4 gibbles out of 5
Directors: Various TV people
How d’ya like your police procedurals, eh? Do you like ’em all glitzed and gored up like CSI? Maybe you like some witty witty ha ha like Bones? Or the centralized characters focus of an NCIS? Or maybe you just want to divest yourself of all the extras and get down to business. Well, you’re in luck – so does Law and Order.
Creator Dick Wolf struck on a good formula with his Law and Orders, taking headlines and an ensemble cast and, for the most part, just presenting a case a week. It sidesteps most of the problems of TV by never claiming to be more than, in a way, a document – it’s rare that a case will extend over one episode, and the tension doesn’t come from character interactions or omg our lead is trapped in a wine cellar, but rather from the thrill / anxiety that should (in a well-written show, which L&O generally is) be inherent in finding the suspect.
SVU gets a notch above most other L&Os from me, though, because it’s cast works together incredibly well. Despite this avoidance of TV tropes as mentioned above (accepting that Law and Order is, basically, one big trope), many of the other versions of the show do get distracted by their characters. If not their behaviors off-screen (which in all incarnations is, thankfully, not often the case), but their nuances on screen. We all end up liking one character or another and the show knows it, and starts gearing it toward moments that we like. We love Christopher Meloni and Mariska Hargitay, and they have established aspects of their personalities – Stabler (Meloni) and his anger, Benson (Hargitay) being the daughter of rape – but it’s doled out appropriately to match whichever case we’re solving this week, and all of the character’s in the office are similarly shaded so that we really don’t mind spending time with Ice T.
Carrying over to all Law and Orders, and setting the show apart from most, is that not everything works out. People get away, cases are usually brought to trial with acceptable but not perfect results. It’s what ends up giving the premise a bit more heft and reality than others, even adding legitimacy to the show beyond entertainment.
All in all it’s still a police procedural. And with this branch of the show focusing exclusively on sexual victims, you can sort of pick out the devious child abuse / rape territory where most episodes are going to go, meaning you can skip out on the middle and still get the gist. But there’s a reason Law and Orders have found an audience for so long, and SVU, one of the longest running versions, strikes a unique balance between recognizability and reality to make for easy to watch, and occasionally truly affecting, television.
Sometimes people pose during the course of the show.
vaguely-offensive 