, in the brand new world order, they simply seem neutered.
Law & Order is attempting a type of doublespeak: It wants to have interaction within the usual doldrums of cop television (being a renegade, ignoring the principles, literally beating people up until they offer you the knowledge you would like) while also fretting over how hard it’s to get anything done. The franchise wants to point out that even “good” cops need to interrupt the principles, that they’ve their very own biases to contend with, while also showing how a department like IAB buckles under internal pressure from its own police force, and the way the skinny blue line offers negligent cops incredible protection. The series has at all times been copaganda, built on a foundational love for the police, and yet it could’t help but give the general public ammunition against itself. What we’re left with is an identity crisis. Rather than ideologically easy, don’t-think-too-hard-about-it entertainment, Law & Order has turn out to be more of a many-layered psychodrama that seems frightened its audience doesn’t trust it anymore.
Law & Order’s central tension was once bad guys vs. cops. Now it’s good cops vs. bad cops. Even copaganda like this franchise can’t adequately make the just-a-few-bad-apples argument; the failure of policing has turn out to be a most important plot point in perpetuity, and it’s torture to observe. If we’re stuck with this mess that keeps attempting to have it each ways, the very least they’ll do is just let Olivia and Elliot kiss. It’s been 25 years of pro-cop pablum—it’s time to finally give the people what we actually want.
Credit : slate.com
