Law & Order Special Victims Unit....

[Rev. Rye]

I don't remember having seen a full episode of the show, although I do remember watching parts of one episode where a girl with Down's syndrome described taking a sex ed class and saying, when introduced to the act, "that's exercise." It turns out she was pregnant by her boss. I remember putting it in a story about a pedophile trying to fuck a girl he met on the beach because I honestly wasn't sure how else he would have introduced the concept to a seven-year-old girl (thankfully, he jumped out the window at the end after a sudden attack of conscience). Only last year did I figure out that it was an episode of SVU. Also another episode where a twenty-something woman turns out to have been pretending to be a high school girl during a statutory rape case. It was like Maeby's subplot in Season 4 of Arrested Development, except it was played dead straight and this time, she tried to be her own lawyer.

That said, I have read quite a bit about it, but what I have read doesn't inspire a lot of confidence in me. Besides the standard trope of "cops who don't play by the rules and have an adversarial relationship with Internal Affairs" (seriously, we have decades' worth of shows and movies about this and we still wonder why we end up with police brutality, especially since they apparently did an episode about covering up the shooting of an unarmed black teen that portrayed it as a good thing mere months before Michael Brown), kink-shaming (to their credit, at least the closest thing they've come to demonising foot fetishism is shoe fetishism), and some recent episodes ripped off of true stories that managed to showcase the incel subculture and showed how idiotic they expected their audience to be, since they apparently spent a good portion of the episode thinking that the attacker called the victims "Chad" and "Stacy" because of a case of mistaken identity, and know nothing about incel culture until they search the fucking dark web. Meanwhile, in the flesh world, we see the Urban Dictionary entries for their names within the first two entries. And Chad's only at #2 because there's actually a country with the same name. Also, there's also an episode about a gang rape and there's the line "we gang-banged her Gangnam Style." Yes, really.

Honestly, the fact that it's so popular (when its 21st season starts, it will be the longest-running scripted live-action primetime series) honestly reinforces my hypothesis that people (or at least Americans) are looking for a productive outlet for their violent desires (and ContraPoints seems to agree with me, especially as she contrasts its depiction of violence with my favoruite film of all time):




If you want a police series that actually does this sort of thing right, try Dragnet. Sure, it's over half a century old (and Jack Webb has some notably retrograde views on drugs and other issues, though at least he's fairly progressive on race and, to a lesser extent, sexism, although his views on gay rights are about what you should expect from someone pre-Stonewall), but at least when they drop the ball, it's because at the time, authorities seriously thought that (for instance) marijuana led to use of more dangerous drugs or that LSD use led to birth defects. And if you know anyone on the Autism spectrum, there's a very good chance they'll love it (I would personally recommend starting on an episode that doesn't involve drugs). I know this from personal experience.