The show has just been renewed for season twenty-one.
I have never seen thirty seconds of it.
I don’t even own a TV
I make my own tv shows better at home.
I’m amazed that it’s run that long and Mariska Hargitay still looks like she’s sucking on lemons all the time. My husband will turn this show on occasionally, but I got sick of it years ago - it’s always the same crap over and over. I find the whole L&O franchise to be pretty depressing.
I watch it.
I watched Gun smoke.
I watched MASH
My parents watched Dallas
I am amazed also. This show is awful. These are the worst cops in the world. Every time they tell a ‘special victim’ that they will protect them now, that person is about to be re-victimized, maybe killed.
Also, never ever let you kids go to Hudson University, every student and faculty member there is a victim or perpetrator of a crime. Sometimes both. Yet knowing this SVU detectives still send their kids there.
I’ve only watched a few. As a fan of the franchise, I felt I should give it a try (I loved Criminal Intent, though I thought I wouldn’t, for example). The first season, with Mayhem, wasn’t so bad.
But watching that show too long makes me feel all icky and dirty. And I think the show love the titillation factor. It’s an exploitation show rather than a procedural, like the other franchise shows are.
And UnStabler is one of the worst cops on TV. He’s the embodiment of everything people dislike about cops, and he’s supposed to be the hero of the show.
Stabler hasn’t been on the show since 2011. I used to watch every single episode and then a couple years ago it became way too preachy with everyone clearly catering to Mariska Hargity. I hate Benson so much! The current season has been better with the other characters actually getting to do things instead of having Mariska save the day as Saint Benson every episode.
Lost some when Stabler went. But once Cragen and Munch went it really started to suck. The new people are just incredibly unlikeable and bad at their jobs. We continued to watch but decided to give up a few years ago.
(Well, the DVR started dumping the unwatched episodes so it was the DVR’s decision, not ours. ;))
The show was also spending way too much time on personal life crap. That’s not what I watched the show for.
Note that once a show goes past its prime but is still getting decent ratings, it continues to make money. Except for those pesky actor salaries who think they should get paid the same as in the heyday. So time to get some of the old timers to go. This often leads to one big paying person and some little fish.
Finn and Munch were one of the nest detective comedy teams ever.
But, yeah, I used to go with a cop and I watch Law & Order to catch the stupid mistakes the cojps make.
I’ve seen pretty much all the original Law & Order episodes, but only caught one or two of the ‘other’ ones. They were** awful!** Never got into them.
I just can’t buy Ice-T as a cop. Sorry.
I gave it up when Chris Meloni left. It’s just not the same. The second I see an episode number of 13:1 or later I switch.
John Mulvaney makes fun of ICE-T on SVU in this clip. Enjoy.
I used to love it but I gave up in Season 9, which I think is when it really started going downhill. It featured some of my most hated episodes: the Robin Williams episode, the episode where Benson went undercover in a prison, and the episode where Finn chases a guy off a roof and he gets crushed by a garbage truck.
I’ve seen every episode and still watch it. It’s not a great show, granted, but the stories have improved recently. At the beginning, the crimes were “especially heinous,” and I was appalled that my (then) boyfriend’s 14-year old daughters watched the show avidly. The girls are 30 now and the sensational sexual content of the plots has been toned down a lot after some really bad seasons. Thank goodness they’ve stopped dwelling on personal stories so much. Olivia has been kidnapped, both women now have children, Brooke Shields had been outed as a crazy Grandma. Let’s move on.
Still “ripped from the headlines,” however, as a recent one dealt with a migrant child separated from her mother and held in a chain link detention cage with about 100 other little kids. That was very hard to watch.
Mariska does always look like she’s smelling something unpleasant. I want her and her co-star Kelli to wash their hair and pull it back. They always look a mess.
Hell, I’m still watching NCIS. There’s no hope for me.
Like others here, I stopped watching a few years ago, partly because of the exploitative nature of many storylines and partly because it just got boring. Weirdly, I don’t have the boredom issue with the original Law & Order, where even reruns are usually interesting enough to watch. I’m a little annoyed that the original show didn’t get a proper send-off or a renewal so it could break Gunsmoke’s record.
(And at one point BBC America showed the UK version of Law & Order, which was also fun to watch, just to see how things were different.)
Longest running prime time drama. There are several soap operas that have run longer.