Track the Television Series/Seasons You Completed in 2023

I randomly semi-binged season 1 of Law & Order: SVU. SnoBorderZero, that’s the one without Ice T, but, you get plenty of Richard Belzer which is a good thing.

A few thoughts.

1. I’ll watch anything with Mariska Hargitay.

2. Casting Christopher Meloni was an intriguing choice. He’s doing his best to play the good guy, but that man was born to play villains in Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. I don’t buy him at all. I feel like he spends his nights killing criminals Dexter style. Which leads to my next point…

3. All the episodes end abruptly. We never get a resolution to anything. Dracula can correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the whole point of Law & Order to merge a cop show with a lawyer show? This spinoff is missing the other half of the equation. It purposely leaves it ambiguous if justice is served or not. They likely went with that approach because…

4. This show is laughably over the top. A typical episode will start with the body of a girl that was raped and murdered and her body was left behind a dumpster. Christopher Meloni and Mariska Hargitay will conduct their investigation. Richard Belzer will crack a few jokes. They’ll track down the perpetrator, her abusive ex-boyfriend, and discover that he’s the nephew of the Mayor of New York. The perp will lawyer up and post bail. Then a bomb will go off in his apartment, killing him and destroying all the remaining episode. Christopher Meloni angrily stares at the camera. Fade to black. Executive Producer Dick Wolf.

Notable episodes:

1.01 — Payback
A cab driver is found dead and castrated. Turns out, he was a Serbian soldier that raped a hundred women. Two of his victims tracked him down and killed him. One of them stabs herself to death in the middle of a crowded restaurant as the cops approach to arrest her.

1.02 — A Single Life
A woman is tossed out the window of a high rise apartment. The suspects are her therapist (whom she was sleeping with) and a news anchor (whom she was having an affair with). All their investigating turns out to be a waste of time. Her suicide note turns up in the newspaper. She was a columnist. And she revealed her father raped her as a child and she could no longer handle the pain of those memories.

1.05 — Wanderlust
The mom from Home Improvement is suspected of murdering her tenant, but it was actually her slutty teenage daughter. The whole episode is based around Dave Chappelle’s R. Kelly joke about, “how old is 15 really?”

1.18 — Chat Room
The SVU takes on the Internet. Episode is quite the time capsule.

1.19 — Contact
Outlandish episode of a man that rapes women in crowded subways. The episode is a giant critique of New Yorkers.

1.20 — Remorse
A television reporter is raped and she takes her case to the airwaves. Her and the perpetrators end up dead.

1.21 — Nocturnal
A piano teacher is arrested for rape, but then it is discovered that he mentored one of his students to rape. So basically, one of his victims is also a perpetrator. Dun dun.

1.22 — Slaves
A foreign-born nanny is the sex slave to a yuppie couple. The cops find her locked up in a box with no food & water. Barely alive.

Original recipe Law and Order is the one that religiously follows the "first half cops, second half lawyers" format and (except for one experimental season) they avoid getting into the personal lives of any of the cast outside some one-off lines and background bits.  SVU, by contrast, doesn't give a fuck.  It's a much more conventional cop show in the mold of NYPD Blue and the do whatever stupid and sensationalist thing comes into the writers' heads.

My wife LOVES SVU.  She started watching from the beginning before we started dating and by the time I was in the picture she was maybe halfway through give or take.  We still watch it regularly but not because it's a good show, it's actually pretty laughable but entertaining.  I can't speak to the earlier episodes but they do remain pretty over the top.  I feel like there was this one time in the show where the suspect of the episode was constantly getting killed by some side character and thats how it ended.  'Benson and Stabler find a girl who was raped, they arrest the rapist but there's scant evidence to prosecute, they prosecute anyways and he gets off, before he leaves the courtroom the victims father stands up and shoots him in the head.'  Stuff like that only all the time.  But I don't think it takes long before you get into the phase where most of their episodes are just ripped from the headlines.  I'm interested to finally see the one where the antagonist was based on Trump but NBC pulled it before airing.  I'm sure it'll leak one of these days. 

I randomly binged some newer episodes. The one was Alex Mack, in which she’s a producer for a reality show that airs a rape on live television. And the one with Brad Garrett, where he plays a rapist correctional officer, and the episode ends with him killing that SVU cop in a standoff. Those were noteworthy.