Law And Order: SVU Called Way Back To Mariska Hargitay’s Earliest Days As Olivia Benson, And Now I Need More Backstory
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Law & Order: SVU continued in the 2025 TV schedule with a case that was bad enough to start with one victim, only to get even worse for Captain Benson and Co. when they discovered a string of women who had been coerced into sexual favors in the workplace over many years. Carisi wasn’t getting the evidence he needed to be 100% certain of a guilty verdict, leading Benson to approach the one woman whose testimony could put the bad guy behind bars. In the process, SVU called back to Mariska Hargitay’s character’s career even before the show started, and I want to know more about those pre-Special Victims days.
When Benson attempted to appeal to Grace’s conscience and get her to testify, Grace tried to argue that an NYPD cop could never understand the corporate culture that had led her to protect a rapist for so long. That obviously didn’t work, prompting Benson to say:
Oh, I understand what it means to be a woman in a male-dominated field. I’ve been with the NYPD for 30 years… I survived.
Fortunately, Benson did successfully talk Grace into testifying, helping Carisi to earn another win after recently getting a much-needed wake-up call. But that’s not the takeaway from the conversation or the episode as a whole that leaves me wanting more from Olivia Benson’s backstory. Her mention of being with the NYPD for 30 years reminded me that even though SVU has been on for a whopping 26 seasons and (hopefully) counting, the character’s time as a cop goes back further than we’ve seen.
After all, she was already a junior detective in the pilot of SVU back in 1999, and one doesn’t become a detective straight out of the academy. In fact, both Stabler (Christopher Meloni) and Munch (the late Richard Belzer) had seniority on her. Even if Benson was just rounding up or down in “Deductible,” there are years of her career that haven’t been fully explored on screen.
And I’m ready for SVU to revisit those years in some form or other beyond what has happened so far. In the scene from the latest episode, she even acknowledged to Grace that “things have changed,” which just makes me want to learn more of the status quo Benson was working in before the pilot. (You can find the pilot streaming with a Peacock subscription now.)
Of course, anybody who has rewatched SVU’s older episodes in recent years (like how I rewatched the pilot for its 24th anniversary) knows that the show tackled certain subjects in ways that certainly wouldn’t fly in 2025, ranging from how the unit addressed topics of gender and sexuality to police brutality. I could see Benson alluding to her earlier years in a conversation with Fin, since Ice-T didn’t join SVU until Season 2, or even if Mariska Hargitay and Christopher Meloni ever share the screen again for Law & Order: Organized Crime crossover.
