Reviewed by Guy Clapperton
Stars Christopher Meloni, Mariska Hargitay, Richard Belzer, Ice-T | Written by Dick Wolf & others
UK certification 15 | UK RRP £44.99 | DVD Region 2 | Runtime 934 minutes | Directed by David Platt
The uninitiated may not know that Law and Order is the longest-running crime shows currently airing in the US. Amid all the hoo-hah about The Wire in the UK it’s easy to overlook this little gem; it’s a straight down the line police procedural, played for realism and by the book. Law and Order: Special Victims Unit (sometimes known simply as SVU) focuses on the sex crimes unit and is the most highly-rated offshoot of the original programme.
No doubt there are little extra benefits to be had from knowing the characters intimately if you’ve been a viewer since season 1, but if season 8 is your introduction then you’ll get to know them pretty quickly. Christopher Meloni plays Eliot Stabler, a reasonably pleasant detective not unduly cursed with brains; Mariska Hargitay is his harder-bitten colleague Olivia Benson. Drawn to SVU by being a child of a rape incident, she’s the most interesting character and it’s a frustration that she’s drawn away from the action early in this season by secondment to the FBI. It’s realistic (and Hargitay was about to go on maternity leave so we’d better let her off) but she’s a more interesting character than her replacement as Stabler’s partner, Detective Dani Beck played by Connie Nielsen; this character’s husband was murdered in 2002, leaving her a flawed officer sometimes too ready to bend the rules to get the right result.
As the season unfolds we’re brought up to speed with Stabler’s marital problems – indeed, the viewer is left wondering whether any of the personnel in this series have an average personal life. Fortunately the stories themselves make up for any shortfall in believability. The opener, and the one that takes Benson undercover and removes her from the fray as a result, is one of the strongest; a woman is brutally raped and her head shaved, but she’s not inclined to co-operate with any ongoing investigation. Genetic defects are covered in the second, in which a young woman has a condition that leaves her looking like a child but with fully-developed adult instincts and a lover who probably finds her attractive for all the wrong reasons, but he’s legal.
It’s in this sort of area that the show really takes off. There are episodes devoted to tracking rapists, and they’re well executed by all means. There are stories about drunk driving and about a death in police custody (implicating Stabler) but most of these are clearcut; the main characters have shades of grey but the bad guy is usually the bad guy. In the stronger episodes the lines between victim and perpetrator are blurred. The father looking for his daughter’s lover not only because he wants to protect her but because he’s a control freak; the rape victim who’s only been humiliated because she’s betrayed the terrorist sect of which she’s a member. You couldn’t do this every episode of course, but when it’s done it’s done right, and the programme flies as a result. SVU has now finished its 10th season in the US; on the strength of the quality of these episodes it has a way to go yet.
EXTRAS None