Law & Order: Special Victims Unit: Difference between revisions

''[[Most Wonderful Sound|CHUNG CHUNG]]''

 

 

The SVU detectives investigate sex crimes, usually rapes, rape-homicides, and various forms of child abuse. The voiceover at the beginning identifies such crimes as "especially heinous," and the show often focuses on the characters' struggle to deal with unspeakable crimes and living victims.

* Stabler: pedophilia, incest (due to the many male offender-young female victim cases he has worked; it doesn't help that he has kids), {{spoiler|and now mental illness}}.

* Tutuola: drug abuse, race ([[Missing White Woman Syndrome|especially how some victims are treated compared to others]]).

* Cragen: alcoholism (since he is a recovering alcoholic and card-carrying member of AA).

* Huang: pseudo-psychology (it insults his intelligence) and, as of "Hardwired", gay-bashing, especially since {{spoiler|he's a gay man himself both in-universe and in real-life}}.

This trope works backwards too; we learn more about the detectives by noticing what kinds of people they empathize with. When the usually cool attorney Casey Novak is uncharacteristically lenient to a young girl who committed vehicular manslaughter while off prescription medicine (thanks to following the advice of a popular artist who was against them, after his own tragic story), you later find out that, quite predictably, she has a [[Broken Bird|personal history]] with mental illness - her ex-fiancé (who she abandoned and later found in the streets) suffered from schizophrenia.

 

 

''[[Sesame Street]]'' did a spot-on parody with Muppets called [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5121VjLwqZM ''Law and Order: Special Letters Unit'']. [[Parental Bonus|The primary audience probably don't watch the original]] (or at least we hope not).

* [[Catch Phrase]]:

{{quote|'''Elliot Stabler''': [[I Did What I Had to Do]]!

SVU Portable, we need a bus at...}}

** Stuckey has a particularly [[Annoying Catchphrase|annoying]] one for when he figures something out: "Bing, bang, bong."

* [[Conspiracy Theorist]]: Munch. Hearing a police officer rant about the nefarious machinations of The Man make them sound all the more ridiculous.

** On the rare occasion, an episode will hilariously turn it into a case of [[Chekhov's Hobby]] whenever the case involves needing to worm through a layer of paranoid conspiracy nuts. Then Munch becomes an effective means of getting through to them.

* [[Crime-Time Soap]]: Big time.

* [[Crime and Punishment Tropes]]

** Twisted up in the episode where Terrence Howard's DA from ''[[Law & Order: LA]]'' [[Crossover|appears]] to defend his cousin, who {{spoiler|raped a woman who turned out to be the granddaughter of one of three men who raped his mother when he was a child ''and made him watch'' (and called her a whore to escape justice on top of it). Except he didn't -- he couldn't bring himself to do it and she only said that because grandpa told her no one would believe she was merely attacked and "black men always rape". The DA's cousin still gets a measure of revenge because the granddaughter A) is going to jail because of the false accusations and B) now utterly despises her grandfather}}.

* [[Rich Bitch]]: ''[[Up to Eleven|Holy hell]]'', the grandmother (who's [[Spider-Man (film)|May Parker]]!) in the [[Mushroom Samba]] episode "Wet", who sees her granddaughter as weak for becoming a drug addict and needing [[Sarcasm Mode|silly things]] like therapy and emotional support. Later, she visits her granddaughter after a suicide attempt just to take back her necklace and disown her {{spoiler|the granddaughter ''did'' kill someone (who grandma saw as more of a granddaughter than her own) but even the detectives can see how grandma drove her to it}}.

'''Grandma''' [[Bitch in Sheep's Clothing|(in a sweet old lady voice and a slight smile)]]: Well she's dead!}}

* [[Ripped from the Headlines]]: Just too many.

* [[There Should Be a Law]]: To the point where the show isn't even about a sex crime half the time.

* [[Too Dumb to Live]]: In "Personal Fouls", a manager of the basketball star Prince Miller had told detectives he was wearing custom-made prototype shoes. {{spoiler|He wore those shoes when he killed a man who would effectively expose the fact that Prince had been sexually abused by his coach years ago}}.

* [[Torture Cellar]]: "Signature" had a pretty horrific one.

** In another episode, a girl is raped at gunpoint. She looks very young, and throughout the episode she is is consistently portrayed as a teenager who is not yet fully adult - neither intellectually nor emotionally. This is not held against her, instead it simply underscores how vulnerable she is. However, she happens to be 19, so the prosecution must prove that she didn't consent. And of course, the defense has [[Blatant Lies]] about the gun as one of their top priorities.

* [[Trailers Always Lie]]: Previews made it seem like Tutuola was going [[Vigilante Man]] on the gay-bashers who beat his son's fiancee into a coma; actually {{spoiler|the gay-bashers were found fairly quickly and the real story was about a copy-cat}}.

** Liza Lapira has played two other characters besides a lab tech, see [http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0487594/ here].

** [[Veronica Mars|Kyle]] [[Smallville|Gallner]] has appeared on the show as two different characters, in Season 4 and Season 9.

* [[You're Insane!]]: Elliot to a particularly disgusting pedophile perpetrator who's trying to defend his rape of young girls (and dressing a woman ''as'' a young girl to rape her) as "natural". When he calls the "love" he has "natural" as that which [Elliot] feels for his wife, Ell is visibly trying not to [[Berserk Button|leap up and beat the scumbag to death]].

** The prisoners at Riker's do everyone a favor and take him out.

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Police Procedural]]

[[Category:The Nineties]]

[[Category:Crime and Punishment Series]]

[[Category:TV Series]]

[[Category:Detective TV Series]]