![]() ![]() Yet Benson, burned by his ignominious ghosting years ago and with a decade of knowing better under her belt, still defends him. The district attorney, a black man, voices his concerns to Benson: Stabler is too impulsive, his record too blotted with past violations (including six shootings) and too convinced of his righteousness. Take the SVU premiere, in which Stabler’s wife Kathy is critically injured in a car bomb seemingly intended for him back in New York, he insists on being a part of the investigation despite the conflict of interest. Not that much has changed, though – while it’s no longer tenable not to question Stabler’s brand of heroism, he’s still the hero here. Times have changed, characters say repeatedly in these episodes, amid peppered references to the pandemic and a certain “last four years”. How uncomfortable were SVU and the new Organized Crime going to get? The answer appears to be, at least in the two-hour special (no episodes were made available in advance): not much, or at least, not in a way that would provoke unease with watching a staple of cop-aganda at a time when centering police viewpoints seems less like fantasy and more like complicity. “This has to be a moment where people make themselves uncomfortable, where people in power have to make themselves uncomfortable,” he added. “Presumably our cops will still be trying to do the right thing, but it will be harder for them and they will understand why it will be harder for them,” he told the Hollywood Reporter’s TV’s Top 5 podcast. How will Law and Order, one of the tentpoles of police perspectives on television, reflect a growing disgust with the gap between TV’s fantasy of competency and the reality of a racist, incredibly fallible institution? And how will it handle a character like Stabler, when the qualities that once made him heroic – aggressiveness, heedlessness, violence – are now seen, rightly, as liabilities?ĭuring last summer’s nationwide protests for racial justice following the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, Law and Order: SVU’s executive producer and showrunner, Warren Leight, promised the show would address the outrage and the influence of the hero cop narrative. It’s a dubious choice given the larger cultural reckoning at hand over television’s role in sanitizing police work, allowing audiences, predominantly white people disproportionately afforded leniency by law enforcement, the narrative cover to look away from the brutality inflicted by police on people of color, and especially black Americans. (Both series are produced by Dick Wolf, maestro of a whole law enforcement procedural TV universe that includes NBC’s Chicago Med, Chicago Fire and Chicago PD.) ![]() Nevertheless, Stabler is back on TV, on both the new season of SVU and his own spin-off, Law and Order: Organized Crime, which premiered in a two-hour crossover event last week. His line-crossing vigilantism has only grown more queasy in the ensuing decade, as more and more evidence of systemic police brutality collects in the public sphere. Stabler became, for many, the problematic “zaddy” of past TV, a staple of Netflix binges and unceasing cable marathons. ![]() After Meloni abruptly left the show in 2011 following a contract dispute, Law and Order: SVU continued with Benson as its anchor, and in its 22nd season is now the longest-running live-action primetime series in history. ![]()
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