What Makes SVU Special?

Emily Nussbaum ponders the popular appeal of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit:

You can pause an episode, you can laugh at a bad guy. The cheesiness (cha-chung!) is itself a reassurance. For young women, who are endlessly bombarded with warnings of how to avoid assault, watching can feel like a perverse training manual. What is it like to be cross-examined about your sex life? Is there any way to foil a home invasion?

For survivors, there may be something validating about seeing one’s worst experiences taken seriously, treated not as the B story but as the main event. But the show also has a strange therapeutic quality for any woman, a ritualistic confrontation with fear: it might upset you to watch one rape story, but it thickens your skin to watch a million. (As Bart Simpson once put it, “If you don’t watch the violence, you’ll never get desensitized to it.”) And, of course, the show is also a fantasy about something else, something largely out of reach: an incorruptible legal system, in which the police are eternally in the rape victim’s corner.