Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, which returns for its 27th season this week, has a special place in many viewers’ hearts in a way not many other police procedurals do. Though there are valid criticisms of the show, the way it handles sexual assault has been a touchstone for many victim-survivors. Star Mariska Hargitay, and the character she plays, Olivia Benson, has become a patron saint for the way people wish they were treated when disclosing assault.
SVU has set many milestones in its decades-long run, and Season 27 marks a new moment in its history, with the series’ first-ever female showrunner finally taking the helm. Michele Fazekas, who first worked as a writer and producer on the show in the early 2000s before departing in 2006, has returned to the world of SVU nearly 20 years later.
“I’d been on the show for five years and for a while I was like, ‘I can’t do a sex crimes cop show anymore.’ It’s too hard to be in that world. This was probably the right amount of time to be away from it,” Fazekas tells TIME, laughing.
SVU looked much different then. The original cast of Hargitay; Christopher Meloni as Elliot Stabler, who now has his own show in the Dick Wolf universe, Law & Order: Organized Crime; Ice-T as Odafin “Fin” Tutuola; the late Richard Belzer as John Munch; and Dann Florek as Captain Cragen were all still on the scene. Now only Ice-T and Hargitay remain (though several crewmembers from Fazekas’ initial run on the show still work there, including the teamster who picked her up for her first day back). Fazekas remembers working with Hargitay fondly.
“She’s a huge reason to come back,” Fazekas says. “One of the best professional experiences of my life is working with her. She’s such a positive person to have on your set. She’s incredibly talented, diligent and gifted, and just a fun, funny person, so you kind of check all the boxes with her.” Hargitay is not beating the real-life Olivia Benson charges.
Though undoubtedly still a popular show, Fazekas’ first tenure on SVU was before it really hit its stride as the guilty pleasure-come-therapy session a lot of viewers see it as today.
“I think it’s okay to present an ideal version in an imperfect world,” Fazekas says of SVU’s portrayal of law enforcement officers who listen to and advocate for survivors without retraumatizing them. “There is a real place for that.”
It’s a throughline throughout Fazekas’ work, especially in her other show that is airing alongside SVU, season two of the Prime Video superheroes-in-college show, Gen V, a spin-off of the devilish The Boys. Gen V follows a group of budding, oftentimes reluctant superheroes as they navigate their abilities. It refreshingly focuses on the experiences of young women, particularly protagonist Marie Moreau (Jaz Sinclair), who comes into her powers when she gets her first period, and her roommate Emma Meyer (Lizze Broadway), whose gift of shrinking and enlarging herself has parallels with disordered eating and body image.
“It’s the reason why I like having a diverse writers room with people from all different jobs, races, ethnicities, walks of life,” she says. In the Gen V writers room “guys would pitch something that happened in college, and every woman in that room either knows someone who had been sexually assaulted in college or had been sexually assaulted in college themselves, so it’s a different life experience.
“In my work I like pitting good against evil and putting characters up against really challenging odds. I really like watching characters defy odds—that’s so Benson to me,” she says.
Fazekas is not trying to reinvent the wheel with her turn on SVU, apart from some new cameras and a different shade of paint in the squadroom. There have been cast shakeups in recent years, and this season is no different, with Kelli Giddish returning in a full-time capacity to her role as Amanda Rollins, amidst a host of new faces, including Noma Dumezweni as Benson’s boss, the chief of detectives.
Instead she’s been looking back at what worked from her first time around and melding that with what SVU is currently doing well.
“The pace of the show is different,” she says. “I like [a quicker] pace, so I told the producer we’re going to have a lot more scenes, don’t freak out, they just have to be faster!”
Fazekas is also leaning into the more procedural aspects of the franchise—or Dick Wolf law school, as she calls it—and, indeed, focusing on interpreting the grey areas of the legal system.
Will this impact the vicarious thrill survivors feel when watching especially heinous crimes investigated by dedicated detectives and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law? We’ll just have to watch Season 27 of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit to find out.
Scarlett Harris is a culture critic and author of A Diva Was a Female Version of a Wrestler: An Abbreviated Herstory of World Wrestling Entertainment. You can follow her on Bluesky and read her previously published work at her website and Substack, The Scarlett Woman.
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