The first thing that should be said about “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” the spinoff to longrunning gem “Law & Order,” is that two “L&Os” beats five “Datelines.”
If NBC must clone programs to fill its hand in prime-time television poker, far better “SVU’s” slight twist on the well-established “Law & Order” format than another rote newsmagazine hour.
But as the first season of the series about detectives who solve New York’s sex crimes progresses, the ways in which it is a lesser program than the progenitor are becoming clear and the fears about its very specialized subject matter are being realized.
“Special Victims Unit” is still a solid television hour, certainly smarter and more intriguing than a “Nash Bridges,” for instance, but it exists in a large shadow, and, instead of the talk of anal rape and genital mutilation growing routine, it just gets creepier.
Like someone who can’t hide the gleam in his eye as he talks about Nazi Germany or the dead cat he came across, the accumulation of episodes is making NBC start to seem obsessed, in a way that makes you not want to let it babysit your kid, after all, and maybe even cross it off your Christmas-card list.
Monday’s episode (at the entirely too early hour of 8 p.m., on WMAQ-Ch. 5) is illustrative. The case starts with a boy found raped and murdered, and the suspect is quickly identified as a neighborhood resident who was on the state’s official list of convicted sex offenders.
The story has enough twists and turns to be intellectually satisfying, as one would expect of a “Law & Order” spinoff, but on a gut level, and in the context of other, similarly detailed episodes, the thorough discussion of the new crime and the suspect’s previous one, right down to an interview with his now-grown victim, comes to seem like stomach-turning overkill.
Even the wording of the opening narration, similar to “Law & Order’s,” smacks of luxuriating in the ugliness of the subject matter: “In the criminal justice system sexually based offenses are considered especially heinous . . .”
It’s not that sex crimes should be a television taboo, or that it isn’t valuable to remind adult viewers, from time to time, of the ways and means of sexual predators. It’s the singlemindedness of it.
The original “Law & Order,” of course, tackles so broad a range of topics that trying to determine which news stories inspired the plot is part of the fun. In addition to not being so formally structured, with the cop phase of a crime leading into the prosecutor phase, “SVU” also differs from “Law & Order” in focusing more on the characters’ personal lives.
The detective played by Chris Meloni is placed, in a very brief scene Monday, at a family picnic, just so he can run over and fiercely hug his own boy. In an earlier episode, his partner, played by Mariska Hargitay, was driven to unethical behavior by memories of her own rape.
But because the overwhelming bulk of the show is still crime solving, this off-the-job business feels shoehorned in, almost like an apology for why these people would chose to work sex crimes. The more interesting personal story would lie in their fighting a growing numbness even to such gruesome crimes, a scenario that perhaps will occur as the year progresses.
I have to wonder, though, if Meloni and Hargitay could pull that off. Competent in the series debut, they increasingly seem a wooden pair, even when they are supposed to be feeling intense passion or anger. I’m still puzzling over the meaning of his oft-used demonic grin, to say nothing of her wearing a tank-top in the office.
The stories are borrowed, like “Law & Order’s,” from current events, in Monday’s instance the controversy over neighbor notification of sex criminals in their midst, but the framing of the intellectual issues is less subtle. “These new victims’ rights laws protect the public at the expense of individual rights,” the convicted sex offender’s lawyer says, as if addressing a law-school class.
Thank heaven, in all of this, for a couple of elements borrowed from a different show entirely. After several successful “L&O”-“Homicide: Life on the Street” crossover episodes in recent years, the “SVU” producers decided to simply import Richard Belzer’s Det. Munch character from the defunct “Homicide.”
His arms-length stance toward life is certainly appropriate to working in sex crimes, and, through him, the producers have also imported some of “Homicide’s” knack for offering droll asides on issues broader than who done it. Belzer Monday chastises a wise-guy teenaged witness, white, for “appropriating black culture for your own bad self. At least be original.”
That’s not a bad mantra for the show, either.
But perhaps the biggest problem with “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” is NBC’s choice of a time slot. It would have been easy for the network to give it the latest-available, 9 p.m. slot occupied by Monday’s “Dateline” — distinguishable from Tuesday’s “Dateline” by, you know, the day it airs.
“SVU” producer-creator Dick Wolf said he argued strongly for 9 p.m., but NBC stuck with its decision to place it at 8. Perhaps it is the network’s theory that talk about an 8-year-old boy being raped and strangled to death, then tossed in the bushes, is valuable information for an 8-year-old boy watching at home to have.
