Perhaps it's a way of achieving balance. Perhaps it's a bad habit. Perhaps it points to some deep unresolved inner turmoil. Perhaps I'm making too much out of a trivial personal shortcoming.
Allow me to explain, to confess, perhaps even to rationalize a bit. I have a teeny-weeny addiction to the TV show "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit." My addiction makes little sense on the surface. I should hate LOSVU. Here I am, a man dedicated to the arts, a teacher and musician, a gentle person who deeply regrets failing students, even those who deserve it to the point of absurdity, a longtime practitioner of Theravada Buddhism and an upright kinda guy who wouldn't knowingly commit a crime or hurt anyone. And here I am, sucking down episodes of a television show that routinely displays the lowest opinion of the human psyche in the history of cheap canned entertainment.
LOSVU is all about sex crimes, especially those that are convoluted, way kinky, or just plain loathesome. A dirty old man yanking down some kid's knickers is only the start of your typical LOSVU episode; forty-seven minutes later you're likely to have traversed a swamp of bestiality, child enslavement, drug trafficking, murder, necrophilia, and a host of other pleasantries on your way to the eventual outcome. Most of the time justice is served and the guilty sonofabitch (rarely the initial suspect) is hauled away to rot in the hoosegow. Once in a while the writers toss in a stalemate, as a way of avoiding tedious predictability.
Perhaps the relatively light doses of soap opera amongst the detectives of the SVU accounts for the attraction. I never lasted long with cop shows that obsessed on who in the squadhouse was sleeping with whom. A missing-persons show set in the New York FBI building went wildly off-track, in my opinion, as a pretty blonde female detective progressively slept her way through every male in the vicinity. Presumably this was to impart a human touch to cardboard-cutout FBI agents who inevitably play a weak second fiddle to the missing persons and their problems, not to mention the scumbags and assorted villains that pop out of the woodwork. But while that may have been the intent, to me it just looked like they were fixated on the town pump. So after she slipped into bed with yet another employee—this after having an out-of-wedlock baby with some non-FBI guy—I decided I had seen more than enough of I Was a Slut for the FBI and sought solace elsewhere.
That isn't to say that LOSVU is completely free of gratuitous soap. Head detective Elliot Stabler's problems are particularly annoying, boring, and tedious. Nary an episode goes by without some sappy doodoo about Elliot's disintegrating marriage or his kids or whatnot. I don't care. There is no Elliot Stabler, remember. He's an actor—quite a good one, I'll allow—playing a role. There is no long-suffering wife, no kids, no divorce. If the writers can make up that he has problems with a wife and kids and a divorce, they could also make up that he is an alien in disguise from the planet Sfhlsdi%@ and is just biding his time before enslaving the populace of New York with his paralyzing raygun. As a lifelong bachelor I find real-life marital problems boring enough, much less invented ones between nonexistent people.
I have never been troubled by an active suspension of disbelief. I do not watch a show like LOSVU and become engrossed in the characters or the situation at hand. Never losing sight that I'm watching an invented shadow-play, fakery, actors on a set speaking learned lines for a camera, I'm also quick to spot the ultimate outcome of the story. That's because I can't help but notice a plot device or a planted character.
Consider your basic LOSVU episode that opens with your basic grisly rape-murder of somebody's wife. That somebody's wife's best friend is the first and obvious suspect. Some time during the first fifteen minutes, the writers toss in a brief, seemingly random conversation said suspect has with his teenage son. At that point you can switch over to Desperate Housewives of Terra Haute, if you prefer: the teenager did it. That's the only reason for the brief conversation; they can't just trot out the kid at the very end as a convenient deus ex machina, after all.
Watch for people who are given identities and lines, but have no apparent reason for being there. They're probably the perps. Extra points for rising young actors or actresses. For example, I noticed one particular episode in which a good friend of the victim showed up within those critical first fifteen minutes in a brief conversation with the detectives. Presumably they just got some info from him and moved on. But he was Will Estes, soon to land a great part on Blue Bloods as Tom Selleck's youngest son. Of course he was the murderer. His character suffered from a gambling addiction, was a poor kid trying to make good in a rich kid's college, was trying to play a bookie-type scam to make enough money to fit in, and murdered his girlfriend when she screwed everything up. Naturally.
From what I can tell, the writers enjoy opening the kimono from time to time. The show has a noticeable yen for Broadway stars. Maybe that's because they're all pretending to be in New York. It's certainly a Law & Order tradition, given the original show's casting of stage great Sam Waterston in the lead, not to mention musical veteran Jerry Orbach of The Fantasticks and Promises, Promises and 42nd Street in addition to his acquired immortality as the voice of Lumière in Disney's Beauty and the Beast. LOSVU regularly trots out veteran Broadway man John Cullum (Camelot, On a Clear Day, Shenandoah, 1776) as a defense attorney who imparts a distinctly slimy twist to his Southern bonhomie and Bernadette Peters as a hard-bitten bitch defender who never fails to irritate the hell out of everybody. One season-closing episode went whole hog and threw in Angela Lansbury, Alfred Molina, and Bebe Neuwirth, sort of LOSVU Goes Broadway. You almost expected them to finish the episode with a full-tilt production number, say "All That Jazz" from Chicago in honor or Neuwirth, or "Mame" in honor of Lansbury.
That's all OK because LOSVU is fantasy. Grim, drab, depressing, and disheartening to be sure, but fantasy all the same. I'm astounded by the speed with which the Perp of the Week winds up in court. That's whimsy on the same order as Jimmy Stewart always finding a parking place in San Francisco as he tracks Kim Novak in Hitchcock's Vertigo. Perhaps there's no more thankless job than being a federal agent on LOSVU. There is no mercy shown: FBI and CIA and Homeland Security folks are closed-mouthed, uncooperative, smug bastards one and all. Modern-day Gestapo, they stop barely short of snapping out a "Heil, Hitler!" salute as they enter the room. Even when the writers attempted to humanize a female FBI agent in a multi-episode story, you could tell their heart wasn't in it. In the LOSVU world, local cops are at least human, but the feds are inhuman and monstrous. That's fantasy as well, but it's smart writing since it feeds right into most folks' preconceptions.
The show is at its worst when it goes all preachy about some perceived social ill. An episode on the perils of teenage drinking was next to unwatchable as the kids in question kept hitting the bottle until—hey, guess what?—two of them wound up dead in a—guess again—drunk-driving accident. It's at its best when the criminal is gloriously diabolical and smart. I don't suppose they can portray unmitigated evil on a week-to-week basis, but they sure have a flair for it. Those arch-clever sociopaths and psychopaths, a city full of Hannibal Lecters who add a frisson of sexual deviance to an already noxious mix. Once in a while the show even lets one of them walk free…presumably leaving us to shiver in our beds, knowing that Evil Stalks Us and that we must be ever vigilant or It Could Happen To Us.
Except that it's just a TV show. There was no sociopath, no serial killer-rapist, no arch-psychopath-criminal, no twisted sexual sadist. Nobody got raped or dismembered or tortured. Nobody went to jail. There was no miscarriage of justice. It's all just dancing bunnies. The studio lights go out and the bunnies pick up their paychecks and go home to Flopsy and Mopsy. Next week it's showtime again and the bunnies are back on.
Maybe LOSVU bunnies aren't as cute as animated Disney woodland creatures. But they're bunnies nonetheless, soft-shoeing and giggling and hopping and wiggling their fluffy butts. So when those synthesized low violas come in as a critical moment in an episode arrives—Mousy Housewife is just about to spill the beans that her husband wasn't, well…he wasn't really at home last night after all—just remember that it's just the bunnies entertaining us as they sing their little song and dance their little dance.