After the abominable, <em>American Idol centered episode two weeks ago, I started to debate on whether or not Law and Order: SVU was worth watching this season. So far, almost every week has flopped in quality and believability and at times, were totally and completely uninteresting. I gained a little hope back after last week’s “Ripped from the Headlines” military episode (surprisingly), and a little more with this week’s episode. But there are still a lot of problems that the writers might want to rework before the rest of America joins me in just sticking to the USA reruns.
This week was another episode surrounding Detective Amanda Rollins and her inability to be unsympathetic towards troubled blonde women. I mean, the victim in this particular episode behaved almost identically to her sister and Rollins fell into her trap almost immediately. Rollins acceptance of this woman, in addition to this new beau of hers, Nate (Thomas Sadowski, a.k.a. Don on Newsroom) annoyed me from the start and my contempt for these guest characters got even worse as the episode went on. Most especially because we’ve seen Rollins interact with these type of characters before (her sister and boyfriend) and I am ready to see her character move on from her past. Also, it doesn’t help that Rollins is my least favorite detective on the show or that I was kind of hoping her character might get in even bigger trouble (arrested and/or fired) like the previews suggested.
But despite my ill feelings towards Rollins, I did like that this episode wasn’t trying too hard to attract viewers with “top story headlines.” This episode essentially and successfully deterred us away from the “top story” problem however it didn’t solve anything regarding the lack of character development.
My favorite part this week was what the Huffington Post claims is the “Best SVU line ever” which happened when they were diagnosing the cause of the rape suspect’s murder. M.E. Warner’s exact line was “He came and then he went” and it was probably the most epic line said on SVU in a long time. I can’t say it was the “best line ever,” as I’m sure there are some pretty epic Much quotes that have topped it over the last 15 or so seasons.
We’re not really getting close to having Law and Order: SVU get back to it’s glory days (a.k.a. it’s Meloni) days, and if I were to describe the show in one word on behalf of myself and some of the viewers out there, I’d use “boring,” even with the “top headline” stories. There’s got to be a way to get viewers engaged again, other than bringing Christopher Meloni back as Elliot Stabler.
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