The Ultimate Comfort Show Needs to Make You Uncomfortable
The Ultimate Comfort Show Needs to Make You Uncomfortable
My silly case for why Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Girls are the same
There is only one specific circumstance in which you can say “I can handle murder today, but probably not rape” or “I think I’d be fine seeing incest” and that is when you’re choosing an episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.
There have been 538 episodes of the Law and Order spin-off and I have seen every single one too many times. My friend and ex-roommate Sarah and I created a very precise mathematical equation we should be receiving a Nobel Prize for that calculates how much SVU we’ve watched in our lifetimes: a combined total of more than 2,000 hours. That’s around 40 days of our lives each spent watching Ice-T describe horrible sex crimes with lines like “definitely more wrong here than dirty socks” and hearing detectives very seriously asking things like “do you think that there was a reason the killer sodomized your husband with a banana?” That’s 40 days too many!
Still, we’ve consumed so much that we can walk into the living room, glance at the TV for a millisecond and say “This is the one where they’re actually siblings, right?” Now that Sarah and I live hundreds of miles from each other, I can read a simple “didn’t remember Bradley Cooper guest starred” text and know exactly what she means. Reader, that’s love.
I’ve also seen the majority of Criminal Minds at least twice along with most of the rape/murder/kidnap shows that have been in the public discourse and many that have not (I’d recommend The Five, but Netflix removed it, and that is an especially heinous crime). Chilling stories of assault and killing have dominated media since the beginning of media, and now, you can log onto any streaming service and have your choice: Mare of Easttown, The Killing, Broadchurch, Sharp Objects, Top of the Lake — the list goes on. So much has been written on our obsession with crime shows, with theories ranging from us being fascinated with the dark side of humanity, to wanting to learn how to deal with predators in real life to simply enjoying the adrenaline rush. Those are all probably true, but crime shows are also perhaps the best example of something a lot of television gives us: a proximity to what scares us while we remain untouchable. It’s like watching a lion at the zoo pace back and forth behind a glass wall. As scared as I am, it can’t actually hurt me, which creates a false feeling that it never can. I can always leave the zoo. I can always turn the TV off.
What scares us could look like, in the case of SVU, John Stamos playing a reproductive abuser fathering dozens of children or Sarah Hyland murdering her friend because the friend is better at math. But it can also look like floundering in our mid-twenties, and if that’s the case, doesn’t Girls offer a similar reprieve? The show may reflect worries that all your friends are mad at you or that your career ambitions are unattainable. But hey, at least you’re doing better than Hannah and Marnie! We can watch them, compare ourselves to them, hope they turn it all around, then simply hit pause when it gets too much — not exactly something we can do when we’re actually out and about in the world making a mess of things.
Being close to what makes us uneasy without actually having to deal with it can make for the ultimate comfort show. When SVU’s DUN DUN is followed by a street address, Sarah and I jump to our phones, quickly Google Mapping where the suspect lived or the murder took place. If it’s in Brooklyn, even better. We lived in Park Slope together, so you can bet we were excited when a kidnapping on the show happened under the arch at Grand Army Plaza (which Detective Elliot Stabler identified as the Arc de Triomphe in a photo, bless him). The thought of a kidnapping under the arch in broad daylight when the much-more-believable-as-a-crime-scene Prospect Park is right next to it is kind of ridiculous, but who cares! Besides, spoiler: There was no kidnapping — just a classic brother kills his sister, fakes a kidnapping and hides the body and the secret for years. Dick Wolf, you did it again!
As any woman living in this nutsy nutsy world can tell you, people are terrifying! I won’t go into the statistics illustrating just how scary because this is a fun, light-hearted newsletter and I don’t want to scare away any readers who are eagerly awaiting my inevitable analysis of the iCarly reboot. I’ll leave it at this: There’s reason to be afraid of some of the crimes in SVU happening in real life — just ask the chic birdie I have hooked to my fanny pack at all times.
But when I plop down on the couch on a Sunday to watch Benson, Stabler and those new detectives no one cares about for hours on end, I’m not scared. There’s solace in feeling slight anxiety about the horrors of humanity without feeling in danger. Take Yellowjackets, the modern retelling of Lord of the Flies in which a team of high school soccer players are stranded after a plane crash and resort to the unthinkable. It’s entertaining, yes, but it also begs the question: How far would you go to survive? It’s a question that you, luckily, don’t actually have to answer when you’re curled up on the couch watching the show — but it’s one that might gnaw at the back of your mind. Or even Succession, which took something scary — the inner workings of a right-wing media organization and the country’s wealthiest people pulling the strings — and entertained us with it, zooming in on ridiculous personalities and the intricacies of family relationships (they’re just like us!). Things like the fall of Western late-capitalist civilization seem less scary when they’re centered around doofuses in a Tom Ford bomber jacket. The show only becomes truly chilling when it reminds us of the bigger picture.
Law and Order does more or less the same thing. It takes on a world filled with scary things that can hurt us and dives in so close we no longer feel scared. It’s like opening your eyes on a roller coaster. SVU flirts with the truth and this is at least in part, why it’s become the ultimate comfort show.
Robin Williams once guest starred as a phone caller who convinced fast food chain managers to sexually assault an employee — a true story, which Netflix took on in its docuseries Don’t Pick Up The Phone. A 2009 episode features Hilary Duff in a storyline that looks a lot like that of Casey Anthony (until the episode shifts gears and takes on anti-vaxxing moms because if SVU loves one thing, it is trying to stuff as many politically relevant topics into one episode and then never addressing them again). There have been episodes that closely resemble the cases of Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, Johnny Depp and more. President Joe Biden even appeared on an episode playing himself.
This toying with real life events weirdly enough makes the show even more reassuring. Harvey Weinstein? Not as scary when it’s a knockoff portrayed by Ian McShane and a disturbed oddball who sets up cameras in a woman’s home doesn’t really give me the creeps when it’s really just Adam Driver in Girls.
Where SVU fails to comfort me, though, is in its portrayal of law enforcement itself. Go back to the early seasons and you’ll see Elliot Stabler beating up suspects in every other scene. John Oliver said it best in a half-hour-long takedown of the Law and Order franchise on Last Week Tonight: “It is a commercial produced by a man who is, in his own words, unabashedly pro law enforcement...It is an ad for a defective product.” He was referring to Dick Wolf, who created the franchise. The police as an institution is, for many, just as scary as the kind of crimes SVU portrays on screen, but as Oliver pointed out, Wolf doesn’t see it that way. When you’re watching something like Succession, it’s clear that the creators of those shows have two lenses through which they view their main characters. They have the zoomed-in version in which they view the characters as they’d view themselves, all the inner struggles and complex egos and sympathetic journeys of growth. This is the version that we as viewers get caught up in. It’s how Kendall Roy can be babygirl and Christopher Moltisanti can be our Italian boyfriend. But the other lens is just as important, the zoomed-out version. We know that Jesse Armstrong doesn’t think billionaires are good and we can assume that Lena Dunham knows she’s presenting a certain brand of entitled Millennial. There’s a critical eye to who and what these characters represent in the broader context of the world, and knowing that the creators don’t necessarily agree with what they’re representing makes it easier for us to sit back and enjoy their foibles and even root for them. SVU lacks that zoomed out version. These cops are not anti-heroes. They’re just heroes. And so as much as it’s comforting to watch them dissect other evils in the world, it comes with a twinge of guilt.
But we compartmentalize and carry on. In the SVU universe, cops are the good guys. All television is, as we know, an escape from the real world. But the show reminds us why we want to escape the very scary world in the process of offering us that escape, which makes it that much sweeter.
The series allows us to get close to what we’re terrified of, and then opt to just turn it off. It’s not unlike how in elementary school, I would ask my mom to get the Yellow Dyno DVDs out of the library to watch whenever I was home alone for even a second. (Trying to kidnap me? Okay well GOOD LUCK because I can recite the entire “Tricky People” song and do the dance.) I could have just watched something that didn’t remind me that there were a bajillion people out there hoping to hold me captive — but I found comfort in knowing it, and knowing that in the moment, I was safe.
Whether it be New York City’s “most dedicated detectives” or Lena Dunham screwing things up or Roman Roy throwing democracy out the window, maybe we’re watching all these TV shows for the same reason: to remind us what we’re scared of, put it in a box, and, finally, turn it off.
B Plot
Question: Who would narrate a TV show about your life?
Mallika’s answer: It’s gotta be Maya and Anna from PEN15 — both of them!! I want them to bring the energy they did to Maya’s fight with Dustin and Brandt outside the middle school. If they age out because my show goes on to have like 8 seasons, I’d like them to be replaced with Jennifer Coolidge. And just let her do whatever she wants.
Rachel’s answer: It has to be my birthday twin, the award-winning actress and Aquarius, Laura Dern. But specifically Laura Dern screaming on a voicemail at Michael Imperioli in White Lotus.
C Plot
The general public didn’t actually care that much about Succession, but they do care about … Young Sheldon? Uh, okay! That’s according to this analysis by Axios, which shows that the massive amount of stories the media (feeling attacked) wrote about the Roy family is disproportionate to readership interest. The most-watched scripted TV series in the 2022-2023 season were Yellowstone, NCIS — which Rachel confuses with Law and Order, much to Mallika’s chagrin — FBI, Young Sheldon and Chicago Fire. That being said, Rachel is currently pitching around a Succession essay lol. (Also, Jeremy Strong said we’re allowed to call Kendall “baby girl.”)
Wake up, babe — Variety’s new Actors on Actors just dropped. Jennifer Coolidge closed out her chat with Jeremy Allen White saying simply “you’re such a brilliant actor, and an incredibly attractive human being.” Stars, they’re just like us. Grey’s Anatomy’s Ellen Pompeo and Katherine Heigl were reunited for some good self reflection and only a little bit of gossip. Ugh, to be a fly on the wall after those cameras went off. The tea must have been (mc)steamy…