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Worst TV Show of the Week Brought to you by the Parents Television Council	Share |
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Worst TV Show of the Week

Law and Order: SVU on NBC

At times Law & Order: SVU is rightfully lauded for raising awareness about important issues related to sexual violence. For instance, last November, the show partnered with New York University to host a special screening of an episode that dealt with alcohol abuse and date rape on a college campus. In March of 2010, an episode aired that spotlighted the use of rape as a weapon of war in the Democratic Republic of Congo which drew praise from various advocacy groups.

Unfortunately, more often than not the show feels exploitative, manipulating people’s fear by depicting disturbing sexual violence with a dash of sado-masochistic flair. Such was the case on March 19^th with the rerun of an episode titled, “Spectacle,” which originally aired on February 9^th. One would be hard-pressed to find a relevant issue in this episode. As a result, the show offers little else but sex and violence, earning it the title of Worst TV Show of the Week.

The show opens with a masked man shoving a young co-ed onto a bed. He mounts her, pins her arms down and slaps her across the face. Meanwhile, students in a dormitory watch the crime take place - horrified, yet transfixed. As the brutal rape broadcasts live to the entire campus, the assailant tears the victim’s blouse open and presses a knife to her neck. No one calls campus police until the video ends – a phenomenon known as the “by-stander effect” where witnesses to a crime assume someone else must have notified the authorities.

The SVU team attempts to identify the victim, eventually determining that the case is not only a rape investigation, but an active kidnapping. This is confirmed when the kidnapper streams live footage of the victim, Liz Harmon, tied to a bedpost, nearly naked as she weeps and screams for help. Her shirt is ripped to shreds and her face is clearly bruised. The kidnappers lure Detective Stabler into a proposition: he must solve a cold case or else Liz dies. Her kidnapping was a brutal wake-up call for the police to resurrect the investigation of a separate kidnapping case that happened years ago.

In the end, however, after Stabler does solve the cold case, the kidnapper and his accomplices admit that Liz’s rape and kidnapping had been staged. The rapist was actually her boyfriend.

The elaborate ruse didn’t tackle any relevant issues except for perhaps the “bystander effect,” but other than that, what was the point? Instead, like the detectives, the audience was drawn into the story and manipulated by sexual violence. If anything, the show diminished the issue of women’s safety on campus. The only awareness the episode raised was the fact that the show rightfully deserved the title of Worst TV Show of the Week.