Law & Order: SVU‘s precinct boss is known for being stalwart in the face of hard-hitting blows, both personal and professional. But the NBC procedural’s Season 24 — which gets underway Thursday as part of a history-making, three-way crossover starting at 8/7c — will afford the Special Victims Unit boss and her co-workers some much-needed space to process.
“This show’s already had a two-tiered message, one of justice and one of moral complexity,” showrunner David Graziano tells TVLine. “And there’s going to be a slight third message, and that’s going to be one of healing.”
Executive producer Julie Martin adds that the real-world experience of living through a global pandemic has left its mark on the unit’s officers, as well as the community they police.
“It’s just tapping into the zeitgeist of what’s happening in New York City and across the country and across the world,” she says. “I mean, people are unsettled, still, by the events of the last three years.”
And if you’re Olivia, the hits and hurts go back a lot farther. So sure, we asked about William Lewis, and those pesky years that Stabler was gone. We also touched on more contemporary squad business, such as new hire Det. Grace Muncy (played by Days of Our Lives‘ Molly Burnett) and the future of ‘Rollisi’ which, as regular TVLine readers know, recently got complicated.
The premiere crossover’s ’emotional fallout’
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Photo : Courtesy of NBC
When TVLine talked with Law & Order showrunner Rick Eid in September, he sketched out the overall shape of his show’s crossover premiere with Law & Order: Organized Crime and SVU (which will air in that order for premiere night only). Now, Martin gives us a little more detail about the plot.
“The case starts with a young girl who gets killed, and we quickly realize that she’s a trafficking victim,” the EP says. “Then SVU enters the scene and helps investigate that, and then the story does spin out into a bigger arena.”
Graziano adds that some aspects of the premiere will resonate in the rest of the season. In Episode 2 and beyond, the SVU detectives are “onto other things, but there’s one or two of them that are going to have some emotional fallout from the three-hour event that we have to honor, take seriously, dramatize and have some fun with,” he says.
As TVLine reported in July, Burnett joins the cast as a smart, effective and somewhat blunt officer who has experience working with gangs. “She’s rough around the edges,” Graziano says of Muncy. “She’s going to have a steep learning curve for SVU… She’s used to the gang unit.”
The EP adds that he and Martin are using the new character “to teach the audience again, after 23 years of the show, what it takes to be an SVU detective. Some people have it, and some people don’t. We’re going to see if she has it. Benson is testing her a little bit, but also taking her under her wing.” Pay special attention to Episode 2, during which the captain will start to think that perhaps Muncy will fit in well at the precinct. However, Graziano warns, “It’s not easy.”
Over the past few seasons of SVU and Organized Crime, former partners Liv and El (and former co-stars Mariska Hargitay and Chris Meloni) have spent a bit of time on each other’s shows. What their interactions in SVU Season 24 (and OC Season 3, for that matter) will look like are still up in the air.
Graziano says the shows would like “at least the same amount” of SVU/OC crossovers. “Dramatically, it’s tempting,” he explains. “Dramatically, I think we’d have Stabler and Benson together every episode, like Butch and Sundance ride together again! But he’s such a huge presence on the OC, and every scene is monumentally important to that show.” He laughs. “We can’t just borrow him every time we want.”
Martin adds: “What we will be doing more is having the characters, even if they’re not together on the screen, acknowledge in their separate shows how much a part of each other’s lives they are and will continue to be, whatever form that takes.”
Right before the show’s winter hiatus, Episode 9 to be precise, expect “a different sort of episode,” Graziano previews. “It’s going to be about some of the trauma that SVU detectives absorb, and it’s going to be [Benson] and another character, which I won’t name, unpacking a lot of stuff that needs to be unpacked.”
The EP goes on to say that the hour might touch upon Benson’s Season 14 kidnapping and torture at the hands of William Lewis, an incident she has yet to discuss with Eliot
