Thread by @Scholars_Stage

Earlier this year my wife decided to watch Law and Order: SVU from the beginning. It began in 1999.

The show tries to stay topical with the news. Some observations.

1. In the early episodes the cops are portrayed as very hard-bitten. Every episode they threaten shop owners with the IRS, rough people up, and generally talk in a way the writers obviously associated with working class New Yorkers.

By 2006 or so this is mostly done with.

2. There is an extremely noticeable shift around 2017-18 where all of the characters shift towards woker viewpoints and plot topics focus on the things like the problems ICE causes for the SVU detectives. What had been maybe a gradual tilt leftwards becomes a drastic lurch.

^woke-er

(Side note inspired by this observation: perhaps conservatives underestimate the extent to which the leftist tilt of modern America was born in visceral reaction to Trump. A world where Hillary won is one less culturally leftist than we have now).

3. There are a series of episodes about racial relations and cop violence between 2013-2016, but they are fairly ambiguous, as sympathetic to the cops as the other side.

The earliest episode of this sort is from the early seasons.

Despite taking place in NYC few episodes 2002-2004 center on either 9/11 or the broader GWOT.

You start to see episodes where veterans and their spouses are important parts of the show around 2006.

There is, however, an episode about Taliban honor killings that aired *before* 9/11.

Before the Great Recession wealthy people are just as likely, and perhaps even more likely, to be victims as they are to be the criminals. There is one episode where a poor man rapes a woman *because* she is rich.

After the Great Recession there is a clear shift in the way the wealthy are portrayed. They are much more likely to be entitled rapists who either try to use their wealth to shield themselves from justice or who feel entitled to acts of wrongdoing.

This suggests to me that we underestimate how important the Great Recession was for preparing America for the entire discourse around “privilege” — that thought complex was old, the widespread conviction that America is rigged for the benefit of an unaccountable few, less so.

6. A common plot question between 1999 and about 2006 or so is the question of whether or not rapists can claim their DNA/brain made them that way. There is usually one episode person season where someone tries to use this as a legal defense.

Was this a major debate that I have memory holed? The fact it disappears after this point suggests the public forgot or got tired of the issue.

7. Up until 2018 or so the show has an implicit pro-life bias. Rapists want women to abort the babies they have sired; the main character is a child of rape, and women are portrayed regretting or being transitioned by abortions.

Pro-choice viewpoints are shown and defended, but when the good guys are given a choice they choose life.

8. In the early seasons of the show the prostitutes depicted were usually trashy. They were often street hookers. Many were old. Many were transgender.

In the newer seasons prostitutes are beautiful and traditionally attractive, and often classy in dress and speech.

9. On the transgender note—one detective in the first or second episode of the show calls one of these prostitutes a “tranny.”

Transgender individuals in later seasons are rarely sex workers and are never referred to with words like these.

On this issue more than any other SVU probably tracks general liberal social norms. In the early 2010s transgender transitions debated; by the late 2010s they are assumed good, with anti-transition attitudes linked directly to crimes and people “who grew up with no diversity.”

9. Religion is a bigger deal in the aughts. The most prominent religion is Catholicism. This is partially because one of the main characters in this era was a devout Catholic, but generally speaking the reverence the show has for Catholicism vs other faiths is notable.

If evangelical or Jewish leaders are implicated in a sex crime this is treated as just another peep; when a Catholic clergyman is involved it is treated as a real break in the natural order.

Along with this is a reoccurring plot device that occurs often in the first decade of the show: the priest who knows about a crime through confession but cannot reveal it.

One feels like the main writers must come from a Catholic background themselves.

No the show writers clearly have more respect for Catholicism than other religious traditions. They feel betrayal when the Catholic preists don’t live up to their vows; they sorta expect the evangelicals to fail in this way.

^noticed a typo a few tweets above: women are portrayed pre-2017 as being *traumatized* by abortions.

10. Before 2012 or so the show often questions the entire premise: victim “advocates” show up to argue that the trauma of a trial is *not* worth it, episodes show how traumatic it is to go through a rape-kit, and so forth.

Relatedly, I am a bit less sure about this without calculating the actual episodes involved, but my impression is that there are a fewer number of episodes with false rape accusations in more recent seasons.

In later seasons it is an article of faith of the main character that the only way to overcome the trauma of a rape is by confronting the rapist in a court of justice. Things are far more ambiguous in earlier seasons.

11. Starting in 2013, and escalating dramatically around 2019, are incidents of multi-episode arcs.

From an artistic point of view I was struck by how efficient the writers were in the early seasons. They were very capable of fitting an arc that introduces and resolves a compelling character’s story in a 45 minute window. Every second filmed was a second that mattered.

One of the tragedies of streaming is that screenwriters seemed to have lost this ability to tell good stories with economy.

You notice this in SVU itself as it relies more and more on multi episode arcs.

13. The internet is portrayed in an interesting way in the early episodes. Basically before 2005 if your kid was chatting with a stranger online, they were going to get kidnapped or raped.

There are many many things that could be said about individual episodes. They do episodes for all the things in the news:

there is a gamer gate episode, a duke lacrosse false rape episode, Jerry Falwell jr episode, the episode where they explain to boomers what Myspace is—and so on.

My comments try to look at trends over many episodes.

I am sure I could think of more upon greater reflection.

If there was any over riding trend I would say this: the problems faced generally become less morally ambiguous and its heroes less hard-nosed the longer the show goes on. I suspect this might have to do with public perceptions of cops generally:

The less the public trusts cops the more the writers and actors must do to make their characters and their mission beyond reproach.

That’s all for tonight folks.

Update: my wife requests that I add AIDS to the list—she was struck by how common a theme it was in the first six seasons (often variation of “can you charge someone who knowingly has unprotected sex even though he has AIDS?”). AIDS does not have the same prominence later.

Thanks everyone, but I am muting this thread now!