It’s Not Easy Going On Forever, Just Ask ‘SVU’

Plus: Favorite Podcast Episodes, Onward, and The Dixie Chicks by Linda Holmes Welcome! It was the week when [James Bond was pushed forward](. It was the week when we [saw a new Batmobile](. And it was the week when [Alex Trebek kept on trucking](. Let's get to it. Opening Argument: It’s Not Easy Going On Forever, Just Ask ‘SVU’ We recently learned that [megaproducer Dick Wolf has a new five-year deal at Universal TV]( where he’s been making (among other things) the Law & Order franchise since your grandmother was sipping sodey-pops at the sock hop. While the original Law & Order only ran for 20 seasons, Law & Order: SVU has surpassed it -- it’s currently in season 21 -- and will run through at least season 24. (You should rightly be impressed at Mariska Hargitay’s towering and record-smashing 24-season run, but it’s also true that as far as I know, the current longest-running live-action performance by a male regular in a prime-time series is Ice-T, as Fin Tutuola. Show’s been around a while.) When SVU started, Olivia Benson (Hargitay) was a detective. Then she was a sergeant, then she was a lieutenant, and now she’s the captain. The series always had a different structure from L&O original, with its rough division into half police investigation, half prosecution. On SVU, it’s always been mostly about the detectives, with DAs as a complementary element. Furthermore, SVU has abandoned the “you don’t know about their personal lives” element of detectives like Lennie Briscoe and DAs like Jack McCoy. If anything, we know entirely too much about the families and love lives and back stories of the SVU detectives. (I think I could probably make a documentary about Benson’s son, Noah, at this point. We all could.) But where L&O traded detectives and DAs from time to time, SVU has stuck with a core cast that rotates more at the edges. That’s why we’ve seen Olivia go from a detective fairly early in her career to her being the captain of the whole place. The problem with that, of course, is that what’s fun is seeing detectives go out and solve crimes, not watching the captain argue about paperwork and resource allocation. It’s been pretty clear that the show has strained under the weight of continuing to make Olivia the focus, because she’s beloved, while continuing to make detective work the focus, because it’s not really what she does anymore. It couldn’t have worked any other way -- if she hadn’t advanced in her career, it would be … weird. But the blessing of procedurals is theoretically that they’re so episodic, that they’re less about continuing stories that stretch over the seasons. The only way to tell where you are in the run of old Law & Order when an episode comes on is who’s in the cast. With SVU , you can also see who Olivia is dating, how Elliot’s marriage is, whether Rollins is gambling, and -- of course -- what childhood risk is threatening Noah. It leans much more heavily on the serialized elements, which seems like it wouldn’t be a good bet .... but here we are, looking at a renewal through season 24. They’re obviously doing something that, if we don’t call it “right,” we would at least have to call “effective.” I admit to having fallen a bit out of love with the character of Benson over the years, precisely because the older she gets, the less she’s a scrappy detective and the more she’s a … well, a suit. She has to be. She gives a lot of advice. She does a lot of behavior correcting. She’s doing better than she was for a while -- it does seem that the show has steered out of a very strange skid it was in for a couple of seasons in which Olivia seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time lecturing women about how important it was for them to have children -- women including victims of sexual assault, in whose personal business in re: childbearing she emphatically did not belong. (Benson herself was subjected to a very embarrassing scene before she adopted Noah, in which her ruminations about whether she would ever have children were accompanied by a hilariously on-the-nose, extremely loud ticking noise on the soundtrack. And you thought a Law & Order DA leaving with the final line “Is this because I’m a lesbian?” was jarring.) Very few shows last this long, so very few shows face this particular dilemma, where the lead character has aged and been promoted into a position that’s normally held, on a show like this, by a supporting character. It happened with Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston) on the old Law & Order, but Waterston was never the single center of the show the way Hargitay is, and he stepped back in a way she hasn’t. In continuing with her at the center, they’re trying to do something I haven’t seen attempted too many times. They’ve got at least three more years to figure it out. --------------------------------------------------------------- Newsletter continues after sponsor message --------------------------------------------------------------- We Recommend: If you read this newsletter regularly, you know that Reply All is one of my favorite podcasts. [The most recent episode]( “The Case Of The Missing Hit,” is a brilliant distillation of its best qualities, as host PJ Vogt tries everything -- like, everything -- to help a guy figure out why there’s a song running through his head that nobody else seems to have ever heard of. In fact, if you’re a Spotify user, you can check out [a playlist I made]( of five of my favorite podcast episodes ever. One of the best accounts on Twitter goes into hibernation every year, and fortunately, that hibernation has just ended. [Check out darth]( for all your dog-loving needs, and make sure to check out their [guide to how to wash your paws](. Next week, one of our episodes will look at the new version of Jane Austen’s Emma and also the film Clueless, which is turning 25 this year. So this might be a good time to brush up on Cher and her pals. What We Did This Week: [Onward Image]( Pixar/Disney/Pixar Glen reviewed both [the Disney/Pixar film]( Onward and [the FX show]( Devs. [Our Wednesday podcast episode]( is about Project Runway and features our dear friend Kat Chow. And [our Friday episode]( is also about Onward, a movie we liked, which we chatted about with Petra Mayer of NPR Books. What's Making Us Happy: Every week on the show, we talk about some other things out in the world that have been giving us joy lately. Here they are: - Glen: [Ragnarok]( - Petra: [The Magicians on SYFY]( - Linda: [New York Times Crossword Twitter]( - Stephen: [The Dixie Chicks]( What do you think of today's email? 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