Law & Order: Special Victims Unitreturned for its21st seasonon Thursday night with ones of its most powerful and relevant episodes yet.
In the premiere titled “I’m Going to Make You a Star,” Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) and her team attempted to lock up big-time Hollywood exec Sir Tobias Moore (Ian McShane), who assaulted aspiring actresses. The episode — which aired almost two years to date from whenThe New York Timespublished its first story exposing multiple allegations againstHarvey Weinstein— name-checks the disgraced producer (who has denied the claims) as the parallels between his real-life downfall aftermore than 90 womenaccused him ofassaultheavily influence the plot.
When one of the young actresses, Pilar Reyes (Carmen Berkeley), comes to Benson and Amanda Rollins (Kelli Giddish) to accuse the British media mogul of raping her when she went to his office for an audition, they immediately deem her detailed account legitimate and want to begin investigating. But new Bureau Chief Vanessa Hadid (Zuleikha Robinson) doesn’t feel as strongly about the case and wants Benson to further vet Pilar.
Speaking to PEOPLE, episode writer Warren Leight breaks down what went into creating Thursday night’s Weinstein-inspired premiere, how the stars felt about tackling such a topical issue and what’s going to happen to Benson with Dodds (Peter Gallagher) moving to Coventry and Carisi serving as ADA.
How did you start with writing this episode?One of the tricky things for us when we were writing this episode was if we made it a network guy, everybody would think it wasone person. If we made it a movie producer, everybody would think it wasanother person. There was almost no place we could go in the entertainment industry where somebody at the top of the food chain hadn’t been brought down. But we wanted something like an amalgam of these different powerful serial predators. their ability to avoid prosecution and their ability to not be held accountable is pretty interesting to me.
Why did you choose to bring up Weinstein pretty early on in the episode?Well, I guess so we’re all clear it’s not him. But also to contextualize it. Unfortunately, there’s a dozen of these guys and they’ve been allowed to stay in these positions even though their corporations knew what was going on. I still want to get to, how do the lawyers who work for these guys sleep at night? I find that disturbing. I know everyone’s entitled to a defense, but if your defense is to destroy the credibility of fifteen different victims — that’s pretty sleazy work.
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In the same vein, you also call out Tobias’ assistant in the episode, which has been of part of the conversation as well. Why was it important for you to include that element?Because it’s horrible to me that these guys often use and easily find women to enable their betrayal. There are people inside who lead these lambs to the slaughter, and they do it over and over again. I don’t believe they don’t know what goes on when the door shuts, when they lead the girl into the office, they leave the young guy into the office. It takes a village to prop up guys like this. I wanted to personify that.
Why did you make Hadid doubtful of Pilar’s claims at first?The first thing these guys do is get women attorneys who don’t seem to worry at all about who they’re defending. It turns out, in some specific cases that we looked at, DAs weighed in and prominent female politicians weighed in on behalf of these guys. People sometimes make the mistake of thinking, “I know him very well and he’s never done anything like that with me.” But that doesn’t mean they don’t do it with somebody where the power imbalance is more overt. It’s not just an old boys club propping them up. I wanted to articulate that.
Did you talk to any real-life assault survivors or consult with them for this episode?Unfortunately, in the last three years as different stories have broken in the paper, I’ve had a number of people disclose things to me that happened to them. Some of the stories I’d heard before. Out of the three dozen prominent men who were outed in the last few years, only a couple came as complete surprises to me. I knew them and I knew people who had difficult times with them. I had a lot of people I knew whose stories informed the episode.
What does it say about Tobias and they type of men he’s representing that he kept going after women after Pilar initially reported him?They can’t stop. They’ve gotten away with this for so long, they know they’re invulnerable. I talked to a couple of guys who run sex crimes units, and I go, “What happens when you go up against these guys?” What I kept hearing is they believe they will never be held accountable, so they don’t stop. It’s counterintuitive. If you’re in this much trouble, keep it in your pants. These guys can’t.
At the of the episode, there is a little bit of reshuffling in the department. What does that mean for the leads characters’ futures?Well, Peter has another series, so I had to kind of clean that up a little for his sake. He’s been exiled to Staten Island. We’ll be meeting a new chief above Benson in episode three. As a condition of his subjugation, he insisted on her being promoted. So she’s got more juice going into the season. For me, it’s also a way of resetting the show. Obviously, the Carisi move and establishing Vanessa Hadid is a way of resetting. I just wanted to get some fresh blood in there, get some air in the room, rejigger the dynamics. As always, atLaw & Order, you have to do that while you’re pushing the story forward.
Law & Order: SVUairs Thursdays (10 p.m. ET) on NBC.
source: people.com
