World Screen @ 35: Law & Order: The Franchise That Keeps on Giving

As World Screen celebrates its 35th anniversary, we want to present a series of articles that recap and highlight the best of the interviews we have conducted. We are focusing on the evolution of scripted TV series.

In our last article, we looked at Showtime’s critically acclaimed series Billions and heard from members of its A-list cast. Today, we look at the long-running and lucrative Law & Order franchise and what has made it so successful.

THE FRANCHISE THAT KEEPS GIVING
Law & Order aired from 1990 to 2010. Its 20-year run matched that of the popular Western Gunsmoke, which had been the longest-running drama on television. While Law & Order didn’t surpass Gunsmoke, it did become a tremendously successful franchise, seen around the world, generating scripted and unscripted spin-offs, most notably Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, which premiered in 1999 and is still on the air.

Law & Order creator Dick Wolf’s fascination with crime stories and his ease within the television medium date back to his childhood. “I have been fascinated with crime and crime-solving since I discovered Sherlock Holmes as a boy,” he said in a 2014 interview. “There is nothing more dramatic than life and death. Police/crime stories and bringing criminals to justice have long been a mainstay of storytelling in novels, films and television. We are fascinated by what we fear, yet being able to see crimes solved and criminals convicted brings us closure. And I think readers and viewers enjoy being engaged in the crime-solving process. It’s a low-risk way to play detective.

“My parents worked in television, literally when the medium was born,” Wolf continued. “They met at NBC. As a child, I used to sit in the peanut gallery on The Howdy Doody Show. So I have really grown up in the business.”

He used his familiarity with how the business works to get Law & Order on the air when half-hour sitcoms ruled the American prime-time schedules.

“Back in 1987, you could not give one-hour shows away,” Wolf said in 2016. “In syndication, they didn’t want anything but half-hours, so I developed a bunch of shows, Night & Day, Life & Death, Law & Order, that could be split in half. Luckily, we never had to do that.”

The construction of two half hours joined together was the winning formula for Law & Order. The first half of the show illustrated the investigation of a crime, with Jerry Orbach playing the inimitable Detective Lennie Briscoe, accompanied by several partners. The longest-running were Jesse L. Martin as Detective Ed Green and Chris Noth as Detective Mike Logan. They were overseen by Lieutenant Anita Van Buren, played by S. Epatha Merkerson.

The second half of Law & Order depicted the work of the prosecution attempting to convict alleged suspects with Sam Waterston as E.A.D.A. Jack McCoy, Fred Thompson as D.A. Arthur Branch assisted by several female A.D.A.s, including characters played by Angie Harmon and Jill Hennessy.

The crimes presented in the episodes were most often “ripped from the headlines,” fictionalized depictions of events that actually occurred in real-life New York, where the series was set.

Despite several changes in cast, Law & Order continued to attract loyal viewers, and the crime drama is living on in reruns in the U.S. and around the world.

“The best description of Law & Order was from Sam Waterston, who said the first half is a murder mystery and the second half is a moral mystery,” recalled Wolf in 2016. “The thing that is gratifying is the number of times I’ve been to New York or Los Angeles or Chicago and have gone to district-attorney or state’s-attorney offices, and first of all, more than 50 percent of the prosecutors now are women, and most of them under the age of 35, and they come up and say, ‘I’m a prosecutor because of Law & Order.’ That’s very satisfying!”

Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, or simply referred to as SVU, premiered in September 1999, nine years after Law & Order. SVU has been on the air continuously since then and has outrun Law & Order and Gunsmoke.

As SVU’s intro states, the show chronicles the investigations and attempted prosecutions of sexually based offenses, which the criminal justice system considers especially heinous.

The show focused on two detectives, Elliot Stabler, played by Christopher Meloni, and Olivia Benson, played by Mariska Hargitay. Their boss was Captain Don Cragen (Dann Florek), and they were assisted by Detectives Fin Tutuola and John Munch (Ice-T and Richard Belzer). Despite changes in the cast over the years, the series has retained its fan base. The 2020-21 season was SVU’s 22nd, and the series has been renewed through its 24th season.

When asked in 2018 what has contributed to SVU’s longevity, Wolf answered without hesitation, “Mariska Hargitay. I hate to be that simple, but it’s unprecedented. I don’t know of any show that went from a two-hander with equals [Meloni as Stabler and Hargitay as Benson] to a single-lead drama, ever, and that’s all Mariska.

“The wonderful thing about SVU, specifically,” continued Wolf, “is that the audience is renewed like clockwork every fall and expands because girls find SVU at 13, 14, 15 years old, and it becomes an obsession. Boys not so much, but the girls buy into Mariska so completely as a spokesperson for them. It’s amazing; every year, we get more teens.”

The role of Olivia Benson has continued to intrigue Hargitay. “If it weren’t interesting and challenging, I wouldn’t still be here, and that has been a unique gift,” Hargitay said in 2018. “In so many ways, I feel like I, Mariska, am Olivia. We’ve lived parallel lives in that we both grew up on the show. Olivia was a young, good, instinctual, compassionate, rookie cop who was driven by a need for justice, a need to right the wrongs of her past—many people know that she is the product of a rape—and when I read the script, I was so moved. I instantly connected with her and wanted to play this character more than anything and understood her on so many levels. And moving up as I have into more of a leadership position has been so satisfying. It’s been incredibly challenging to go from being equals with the group to being their boss, which is a difficult thing to do, especially when there’s intimacy. I always think that the rise is uncomfortable, and [Olivia also had] to make very difficult decisions, growing into her power, growing into her leadership and, most importantly, becoming a parent. When Olivia adopted baby Noah, all of a sudden, everything changed in the character, and that was so exciting for me.”

The changes in cast members also impacted Hargitay. “When Chris Meloni left after season 12, I thought, [gasps]. We were this uniquely enmeshed partnership, and there was such intimacy, complexity and chemistry. Then I had a new cast. I remember at the beginning of season 13 going to the cast and saying, “Hi, I’m Mariska; I play Detective Benson,” to Danny Pino [Detective Nick Amaro] and Kelli Giddish [Detective Amanda Rollins], who joined the show. Ice-T [Detective Odafin Tutuola] was my anchor, of course. Then we had Peter Scanavino [Detective Dominick Carisi]. Raúl Esparza [ADA Rafael Barba] and I had this beautiful six-year run.

Hargitay quickly realized SVU was not just another cop show.

“I learned very early on from the type of fan mail that I was receiving that SVU was a very different kind of show, and we had an incredible opportunity. It was speaking to a different audience and was the beginning of giving voice to issues that traditionally had been swept under the carpet. The kind of fan mail that I was receiving was very different from the fan mail that I’d previously received on, say, ER, or any other show that I did. Women were disclosing stories of abuse, their own stories. I was so grateful that this television show gave voice to those issues, that if they were indeed on television, they could be discussed the next day at a watercooler and be new fodder for conversation. So as women and men started writing and sharing stories of abuse, I learned very early that it was not just a television show, and we had an incredible opportunity here.”

The disturbing subject matter that SVU deals with in every episode, whether sexual violence, sex trafficking, domestic violence or child abuse, has affected Hargitay profoundly. “Dealing with these issues every day, I felt a calling to respond to the subject matter…Dick [Wolf] was being honored at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, and he invited me to go. That night I learned the statistics of sexual assault and domestic violence, and they were so mind-blowing to me that I just couldn’t believe that everybody wasn’t talking about it. One in four women and one in six men have been sexually assaulted at some point in their life. I felt like this was a conversation that needed to be started. Dick started it with the show by dealing with those issues, but I wanted to take it to the next level. So, [because of] the combination of the stories we were telling, the statistics that were so staggering and the letters that I was receiving, I started the Joyful Heart Foundation in 2004 to change the way people respond to sexual violence.”

Hargitay also produced a documentary called I Am Evidence, which won an Emmy for Best Documentary. “Our number one advocacy priority at the foundation is the rape kit backlog. In 2009, I learned that there was, indeed, a backlog of hundreds of thousands of rape kits, which is an evidence collection kit, sitting in police storage facilities…One would expect that the kits get tested and sent to the DNA facility, but we found out that they weren’t. It was up to police officers’ discretion. So women had been waiting for justice and waiting to find out, and there was this backlog. I just thought it was a perfect microcosm—a measurable microcosm—of how sexual assault was regarded, and therefore, how important women’s lives were. So we tried to shine some light on it, talk about it, and hopefully, it will incite change. We’re trying to clean up the backlog in our country.”

Working on SVU for two decades has provided Hargitay with numerous unexpected personal and professional benefits. “The show has been my greatest teacher, but what surprised me is how the show changed me as a person and turned me into an ‘accidental activist,’ if you will. When Dick hired me, I was so happy and grateful because I’m an actor and it’s what I love to do; it’s what I need to do. When I got this role, all my dreams came true because it fit like a glove. The part and the person came together, and it’s been challenging for me, very much so, in a lot of ways. I was surprised—and grateful—that I was able to bring change and aid in bringing positivity to the world. That is something that I have thought my whole life: How do I give back? How do I show my gratitude? We’re so grateful for how Dick changed our lives and made so much possible. To be given this canvas and to be able to turn it into something else has been deeply meaningful for me, and I’m deeply grateful. I met my husband on the show, I have three children now, and I have this foundation that means everything to me. To be able to affect change and have a voice and a platform from a TV show, it’s quite surprising to me.”

The Law & Order franchise was extended yet again this year, first with Law & Order: Organized Crime, whose main character is Elliot Stabler. Organized Crime was introduced through a crossover episode of SVU on April 1. The long-awaited reunion of Stabler and Benson attracted significant viewership: SVU scored 8 million same-day total viewers, and Organized Crime retained almost all the audience, attracting 7.86 million.

Wolf believes the success of the Law & Order franchise is due to audiences’ continued fascination with crime stories. “The Law & Order brand has endured in a huge part because of the writing,” he said in 2014. “The showrunners/writers have kept the series current and written stories that are topical and compelling. For 25 years, people have been telling me that Law & Order is addicting. Crime is a constantly renewable resource, so there is no shortage of stories to tell.”