Law & Order: SVU Season 26’s “Back To Basic” Story Is Great News For Olivia Benson’s Future
Law & Order: SVU’s season 26 plan to go “back to basics” is a positive development for Olivia Benson’s future. For the past 25 years, Benson has been an advocate for sexual assault survivors, often providing them with support and encouragement while working tirelessly to ensure they get justice. Many of the saddest Law & Order: SVU episodes involve the court system letting survivors down despite her hard work. Never wanting to being unable to serve justice, Benson almost always goes the extra mile to try to prevent that from happening.
During Law & Order: SVU season 25, Benson took her interest in helping survivors too far, hyper-focusing on missing teenager Maddie Flynn and becoming a friend of the family who stuck around even after the girl was finally found and returned to them. This obsessive behavior contrasted strongly with the best episodes of Law & Order: SVU, which were focused on cases without Benson’s involvement getting out of hand. However, the showrunners’ promise to go “back to basics” (via TVLine) suggests that Law & Order: SVU season 26 will not make the same mistake.
Olivia Benson’s Healing Comes From Helping People In Law & Order: SVU 
From Law & Order: SVU’s first episode, Benson has helped herself heal by closing sexual assault cases and getting justice for other survivors. When the series began, Benson’s trauma came from the knowledge that she was the product of rape and growing up with her mother’s alcoholism and mixed feelings about her. Later, Benson suffered her own trauma when she was kidnapped by a psychopath during one of Law & Order: SVU’s creepiest episodes, but that only made her even more determined to help other survivors.
Benson’s desire to help herself by assisting others can sometimes go too far, to the point that it becomes unhealthy, for her and the show. However, Law & Order: SVU becoming weekly case-focused again gives Benson a strong, relatable motivation to move forward. Additionally, Benson healing herself and others by seeking justice will make SVU again become a beacon of hope to real-life survivors and strengthen the series’ ability to advocate for them. This is preferable to the misplaced focus in recent seasons on Benson’s relationship drama with Elliot Stabler or other personal snafu, which detracted from the procedural’s mission.
How Going Back To Basics Will Help Law & Order: SVU In The Long Run
Law & Order: SVU combines personal and police drama, setting it apart from its parent series. Side stories such as Stabler’s difficulty balancing work and family priorities or Benson adopting an abandoned baby enhanced the series. Despite that, Law & Order: SVU has always prioritized its police procedural aspect over personal drama. Somehow, however, this has become a problem since Stabler returned to the Law & Order franchise. The amount of time spent on whether Benson and Stabler would get together romantically has moved the series closer to soap opera territory rather than keeping the focus on empowering survivors.
Benson will have a full roster of detectives to work with, which makes it easier to tell the kind of stories featured in the early seasons, and the showrunners plan to focus more on cases and less on personal drama.
Fortunately, it sounds like Law & Order: SVU season 26 will correct this error. Benson will have a full roster of detectives to work with, which makes it easier to tell the kind of stories featured in the early seasons, and the showrunners plan to focus more on cases and less on personal drama. This change is good for the show’s longevity, as its audience is not only people who enjoy police procedurals but also those who are looking for a supportive voice as they deal with their trauma after surviving sexual assault.
