Law & Order: SVU Season 26, Episode 1 Review: Olivia Benson’s Return Saves a Middling Premiere

Olivia Benson has been Law & Order: SVU’s central character since Season 13 — which feels like a lifetime ago. Fans of the NBC show have watched Olivia move from Detective to Sergeant to Lieutenant and finally to Captain, and the character has become an icon to many viewers. She’s even become a part of American pop culture history, with the Smithsonian Institution accepting some of Mariska Hargitay’s wardrobe to put on exhibit. All that is to say is that Benson is the biggest reason to watch SVU, and that remains true in the Season 26 premiere.

Season 26, Episode 1, “Fractured” focuses on an attack targeting a group of law students. It also introduces yet another new detective into the Special Victims Unit. However, the most interesting part of the show remains Hargitay’s performance as Olivia — suggesting that the rest of the series needs to catch up to her.

SVU Season 26 Begins With a New Detective

SVU Season 26, Episode 1, “Fractured,” brings with it the returns of Captain Renee Curry and Detective Terry Bruno, who both recurred during Season 25. Detective Joe Velasco spends most of the episode with the newest series regular — Detective Kate Silva (played by Juliana Aidén Martinez), who joined SVU from Homicide and is a second-generation police officer. Silva enters the show in a unique way, as Benson gives her a lift to work… though Benson taking Silva and the rest of the team to the shooting range instead of the precinct is an interesting surprise. Whether or not the new character will be interesting, though, is just too early to tell.

So far, Silva seems to have the same chip on her shoulder that every person who transfers into the Special Victims Unit does — the “I know what I’m doing, I don’t know why this Captain is testing me” attitude, which inevitably disappears after the first case that triggers something specific for the new detective. SVU has cycled through several female detectives in the last few years, so how long the character of Kate Silva will last is anyone’s guess. She makes a name for herself by finding the murder weapon in “Fractured,” but how she gets along with the rest of the team is more important to determining her fate in the long run.

‘Fractured’ Feels Like an Old School SVU Episode

The case in the SVU Season 26 premiere centers around the attack, sexual assault and murder of three college students who attend one of the show’s fictional universities. Damon, Shelli and Elodie engage in a threesome but go to sleep in separate rooms. When Damon wakes up to someone trying to come through the door a couple of hours later, he assumes it is their fourth roommate, Teddy — and opens the door without checking. Damon is hit in the back of the head before the assailant murders Shelli and rapes Elodie. It’s not one of the darkest SVU episodes but it certainly is a very grim case of the week.

After 25 seasons of heinous crimes, it’s hard for SVU to surprise fans — but “Fractured” does manage it. The most likely suspect is Teddy, who eventually produces an alibi… albeit a bizarre one. When the detectives discover the smoke detector in Shelli’s room has a hidden camera in it, they see the threesome — but not the murder. It’s an easy line from there to the IP address of the only other person who has access to Shelli’s camera: her supposed friend Sam Ellis. This introduction of another suspect is the biggest surprise, though only until Bruno tells Fin that Sam downloaded and watched the threesome no less than six times. Even if he hadn’t been the murderer, Benson should have locked him up just for that.

The episode then moves into the trial phase, where Dominick “Sonny” Carisi — doesn’t have the proverbial smoking gun. Benson is on it: one comment from Elodie after her time on the stand, and Benson and Curry are able to retrieve a video Shelli made at the women’s empowerment group she was attending. The video is a “private testimonial” that is used “for the client to track their transformation,” which sounds like a lot of mumbo jumbo for “we keep your secrets to blackmail you later” — it’s exactly what Carisi needs. Shelli admits that she had been trying to set a boundary with Sam and was going to be practicing saying “no” to him, and Carisi uses it to rile Sam up enough that he finally admits he was upset that Shelli had said yes to Damon and Elodie but wouldn’t sleep with him. While Carisi still isn’t on the level of SVU lawyers past, this cross-examination proves how much he’s come into his own.

SVU Season 26 Premiere Leans Too Far Into Copaganda

One of the more unfortunate components of the Season 26 premiere is the repeated rhetoric about how terrible things are for the police. Law & Order SVU has rightly gotten criticism for being copaganda, but the “aw, shucks, it’s tough to be NYPD” moments are particularly over the top in “Fractured.” Curry mentions the topic when the team is at the shooting range, after Benson says she brought them there to make sure they are at the top of their game. “There’s a lot of tension in the air,” she says, which isn’t inaccurate — but it is interesting that Benson’s response to “tension” is to take her team to the shooting range, given that she’s the police officer least likely to pull her gun.

The subject comes up again when Bruno and long-serving Sergeant Fin Tutuola confront Sam for the first time. They are swarmed by bystanders who turn on their phone cameras and move in on the three men, seemingly attempting to prevent the police from taking Sam. A bystander gets shoved by Fin, several food items are thrown, and Bruno slams someone into the back of the vehicle he’s just put Sam in. Then another person from the crowd gets up on the hood of the patrol car and does some dance moves before getting yanked from the hood by a patrol officer and banging their head on the way down. The whole sequence is messy and out of place in the episode.

When SVU cuts back to the precinct, Benson is explaining why they picked up Sam to the commissioner, and then tells Bruno and Fin that the Student Civil Liberties Association is suing the NYPD because 10 students were arrested. Fin tells her that “everyone is looking for an excuse to beat up on the cops nowadays,” which is definitely “copaganda” rhetoric. If SVU is going to spend chunks of every episode talking about how hard it is to be a police officer these days, it’s not going to do the show any favors. Law & Order: SVU Season 26 starts on an entertaining enough note, but there are as many low points in the premiere as there are high ones.

SVU Is Still Driven by Olivia Benson

Nearly all of SVU Season 26, Episode 1’s best moments are with Olivia Benson. She comforts Shelli’s distraught mother, provides a safe space for Elodie to share what happened to her, and is seen holding Shelli’s mother in the courtroom as Sam yells that he’s sorry and that he misses Shelli. Benson and Carisi are consistently in sync and, as usual, Benson’s emotions are all over her face — something Mariska Hargitay has been good at in many episodes of SVU.

SVU has had better season premieres, but it’s also seen worse. By and large, the Bruno and Fin dynamic remains fun, Benson and Carisi are one of the strongest SVU-ADA pairings in the show’s history, and it’s nice to see Benson with other women — whether she’s working with Curry or mentoring Silva. “Fractured” gives audiences a good story, and balances investigating the crime with seeing the wheels of justice turn, which didn’t happen much in Season 25. “Fractured” bodes well for the remainder of the season, though the series needs less of its “everything is terrible if you’re the NYPD” if it wants to be great.