Why do people like svu

For the millions of viewers who tune in to SVU , that education can be valuable. But it can also have downsides, says Feden. On TV, it happens within a week. This is not going to resolve in 30 minutes. But perpetrators in the real world frequently go unpunished , while people who report being assaulted often find that they are not believed or treated well by police. The acclaimed recent Netflix series Unbelievable begins, as its title suggests, with this premise.

Only about nine cases will get referred to prosecutors, and of those, just five will lead to a conviction. Members of a jury who are familiar with the show come in with very high expectations for evidence because on SVU , there are typically clear pieces of evidence against the perpetrator, such as DNA or phone records or videos. Feden says that in her time prosecuting sex crimes, probably only two cases had DNA evidence.

This can be a drawback because, as Feden notes, the majority of sexual assault cases do not carry the clear-cut types of evidence portrayed in shows like SVU. And most sexual assault cases end in a plea bargain, according to Aidala.

It's conceded that it would be a waste of good talent to make them anyone less consequential, but even knowing their purpose in the episode, fans can't help getting excited over the illustrious names. The series had nerve and was even considered edgy in its approach to topical concerns. Each episode, plots would begin as self-contained instances then grow as the case went on into large commentaries on society, politics, justice, and bureaucracy. The best episodes were intellectually stimulating as well as emotional, and ambitious when it came to tackling topics of the day.

As a fierce supporter of the survivors of sexual abuse and assault, as well as a brave officer in the line of duty, she's been an inspiration to fans everywhere. Kayleena has been raised on Star Wars and Indiana Jones from the crib. When she isn't writing for ScreenRant, CBR, or The Gamer, she's working on her fiction novel, lifting weights, going to synthwave concerts, or cosplaying.

With degrees in anthropology and archaeology, she plans to continue pretending to be Lara Croft as long as she can. Share Share Tweet Email 0.

But deep tensions are embedded in the vision SVU is selling. It has built its fantasies around an institution that many, correctly, associate with tragedies. SVU has dealt with the tension, sometimes, directly. Early on, it began making references to the civil-rights abuses accompanying the Patriot Act. Later, it began featuring more elliptical acknowledgments of the fact that, in the world beyond its universe, unarmed civilians have been regularly slain by police officers.

The show has also managed this real-world friction, in part, by focusing ever more narrowly on the individuals at its center. Her heroism is both insistent and tidy.

As Olivia has risen through the ranks of the NYPD, her character has come to question, ever more stridently, the institution she is a part of. During a bottle episode in Season 20, Olivia and her colleagues engage in a passionate—and nuanced—debate about the sharp divisions between justice, as the system conceives it, and empathy.

Another—through a cliffhanger ending that anticipated the one in which Amanda Rollins is currently caught—found Olivia kidnapped by a serial rapist and assaulted and tortured. They exempt Olivia from a justice system that too often fails to serve justice. In the SVUniverse, on the other hand, accountability is possible in part because Olivia Benson, investigator and survivor, will entertain no other option.

Fiction is faith, too. T hat SVU is both radical and regressive makes it, for all its antics, typical. Women and survivors are, at this point, accustomed to compromise in the stories American culture tells about them—used to the literature of their lives being dismissed as empty diarism , or to watching as Sansa Stark, raped and brutalized, announces with beatific acceptance that the abuse has been for the best.

You overlook this because of that. You take what you can. You find yourself wishing, for example, that SVU had handled its latest take on the Epstein story with more nuance—but also feel grateful that a show is handling it at all. Today, thankfully, more series are doing what SVU has been doing for so long.

So is the popularity of recent documentaries such as Surviving R. Kelly and Leaving Neverland , which engage in the work SVU has tried to do, but without the melodrama. Pulp has been one way to make sense of a sexually violent world.

As more creators grapple with the question of how to portray that violence on-screen, SVU will have more counterparts doing what it has long claimed to do: taking sexual abuse out of the realm of silence and shame.

SVU is still uncomfortably relevant; the show is less urgent, however, than it once was. And so Amanda Rollins waits, her fate both uncertain and, the demands of a network drama being what they are, sure. She is at the mercy of a man and his pain and his gun. But she is also held in another kind of thrall.