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‘SVU’ Boss Reveals How Sex Crimes Became Ultimate ‘Comfort’ Watch

Ahead of the 600th episode of “Law & Order: SVU,” the show’s first-ever female showrunner breaks down its enduring legacy.

“With a show that’s been around for so long, you’re worried if we’re running out of stories to tell,” Law & Order: Special Victims Unit showrunner, Michele Fazekas, told the Daily Beast’s Obsessed ahead of the show’s milestone 600th episode, airing Thursday night on NBC. “The nice thing is finding new ways to push our characters and new ways to tell these stories. It’s not just about, ‘What crazy crime can we come up with?’ It’s really about where these characters are taking us.”

When the long-running crime procedural returned for its landmark 28th season this past month, it premiered with an episode that eerily mirrored the Cornell gang rape case. Though the episode was written and produced prior to the September civil suit brought by a former Cornell student known only as Jane Doe against the university, its Chi Phi fraternity and seven of its members, dubbed the Cornell 7, for alleged group sexual assault that occurred at the frat house in 2024, it wasn’t a case of being “ripped from the headlines,” as SVU has become known for. Rather, it was an eerie coincidence that speaks to the show’s resonance within the sexual assault reckoning that has been taking place in the culture over the past decade.

“Benson is looking at a case like this, and nothing has changed,” Fazekas said of star Mariska Hargitay’s character, New York Police Department sex crimes captain Olivia Benson. She points to a New York State law that says if you’re “voluntarily intoxicated you can still consent to sex unless you’re unconscious or have been given the drug against your consent, which was kind of shocking for us to realize that that’s how the law was written.“

“30 years later we’re still saying that if a girl drinks too much, she can be raped,” she added. Or can’t legally be raped, more to the point.

This uncanny correlation speaks not only to the stranglehold SVU has had on the culture since its debut in 1999—the only continuously running installment of Dick Wolf’s extended Law & Order television universe—but also to a kind of renaissance the show is experiencing, which Fazekas said goes “hand-in-hand” with Hargitay’s “Hot Mariska Summer,” in which the patron saint of sexual assault victims broadened her horizons from the character she’s played since SVU’s inception.

This included a stint hosting this year’s Emmy Awards, where she picked up two statues—Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special and Outstanding Directing for a Documentary/Nonfiction Program—for My Mom Jayne, about her mother, the late actress Jayne Mansfield. Hartigay made her Broadway debut in the one-person play, Every Brilliant Thing. And she was a mainstay courtside at the Knicks’ record-breaking championship season, a feat 53 years in the making, which she hightailed to each night when the curtain went down, her exhausted yet elated expressions becoming instantly memeable.

This led to a cameo in last week’s episode by Knicks point guard Jalen Brunson—a long-time SVU fan who has become close with Hargitay—as Detective Jay Madison.

“I wasn’t there when they shot it, but [from] all reports he was completely gracious and lovely and was having fun doing it,” Fazekas said. “The biggest obstacle is keeping fans away. We couldn’t shoot anything outside because it would have just been thousands of people cheering,” so they shot his scene in a bar. “Keeping it secret was the biggest challenge. He’s a superstar in New York.”

Another superstar whose SVU association was kept under wraps is Taylor Swift, who appeared in a pre-taped squad room sketch at the Emmys alongside her cat, Olivia, named after Hargitay’s character. The sketch was written by the Emmys writers rather than Fazekas and her team (though they used the SVU set and crew to shoot it), which was evident in the somewhat tongue-tying conspiracy theory rant Benson goes on in the skit about whether Swift would attend the awards ceremony, where she was nominated for several statues for her Eras tour special, in person.

The more grounded, recognizable tone of SVU proper is what has kept audiences coming back for 28 seasons and counting, making it a comfort watch for the ages.

“I talk to people who are like, ‘it’s my comfort show, I watch it with my grandma.’ This is a show about sex crimes and pedophiles!” Fazekas joked. “But I think it’s a comfort show because you are left with the hope that something can change and there is a hero out there who can help us. People want that.”

That said, Fazekas isn’t resting on her laurels. In fact, the trajectory of the show and Benson’s motivations have shifted somewhat since Fazekas came on board in Season 27 as SVU’s first female showrunner (ironic for a series that deals with sexual assault, a crime that disproportionately affects women), after previously working as a writer in Seasons 3 through 7.

Last season, Fazekas wanted to challenge Benson’s convictions with the foil of chief of detectives Kathryn Tynan (Noma Dumezweni) and her lackey, Jake Griffin (Corey Cott), who has since become a trusted member of Benson’s elite squad.

Tynan was checking up on Benson’s previous cases, which reverberates throughout the 600th episode with the return of Benson’s former partner, Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni), and the revisitation of a case early in their careers and before the timeline of the show in which their inexperience and unwillingness to look outside their personal biases resulted in the wrongful 30-year incarceration of a Black man.

Policing and police procedurals have undergone a reckoning since the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement. Though Fazekas wasn’t making a commentary on that in the 600th episode, it’s hard not to see the parallels.

“I was trying to say something about what happens when these characters realize they made a mistake. What do you do with that? How do you accept that you made a mistake that took 30 years away from this guy who’s been sitting in prison for the wrong reasons?” she said. “That’s a huge thing to realize.”

She highlighted a scene in the episode where Stabler first says, “We made a mistake,” then corrects himself to say, “I made a mistake.”

“That’s a big deal for him,” Fazekas explained. “It’s growth.”

Benson is also growing after 28 years on the job, a project that Fazekas began last season.

“The question that Mariska gets in real life is, why [is she] still doing this? So having Benson ask that question of herself last season was answered: because she can do nothing else,” Fazekas explained. “I like toying with the idea of a little bit of disillusionment and despair really pushing her boundaries. How far will she go? How far up to the legal line will she go? How far over the moral or ethical line will she go? I like to keep pushing her and how it affects everyone around her.”

As Benson grapples with the limits of the titular law and order while pursuing justice for the special victims she deals with, so too is the show. “It’s episodes that don’t have tidy endings,” Fazekas said, referring to, if not the next 600 episodes, then at least the rest of the season, which will also include the return of the much-loved former district attorney Alexandra Cabbott, played by Stephanie March.

It remains to be seen whether audiences, many of whom are sexual assault victims who love the show for its typically neat conclusions in which the bad guys get put away, will respond to this new path. But if SVU fans were willing to stick with the show through 600 episodes, it doesn’t seem like they will be going anywhere soon.

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Scarlett Harris

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