Law & Order: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

One of my first jobs in mental health was working in a residential treatment facility for teenagers. Whenever SVU came on, they would all, girls’ and boys’ floors alike, disappear into their rooms to watch it. I asked a more senior staff one day why that was. She said, “Well, think about it. It creates a fantasy for them, in which the cops are the good guys, the victim is always rescued, and the person that was hurting them is brought to justice. Most of these kids never have and never will see that.”

I watched so much SVU in high school because I wanted to believe in a world where the rape and sexual abuse my friends were dealing with from predators in and out of school was taken seriously. It was cathartic. And a woman like Det. Benson refusing to apologize for defending victims paired up with a tough guy with a strong sense for women and children was super compelling. It helped that they always treated each other as equals, challenged each other, supported each other, respected boundaries, etc. It even showed all the gross ways victims get screwed out of justice, but in real life it’s even worse. In real life, almost none of my friends got justice, but it felt good to pretend that they would.

I like how the main defence for anything cop related is 'one or two bad apples', when the original saying is literally that one bad apple spoils the barrel.

Bananaphylactic shock. Someone give that writer a raise.

I was sexually abused up until the age of 4 by my biological father. There are multiple videos of me, a tiny toddler, describing in graphic detail what happened. Therapy at age five, years of symptoms of PTSD, and an official diagnosis of C-PTSD (PTSD caused by repeated trauma), and years of therapy as an adult. Thirteen years later, he still has never been held accountable. The case had to be reopened when I was 17, and while the cps officer I worked with was very kind, she simply couldn't do anything about it. The system is so fundamentally flawed that despite irrefutable evidence, the DA won't even take the case. He's allowed to be with kids, he's married, he lives in the same house he always has with a family that loves him and knows nothing. He worked with kids at a bookstore. I don't want to think about how many others have been hurt since then. Of course he's a monster and he forever will be, but I'm almost more angry at the system that allowed him to get away with it. The bad guy is bad, thats their whole shtick, it's just scary realizing that a lot of the good guys aren't good
I will never and should never forgive him, but that automatic response of "he needs to die" is too good for these people. They can die a martyr, innocent and killed for no reason. They deserve to live in a world that knows what they are, be repulsed and shunned, they deserve to suffer like their victims suffered, death is too kind

Fun fact: The most medically accurate show on television for years was Scrubs.

Ok, an innocence project version of Law and Order would actually be genius. Imagine bringing back like 20 of the actors for characters who were convicted who have aged because canonically they’ve been in jail for years since their conviction, and then showing that the cops got it wrong in that case. Tell me you wouldn’t watch that.

I was on a grand jury, and quickly learned the District Attorney office hated Law and Order because, L&O apparently had an endless budget, and the DA did not

I remember once watching SVU with my very L&O fanatic parents, and saw a case very similar to my own get solved with justice. My parents empathized with the girl and she got closure. The same parents who blamed me for my own case that never got anywhere with reporting.

L&O is fun, but it's a lie.

I laughed way too hard at "letting your wife watch television could give her notions"

"A**less corpse found at bottomless brunch" is a hugely underrated headline. That's dad pun power to the max! The crowd barely acknowledged it!

Law and Order has never instilled confidence in the justice system for me. If anything it's done the opposite. It's always been been clear that if anything did happen to me I'd have to be extremely lucky to have a Briscoe, Goren, or Benson to get justice for me.

Every time "bad apples" are mentioned, it staggers me how police hypemen forget the rest of that saying. "A few bad apples spoil the barrel." In other words, if you have a bunch of good apples and a couple of bad ones, pretty quickly it turns into all bad apples.

Honestly, knew the concept of this episode before it began. I remember watching a few years back and being really unsettled how Stabler is painted as the guy who breaks the rules but all's well that ends well. He literally tortures people, and its painted as a good things because he gets the criminal.

As a former prosecutor, I had to ask the jurors about their crime watching shows to help understand and educate potential jurors that videotape, fingerprints, audiotapes, etc. isn’t required to find beyond a reasonable doubt.

"Ladies and gentlemen the story you are about to see is bullshit the names have been changed to protect the LAPD because they helped to save a bunch of money on props"...instant classic

I like how Psych, a comedy crime show specifically shows how comically stupid it can be when police or people hired by police let pride get in the way and cause a ton of problems. Psych also made fun of police consulting on crime shows.

If all the medical shows showed how often insurance is discussed, our health system would change. Thats the power these shows have, which is why they also have an ethical obligation to not white wash reality.

Honestly the only thing Law and Order taught me is ‘never say anything without a lawyer’

So...allow me to tell you how I completely destroyed my own enjoyment of Law and Order. What always got me in that series, particularly SVU, was when the detectives, DA, etc. did everything "right" but the obvious bad person got away scot-free. I can't remember how I started finding out about the various protections and rights that people have, especially under investigation for a crime, but I do remember stumbling on that information, as well as context for it. Eventually, I started playing a game while watching episodes. That game was "How many constitutional rights do the main characters violate in trying to arrest and prosecute the bad guy?" I stopped watching it because the "downer" episodes became episodes with actually happier endings because they couldn't railroad over someone's constitutional rights with impunity. It wasn't long after that that I had to stop watching it because, at best, I couldn't take the plot seriously and, at worst, the series was pushing a narrative that just wasn't true and was dangerous to argue for.