We were on the trail, we were on the case. The orders came from Jim, "Tackle it." We weren't interested. We could think of anything, everything, we'd rather do than enter the mind of Dick Wolf. We even wasted about ten minutes pondering whether or not anyone had noted that "dick wolf" may not be the best name for a straight man? "Oh look, he's a dick wolf." But there we were, shadowing the perv, the longest running perv in television.
The show in question is Law & Order: SVU which we decided should be called Beast & Brutality: B.S. about ten seconds after we realized that the woman we thought was a very rough looking Nancy McKeon was actually Mariska Hargitay. Where there is beauty, there is Dick Wolf determined to stomp it out.
Beast & Brutality: BS also describes the case(s) Hargitay's Olivia Benson was supposedly working. She went undercover to get the goods on environmentalists. Dick Wolf was determined to spread the myth of eco-terrorism and quite proud that he opened the eighth season of the show echoing the FBI if not reality. In fact the whole thing plays out like the refuses-to-die "9-year-old Penny Brown is missing!" e-mail hoax. But watch as you will, you never get the update by the freak when they find out they've been tricked:
PLEASE FORGIVE THE EMAIL. A DEAR FRIEND SENT ME THIS INFO REGARDING THE AMBER ALERT AS A HOAX.
I USUALLY DON'T FORWARD, BUT SINCE A CHILD WAS AT THE SOURCE, I DID. LET'S ALL CONTINUE TO LOOK OUT FOR CHILDREN.
GOD BLESS THEM. THANK YOU, GOD, FOR THE CHILDREN. GIVE US STRENGTH AND WISDOM TO CARE FOR YOUR CHILDREN.
That's because, unlike the simpleton above ("a child was at the source" -- believe it or not, the e-mailer is a professional with a college education and degree -- in journalism, which may explain the stupidity), Dick Wolf and his shows work from the principle that you can never go too low and that shame is a coat you toss in the back of someone else's closet.
SVU is supposed to the be the character driven vehicle of the franchise -- news that someone forgot to pass onto both the writers and the cast. On the latter, Diane Neal appears determined to take matters into her owns hands and has turned her character Casey Novak into a DA with a nasty caffeine addiction. (Or maybe it's something stronger?). That's the only explanation for why she can't hold her head still in any shot. Sometimes she's nodding away (when her character may or may not be speaking words of agreement), sometimes she shaking her "no" (see previous parenthetical), sometimes she's doing these very subtle half-jerks. On those rare times when she does manage to gain motor control of her head, always note her first line which she seems to have trouble delivering without a deep inhale which causes a weird indention in her throat. But most of all, watch her cast mates and guest stars to see which ones decided to ignore it and which ones decide to mirror her head movements. On the latter, attempt to determine whether they're mocking her?
Just don't attempt to make sense of this show where Christopher Meloni is the supposed big cheese, the Chris North equivalent. He's so low key you grasp why he had to urinate, naked, on OZ to create a stir. You also remember how he was upstaged by just about everyone and everything in Runaway Bride. Press material is all over his 2006 Emmy nomination -- as though it's a sign of greatness when, in fact, it's just a sign of how awful TV's become.
How awful is Law & Order: SVU? In the episode that aired Saturday night, the one that had us agree to Jim's request and was a repeat of the season opener, Olivia went to Oregon. She was on the trail of eco-terrorists and undercover as a rape counselor, if we understood the plot. We didn't try to follow it too closely because it was obvious the writers hadn't.
But the gist of it was, she was wrong about the harmless nature of the environmentalists group she infiltrated. They weren't a benign group. (And they never would be on a Dick Wolf show). But the program wasn't interested in that plot and it was all asides and tales of what happened off screen. The plot they were interested in was a dead man and, for the record, the NYC Special Unit Squad that is the supposed basis for this crap doesn't investigate deaths or terrorism.
This is Dick Wolf and they needed some sex so the dead man quickly becomes a pedophile. You don't see it coming unless you note that Debra Jo Rupp is a guest star. Kitty Foreman (That 70s Show) isn't that long ago and the actress' tremulous energy meant she was cast for a reason -- to play I've-Got-A-Secret. Thinking that Olivia is a cop before finding out she isn't (she is, she's undercover, it's one of the worst written shows that you'll ever see), Rupp confesses that her dead ex-husband was a pedophile. Then she recoils in horror, after she learns Olivia isn't a cop (but remember she is), and Rupp's character denies everything she just said.
Later on Olivia, still posing as a rape counselor, visits a now adult victim of the pedophile and breaks every rule regarding rape counseling (including arguing with the victim about whether or not she was raped) but the audience is supposed to nod knowingly because Olivia is one tough cop.
One real asshole. That's all the characters on a Dick Wolf drama are. They skirt the law and never get called on it. They bully victims and the audience for this crap nods along and thinks, because the cases are usally bad rewrites of something in the headlines recently or years ago, that this is somehow a commentary or reality. It's neither.
It's a distorted world where the only time rules and law matter is with regard to the police as victims -- such as when Olivia's wrongly detained by the police and then has her cover blown by another police officer. Hargitay briefly snaps to life whining that she was outed. Outed to another cop and she's not investigating the police nor is Oregon the NYC cop's usual beat (don't even try to figure out what she's doing there). But it's a bit of life to the slow, dull show whose most laughable scene may have been the monotone Neil telling a guest star to calm down. If the guest stars ever did, the audience would probably fall asleep.
Olivia's inept beyond belief. Near the end they find a woman. She murdered the pedophile. She was his victim. Her story is she's been sexually assaulted for ten years (since the age of ten) and locked in a dungeon until she killed her rapist. The show's in its last ten minutes so you think it might pick up the pace, but it doesn't. You've got plenty of time to sit and wonder what the writers have strip-mined from the headlines to get this toxic plot. It takes you about two seconds to grasp that it's strip-mining the story of Natascha Kampusch -- which appears to be about one second longer than it took for the show's writers to churn out this script.
They've dubbed the character Britney and doing so appears to have taxed whatever creative energies they had. The shows on fumes and Olivia and a male police officer are in car driving around doing that banter that the really slow-witted will see as 'sexual tension.' Apparently grasping that the show needs to be coming to a conclusion, Olivia will suddenly pull out a file, that she's never held on camera before, and exclaim "Oh!"
All the time it takes her to ask about a fort (that's never been mentioned) a child described (whose never been seen) -- about ten seconds -- is about how long, after the title card describing time and location disolves, before they're seen trudging through the woods and discovering the fortress where they will find Britney.
What Saturday Night Live would call "dropping the cow," SVU calls "plot point."
After the first line is said to Britney, a number of things will happen. We'll focus first on the "art." 'Jump' cuts will come throughout the next five minutes (and the location of the questioning will change at least once) as we're hurtled through time and space because, by God, the writers are out to prove that Olivia knows how to help victims and they need a tidy little moral to go out on having wasted forty-plus minutes of air time. There will be insight, damn it! There will be healing, by God!
And only to the nutsos who inhabit World of Wolf could what passed in the never ending scenes (seemlessly edited together) be mistaken for for that. Since the age of ten, Britney has been raped, has been held (in a dungeon), lived with the threat of death hanging over every day. She has been held prisoner there and her only contact has been her adult male abuser. You need to get that because, despite the lip service by the writers and Olivia, there's no indication anyone involved ever did.
Britney is highly agitated from her first minute onscreen. When Olivia speaks to her, she leaps to her feet. When the male police officer speaks to her, and she notices him for the first time, she screams. Olivia, being the victims 'expert' supposedly, will suggest that he leave them alone, she will have to suggest this again, in an interrogation room we're suddenly in, when he again agitates her. Olivia, the victims 'expert,' does not immediately get the man away from the victim, the man whom the victim was obviously transferring her attacker's persona onto.
Some 'expert.' But it's a strange sort of 'therapy' Olivia practiced which seemed to consist mainly of physically approaching/crowding the victim. Then you'd get another 'jump' cut and the interrogation will continue in this snippet of a scene until Olivia once again approached/crowed the victim -- someone thought it translated as 'foward motion.'
Her 'skills' with victims were also called into question by the fact that she didn't practice listening to allow the victim to tell her story. The victim would share a concrete event and Olivia would then tell the victim what that event meant, what it really meant, what the victim couldn't grasp. There was no listening, there was only leading.
Olivia was telling the victim what had happened, robbing the victim of her own words and of her own control of the awful experience. No qualified counselor would ever allow such a thing to happen. We're quite aware of why it happened, the writers were in a rush, having dithered for the rest of the show, to pile on meaning ten inches thick before the audience could grasp how much time they'd wasted watching this piece of crap. But not only is Olivia not a victims 'expert,' she's not a very believeable cop.
The apparent hours and hours that passed (during the five minutes of 'jump' cuts -- which at one point did include Britney being allowed to eat during questioning) never included her seeing her family or having an attorney or advocate present. She's been missing for ten years. Though the character spoke with what was at least a freshman college student's vocabulary (possibly the dungeon was also an S.A.T. testing location or the writers are just that bad at their profession), the fact remained that at the age of ten she was taken from the world. Her maturity level is in question and Olivia's getting her to confess to killing her rapist. Badgering someone who should have the social skills of a ten-year-old, making her cry, telling her, "You killed him because . . ." probably plays big & tough in the World of Wolf but it borders on brutality when you consider the victim being questioned.
At the end of it (which includes a hug, and b.s. about 'empowerment'), Olivia's talking to the male cop and says that no jury will convict Britney. He responds by asking who said Britney was going to be charged? We're supposed to thank the gods and Dick Wolf that there is some humanity in the world -- in the form of two brutal cops who just spent how many hours brutalizing a victim?
It doesn't matter in World of Wolf. It never does. Rules, guidelines, they're all to be bent so his characters can f--k with the system designed to guarantee the rights of all. You no longer have the loose canon that was Dirty Harry, you've got a whole squad of them on each and every Dick Wolf show. They're a pack of wild vigilantes who have mistakenly have been handed badges. And with each broadcast of every show, they degrade the public's understanding of the legal system and the notion that rules apply for a reason.
In the episode we described, every interrogation rule and every counseling rule was broken, but the audience is supposed to ignore that and, in fact, see how wonderful the two cops who abused the system and the victim are just because Britney won't be charged for killing the man who imprisoned and raped her for ten years. We're supposed to forget how they battered her emotionally to get their information, this woman with the social skills of a ten-year-old. Each and every episode justifies the torture czar and the Bully Boy's actions and, in fact, makes audiences think maybe the White House should go a little further because look at what the police dicks on Law & Order accomplish.
John Mellencamp's "This Is Our Country" takes on a new tone when it's played during a Dick Wolf show. You can picture many in the audience hearing the song on the advertisement and thinking, "Hell yeah, this is our country. Get those nasty immigrants out of here." The whole thing plays out like it's from the mind of a little boy who pinned his hopes on the Confederate flag he pinned to the walls of his prep school dorm room.
