Requiem for SVU

I had seen various episodes of the original Law & Order at various times, and always found it interesting, but I never felt compelled to watch it. I fell in love with Special Victims Unit sometime around 2004. I think I saw the preview for “Mean”, and watched and was hooked.

I have always kind of been into law and psychology anyway, but those still come up in the other versions, and they didn’t affect me the same way. I think the cast had great chemistry. I ended up liking all of the characters, including minor recurring characters. I would be impressed with how they would capture behaviors that I knew real criminals would do. I just thought it was a great show.

I started watching regularly, and as it started being on all weekend with syndicated reruns, the whole family got into it. And really, from 2004 to fairly recently, it was a pretty good run. At some point, things just started getting stupid.

I know that with the franchise you expect a twist, and sometimes reaching for that twist involves some contortion, but then sometimes the result is multiple ludicrous twists, and it feels cheap. After watching “Bang” (John Stamos as a father of forty kids across New York and Europe), it is impossible not to feel that the showrunner learned about reproductive abusers and wasp knives on the same day. That sort of dart throwing does not automatically result in high-quality television.

In addition, they kept making the cops worse. The series used to thrive on realism—even if it was more dramatic than real life, it was still grounded. There were two episodes in a row where people were killed in the station. Actually, a lot of people have been killed in custody or committed suicide with cops right there or gotten trash-compacted while running away. When Julie Hagerty killed herself in front of Finn in “Careless”, it really punched you in the gut. Do that all the time, though, and it loses emotional resonance. And if you are doing it to avoid trials because you are having a hard time coming up with a new ADA, well, that’s just lazy.

The worst thing is, it makes the cops look bad. For years we have been seeing them as super competent and dedicated, and then a guy gets pulled off of a building by his crazy stalker because they started playing mind games with her without thinking about blocking off roof access. Really?

About the time it started going downhill, I started noticing the name Speed Weed in the credits. I don’t know that it is his fault, or really anything about him other than the insistence of various people that it is his real name, but it is hard not to watch those episodes and see that name and not think that there is some kind of a drugs killing brain cells situation going on.

Watching the show was starting to feel like a chore, which we had not quite given up completely, but when Chris Meloni left, so did we. We did watch the season premiere without him, and loving the other actors just isn’t enough. Sometimes maybe it is a mercy to good actors to not watch them with bad material. And there are actually some good shows around now.

Goodbye SVU. We will always have Wrong is Right, Weak, Families, Tragedy, Coerced, Lowdown, and Haunted. I’m getting my procedural fix from Grimm now, but I only started watching it after we had already broken up.