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Worst TV Show of the Week Brought to you by the Parents Television Council	Share |
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Law and Order: SVU on NBC

The ominous voice at the beginning of each episode of NBC’s Law and Order: SVU (Tuesdays, 10:00 p.m. ET) proclaims, “In the criminal justice system, sexually-based offenses are considered especially heinous.  In New York City, the dedicated detectives who investigate these vicious felonies are members of an elite squad known as the Special Victims Unit.  These are their stories.”  After such an introduction, one would expect the show to investigate some pretty reprehensible acts of depravity.  And the February 17^th episode supplied enough of it to be named Worst TV Show of the Week.   

The episode begins in the dressing room of a strip club.  An angry stripper, Sapphire, confronts a girl named, Misty, while scantily clad dancers surround them:

SAPPHIRE:  “Cute top, Misty.”

MISTY:  “Thanks.”

SAPPHIRE:  “That's why I bought it!  Skank!” 

MISTY: “Get off me, you crazy bitch!”

Sapphire rips the top off Misty, who covers her naked breasts with her hands.  Sapphire storms out to the parking lot when an injured man emerges from the darkness with blood smeared all over his crotch.  Once he’s admitted into the hospital the doctor explains his injuries: “He was beaten in the crotch so badly his scrotum ruptured.  He also has deep lacerations to his shoulders and lower back, and I found scratch marks on his penis.”  He also had traces of saliva on his penis and a broken nail was found on his person.  Chief Cragen performs some SVU math and proclaims, “I’m no expert, but for me, fellatio plus fake fingernail equals exotic dancer.”  Detectives go to the strip club to interview the strippers.  Half-naked women sashay and gyrate in front of the camera while others slide up and down on stripper poles.  When a detective asks Misty if she had to beat off rowdy customers recently, she squeezes her breasts and proclaims, “These are for pleasure, not pain.”  Misty eventually admits that she performed fellatio on the victim, but explains that she is actually a doctoral candidate writing an ethnography of sex-workers for a book she plans to publish.  She actually recorded her encounter with the victim on a digital recorder.  When the detectives play it back, moans and sexually explicit dialogue are heard. 

Misty, however, does not remain the main suspect for long.  Instead, the victim’s transgendered, thirteen-year-old son (who lives as a girl named Haley) becomes the main suspect.  The ensuing investigation takes its toll on the troubled adolescent.  He slits his wrists, but survives the suicide attempt. 

As it turns out, Haley’s overly-sympathetic female guidance counselor, Jackie, attacked Haley’s father for refusing to allow Haley to receive hormone blockers to prevent his male characteristics from maturing.  On the witness stand, Jackie breaks down and admits that she was born a man.  Her tearful, heart-wrenching testimony reveals that she survived a brutal hate-crime in her youth:

JACKIE:  “I was leaving a bar, and three men grabbed me.  They called me a freak.  They dragged me into a vacant lot, and they pulled up my skirt. And one of them took out a knife and he said, ‘If you want to be a woman so badly, I’ll make you one.’  And he cut me.”

This show claims to expose the heinousness of sexual violence; in fact, however, it really exploits sexual violence, titillating the audience with strippers and explicit discussions of sex. The graphic descriptions of violence, though, add a perverse layer to the show.   For this disturbing combination of sex and violence, Law and Order: SVU has been named Worst TV Show of the Week.