Law & Order: OMG SQUEE!

Posted by sara September 24th, 2008 at 12:00pm In General Law & Order

My love of Law & Order is not quite as deeply rooted or long-lived as Cristin’s, nor as wide-ranging as that of the TWoP writer behind this masterpiece. (I can usually just flail at the TV while yelling “I saw him sassing Lennie Briscoe!”) But it is love, and it endures. I owe the completion of my thesis to the reruns of SVU on the USA channel, and having watched all of Oz last spring (somehow sex crimes made it easier to do financial reports…who knew?) I can speak authoritatively about the SVU-Oz crossover appeal (this week: Luke Perry, formerly charred, disgraced televangelist Rev. Jeremiah Cloutier!). And I was SO EXCITED when SVU came back last night.

We are totally not thinking about banging each other. Totally not.

SVU has long been the soapiest of the L&Os, with the most detail about the characters’ personal lives, especially Stabler’s—we’ve met his kids, heard about his views on birth control, seen his wife go into labor after a car accident, and sat by while crazy (Emmy winner!) Cynthia Nixon tried to cut his throat. (And if we watched Oz, we’ve seen the full Meloni. Meh.) Benson’s shtick is breaking down into a traumatized mess whenever she goes undercover—it happened after she infiltrated an ecoterrorism group (which is…not a sex crime), and again in last season’s finale when she went undercover in a prison to catch a serial rapist. The rest of the squad is a pack of lovable miscreants like Ice-T and cop show stalwart John Munch, who is my favorite.

Both Christopher Meloni and Mariska Hargitay have been playing these characters since the show began, and now in season 10, that’s about as long as anyone ever ought to stay on Law & Order. (Waterston is at 14 years and counting over on Original Recipe, but he’s sounding pretty damn bored. And Orbach, who remains a god among men, did 13 years.) I’m wondering if they’ll start working on an exit strategy for the two sometime—I think they’d have to go together, because they are the chocolate in each other’s peanut butter—because I would hate for either of them to get to that incredibly tired William Petersen point where they’re giving interviews bitching about how bored they are getting paid the GDP of Panama every week to hold a flashlight and peer into a microscope play dress-up.

The show has veered away from the “ripped from the headlines” keep-you-up-at-night stories the original is famous for (and I don’t even know what Criminal Intent is about—they are ALL criminals, y’all) in favor of increasingly perverse and sensationalistic stories. It can tip over into exploitative at times, but at least, unlike Without a Trace‘s sex trafficking storyline last year, it’s not boring. This year I predict more slumming NBC crossover stars (this week was the little boy who befriends Tim Riggins on Friday Night Lights, being all shrill and towheaded) now that they know they can get Emmys for it. I predict Ice-T isn’t going anywhere. I predict the new ADA will be even stupider than Serena Southerlyn was (she came from One Tree Hill, people! They do not have a law school! OMG I miss Stephanie March so much). And I predict that Benson will get a boyfriend who looks just like Stabler and who will also be played by Meloni. And then he’ll turn out to be a serial rapist.