“Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” will reflect George Floyd ’s death in police custody and public outrage that followed in future episodes.
Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, died in Minneapolis on Memorial Day after a white police officer kneeled on his neck for more than eight minutes, sparking nationwide protests against police brutality. Multiple television critics, including USA TODAY’s Kelly Lawler, have said these protests raise issues not just about real-life cops, but about fictional ones, too.
During Friday’s episode of The Hollywood Reporter podcast TV’s Top 5, showrunner Warren Leight said he thinks the portrayal of police officers in television is going to change.
“I hope to God it’s an inflection point,” he said. “Change will start taking place on shows individually. There’ll be lip service paid, probably across the board, but I wonder how deep it will go.”
Leight sees shows that glorify cops who don’t follow the law as one of the biggest problems.
“There are shows with flawed cops at their center,” he said. “I don’t mind a flawed cop at the center, but a flawed cop with a tendency to violence that’s glorified, to me, is a real recipe for legitimizing police brutality. That’s what I see the most that disturbs me.”
However, the goal of ”SVU,” Leight added, is to show “how justice should be handled” — even if that isn’t always the reality.
In the long-running NBC crime drama, Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), a supervising officer who investigates sex crimes, “makes mistakes... but she’s empathic, which is, I think, what separates the cops on our television show from a lot of what we’re seeing these days on livestreams,” he said.
This hopeful portrayal of the justice system has resonated with fans of the series, which just concluded its 21st season, Leight added.
“People come up saying, ‘I wish when I was assaulted I’d had a cop like Olivia Benson,’ “ he said. “You’ve seen people rise to the occasion when others have collapsed under the pressure or their true natures have come out. I think that the audience is sophisticated enough to know this is not the reality of day-to-day life in the world of sexual assault.”
In the future, Leight said, the series will address Floyd’s death and the subsequent backlash against law enforcement. The “Law & Order” franchise is famous for taking real-world events as jumping-off points for fictional stories.
“It has to come up,” he said. ”And it will. It’ll come up when we arrest somebody ... The second the cops on the street arrest someone now, the cameras are out, and we’ve played that beat a number of times. And what does that capture?”
He added: “We will find our ways in to tell the story, and presumably our cops will still be trying to do the right thing, but it’s gonna be harder for them, and they’re gonna understand why it’s harder for them.”
When contacted by USA TODAY, neither NBC nor Dick Wolf, who oversees the entier “Law & Order” franchise, offered any additional details about plans for a George Floyd-influenced storyline.
Read more at usatoday.com