WE will explore the dark side of familiar territory, with familiar faces, in “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.”
If the crimes that drive “Law & Order” have the cops who solve them and the lawyers who prosecute them shaking their heads, the sex crimes dealt with by “Special Victims” will have the cops – and viewers – holding onto their stomachs.
In the opening scene, which looks as if it were filmed during Floyd’s deluge, we’re peering at what’s left of a New York cabbie’s body after someone stabbed him 37 times and hacked off his “cigar,” as the cop at the rain-drenched scene delicately puts it.
To answer the question of whodunit, the cops on the case (Mariska Hargitay and Christopher Meloni) have to begin asking why.
The answers will have a ripple effect that reach from Sarajevo to the elite unit that has inherited genetic material from the cerebral “Law & Order” but will pack a more visceral punch that’s sure to rattle the sensibilities of the 9 o’clock audience.
NBC is sharing “Special Victims” with USA Network, which will repeat episodes at the more adult hour of 11 p.m. Sundays.
Even creator Dick Wolf knows NBC has given an inappropriate timeslot to the show, but he and executive producer Robert Palm, whose name will be familiar to early fans of “L&O,” are not about to pull punches.
So we are off on a trip that will take us into the Rikers-ish land of “Oz,” from which inmates Meloni and Dean Winters have been rehabilitated as “Special Victims” cops, to meet a heavily made-up inmate whose personna fey-vors Robert Downey Jr. and whose former johns include a gallery owner born to be chronicled by Page Six (which gets a plug tonight).
Surrounded by blowups of garishly colored lips, the gallery owner, who envisions Det. Olivia Benson (Hargitay) with his bisexual wife, dismisses the inmate as “a disgusting little piece of street meat, but he has an extraordinarily gifted orifice in the middle of his face.”
Gamey stuff indeed.
But what will have Benson upchucking and sharing a good cry with her mother (Elizabeth Ashley) speaks to the powerful and long-lasting impact of sex crimes, as well as to the character intimacies that also will distinguish “Special Victims” from its parent show.
“L&O,” from which Angie Harmon does a legal-brief walk-on tonight, has steadfastly refused to give us peeks into the private lives of its characters – except during crossovers with “Homicide: Life on the Street,” from which Richard Belzer’s John Munch, conspiracy theories intact, has transferred.
Munch has little more than shtick in tonight’s show. Ditto the bureaucratic Det. Donald Cragen, played by “L&O” founding cast member Dann Florek; Winters, whose major contribution tonight is to ask whether a sex act with a corpse in a subway station constitutes a sex crime; and Michelle Hurd, who squelches Munch with a double entendre that’s for mature audiences only.
Comic relief is going to be hard to come by with “Special Victims” – witness the unrelated subplot in which Det. Elliot Stabler (Meloni), on the stand, baits a “weinie-wagging” city councilman, who whips out the weinie in question to prove to the jury that he’s got no “shortcomings.”
A couple of months from now, when everything has gelled, that scene might be one to savor.
Tonight, it has the feel of a gratuitous bit of TV business that’s a slap in the face of “Special Victims.”