Worst TV Show of the Week Brought to you by the Parents Television Council WARNING: Graphic Content!!! Do NOT push play if you don't want to see the explicit video!!!

Law & Order: SVU on NBC

While Law & Order: SVU is notorious for depicting graphic violent content, the program’s writers occasionally take things too far with sexual content as well.  The November 20^th episode, which aired at 10:00 p.m. ET, featured a horrific depiction of a murdered teenager and retraced the promiscuous behaviors that lead to her death.  Rape, prostitution, nudity, and teen sex saturated the hour-long program.

The show opens with two pre-teen Boy Scouts finding the body of a dead 17-year-old girl in the woods.  Her body is beaten and disheveled, and her lips have been ripped off.  When detectives investigate the scene they find a bloody bag with the girl’s recovered lips.  Upon further inspection of the body, they discover semen inside the young girl.  As the investigation begins, the man whose semen was found is questioned and, wouldn’t you know it, he just happens to have a sex tape of himself in bed with the victim.  The man is shown getting out of bed clearly in the nude, with a towel barely covering his genitals. 

Later, the detectives are lead to an apartment where a pimp answers the door and quotes prices based on race to sleep with a prostitute.  Police push past the pimp and move to the back of the apartment where they hear orgasmic moaning.  They enter the room to find a young man on top of the prostitute, thrusting his hips in a clear display of sexual intercourse.  When the cops remove him from the woman he yells, “Hey, I ain’t finished!”

After a gang-shooting scene, we see detectives looking at pictures of the victim in bed with one young man, and being beaten to death by another.  The photo of the girl in bed is shot from behind and shows her straddling the boy, completely topless and engaged in intercourse.

The worst thing about this episode is that the honorable efforts of the show’s protagonists to solve crimes and apprehend the guilty are completely overshadowed by unnecessary content which could only have been intended to disturb and titillate.  From the young boys who witnessed the body to the topless teens in bed, the offensive content in this episode was not essential to telling a decent crime story.  This irresponsible embellishment has earned Law & Order: SVU our pick for Worst of the Week.