“I guess I felt we were struggling with the philosophy and how we were going to present that philosophy,” Florek says. “I thought what we had happening was pretty good.”
Audiences, which were not tuning in
en masse
, may have disagreed with his assessment. People he talked with would often disparage
SVU
.
“They’d go, ‘Oooooh, that one, don’t like it.’ And I’d say, ‘Give it at least three, maybe four or five episodes. It’s different but it’s smart and it’s good. And it kept changing and changing,” Florek says.
Wolf points out that
SVU
“is not about sex; it’s about special victims, and the courage of police to prosecute these heinous crimes.”
For the production team, perceptions of a sex-crimes show were sometimes formidable beyond the soundstage. “We had to take a very sensitive approach in the beginning, getting people to understand what the show is about,” says Trish Adlesic,
SVU
location manager since season one’s sixth episode. “One of my responsibilities is to communicate with the public. . . . We coordinate with city government, state government, tenants, superintendents, building electricians, co-op associations. I’ve been very fortunate, but in general people are a bit apprehensive. I have to be a diplomat.”
While Adlesic continued blazing a path for their location work, the actors tried to muster the inner strength to cope with the show’s pace.
Stephanie March, introduced as the ADA in the first episode of season two (“Wrong is Right”), contrasted the
SVU
schedule to the relatively easy demands of theater: “You have to sustain a certain low-level constant energy, and when I say sustain, I mean more than fifteen or seventeen hours. And that is so different from being in a play. I remember thinking the amount of time it takes to shoot one scene, I could have been done with my play by now. So it was so much harder than I thought it would be.”
Nonetheless, March found a positive side to the arduous effort. “It was completely different muscles, it was a different kind of concentration, and sustenance and focus, and it was really wonderful for me and lucky for me to be a principal on a show where I could hone that over and over and over day after day,” she surmises. “It was like being forged in fire, but it worked.”
By then, the rigor was becoming at least somewhat routine for the others. “I think it took me a little over a year to figure it out,” Meloni says. “Because the first year is the impending actors strike, so in order to get a jump on that we worked a whole year, we put thirty episodes in the can, and then the next two or three (seasons) we were working anywhere from sixteen to twenty-two hours a day. It was a matter of course.”
For Hargitay, the East Coast had turned into an albatross around the neck of a California native. “I wasn’t dating anyone, I just didn’t have a life here. It was unbalanced and depressing,” she says.
And where did Monique Jefferies, one of the original
SVU
detectives, go? “At first, we had Michelle Hurd as Belzer’s partner, but (ultimately) man-woman, man-woman was too redundant,” Kotcheff notes. Her character got in trouble with the NYPD and quit the job in frustration early in season two—not an ideal situation for the actress.
As the cast coped with various problems, life wasn’t always smooth sailing for the show’s producers. Showrunner Robert Palm had two young daughters at the time and “the subject matter was really getting to me. You dream of that shit. You wake up in the middle of the night. I didn’t want that in my head anymore,” he says of his decision to leave
SVU
at the end of season one.
The scribes were restless. “I remember Dick Wolf reminding us how high the bar was, and if any scripts weren’t as good as a
L&O
, you were fired,” recalls DeNoon, who has penned teleplays for
SVU
from the start. “He pulled no punches and we left the room shaking. And they pretty much fired every single person by the end of the first season.”
Another issue: Who got to rip what stories from which headlines? “We worried, ‘What happens if the original
L&O
does a sex crime?’ We had turf wars over story ideas,” recounts Jeff Eckerle, a former
SVU
producer. “Now there’s a central clearing house. They try not to have two shows cover the same case in the same season or at least do things differently. Whenever we reached an impasse, a decree would come down from the Wolfman.”
As a veteran resident of the Wolfman’s lair, executive producer Arthur Forney explains, “We got off to a rough start because we were dealing with sex crimes in a harsh, almost cinema-verite style that was maybe a little too graphic,” he suggests. “As time went on, we brought in the medical point-of-view. On the Mother Ship, it’s a dead body. On
SVU
, the victim is often still alive with damage done to their body and emotions. We were figuring it out as we went along. By the second season, Neal Baer really spearheaded that process.”
For writers Jonathan Greene and Robert Campbell, a year had passed since their initial involvement with
SVU.
Then, one evening they were rather suddenly summoned to a meeting in New York with David Burke, the first season two showrunner, and Judith McCreary.
“David said, ‘How soon can you guys be ready to move to L.A.?’ And I was like, ‘Huh?’ They wanted to hire us (full-time). And six weeks later, that’s exactly what happened. We moved out here (to L.A.) and came on the show,” Greene says.
But there was an additional surprise: “Three weeks after that, David left the show and Neal Baer came and that changed the whole world.”
CHAPTER THREE
HEALING THE WHOLE
I
t’s no secret that
SVU
was caught in a whirlwind of flux during the first two seasons, according to executive producer Ted Kotcheff. “We lost Robert Palm, our chief writer. He quit. David Burke—that just wasn’t working for us. We had no writers. Then I read that Neal had parted company with (
ER
showrunner) John Wells.”
Baer, an executive producer with the NBC medical series for seven seasons, was poised to leap from the hospital to the halls of justice. “I felt
ER
was getting very soapy and thought it was time to move on,” he says. “I left the show on Friday, October 13 in 2000—a lucky day!—and started at
SVU
on October 20.”
That sense of luck pervaded
SVU
. “This show to a certain extent started out being more sensational and what Neal really did was bring it around to being . . . more issue-oriented than (merely) the sex crime of the week,” theorizes Jonathan Greene, now a co-executive producer. “He literally took this not just to the next level, but up five or six levels above that.”
He calls the showrunner “our spiritual guru.”
Series creator Dick Wolf says that “when Neal Baer joined the team, his background as a pediatrician added new insights to the stories and characters.”
But Baer initially felt wary about the offer to join that team, given the tenor of
SVU
’s first season. “My wife told me: ‘Don’t take this job—it’s too tawdry.’ I thought it was, too. Bananas up the butt and all that.”
This fruit assault takes place in an episode titled “Russian Love Poem.” Earlier in the season, “Wanderlust” included another questionable shot that Baer describes as “panties stuffed in a dead guy’s mouth.”
Robert Palm bristles at the suggestion that the episodes were dissolute under his one-season watch as showrunner. “That’s bullshit,” he says. “It was raw the first year, not prurient. We tried to bring complexity to the stories but were constantly getting slapped down.”
His theory was that it would be an oversimplification to merely demonize abusers: “It seemed too easy to just create monsters. But we were told, ‘No, no, no. We want monsters.’”
Whatever the cause, in the opinion of NBC Universal vice-president for programming Charles Engel, the series was sinking. “We were doing some types of stories that, taken out of context, sound like a horrible show you wouldn’t want to watch,” he surmises.
Baer had discovered the daunting challenge ahead during his first
tête-à-tête
with several
SVU
higher-ups. “Dick said: ‘I’ll toss you into deep water and you’ll either sink or swim.’”
But this cautionary statement did not sour Baer on the invitation to work for
SVU
, a risky decision that was rooted in an earlier chance encounter. ”Primarily, I was drawn to it by Mariska,” he acknowledges. “I’d been introduced to her by (longtime
L&O
writer who later worked on
SVU
) Robert Nathan in 1996. He did
Prince Street
(NBC, 1997-2000) with her. She was hoping to play Anthony Edwards’ screwed-up girlfriend on
ER
. Despite being smart, funny, and beautiful, she didn’t get the part. Then I ran into her on the (Warner Bros.) lot.”
Hargitay was en route to demand that John Wells, Baer’s boyhood pal growing up in Colorado, reconsider his decision not to cast her as Edwards’ girlfriend—a tactic she would use later when insisting that Wolf choose her for the role of Olivia Benson.
Impressed by her determination, Baer had no qualms about intervening. “I told John, ‘She won’t take no for an answer.’ She got the part and was wonderful on the show. So, when
SVU
had an opening (in season two), I thought I was destined to take the job.”
But destiny was much thornier when it came to other matters on the show, as Baer discovered in what was ostensibly his job interview during the search for a new executive producer. “Some of us were nervous after the first season of
SVU
that it was being done in the wrong way,” Engel recalls. “Dick, Peter Jankowski, and I were having a sort of meet-and-greet with Neal Baer. And at a certain point we realized—I could see it in Dick’s eyes—that Neal was the guy. We basically told him, ‘You’ve got to start yesterday.’”
Baer will never forget the sense of urgency in that get-together. “Dick told me there was a (season one) script, ‘Pixies,’ I had to have ready by Monday. And I had to do something about ‘Runaway,’ which was a disaster,” he says. “To re-shoot it, Ted Kotcheff directed around the clock for twenty-four hours. I threw out all the original dialogue and put in long interviews with each character. That’s the only episode ever broadcast just once on the network—because it was stinky.”
He also deepened the
SVU
diagnoses by bringing on two physician characters. Baer replaced the psychologists, Elizabeth Olivet (Carolyn McCormick) and Emil Skoda (J.K. Simmons) with a forensic psychiatrist, Dr. George Huang (B.D. Wong). And Tamara Tunie came on as a pathologist, Dr. Melinda Warner.
Next, he made use of his passion for social change by encouraging Amanda Green, then a consultant, to begin writing scripts and relocate from the East Coast. “I wanted to cover more psychological and social issues,” Baer notes.
Green (no relation to the co-author of this book) had been living a semi-clandestine existence, theoretically not allowed to hold a job outside the NYPD yet mentioned in the credits for each
SVU
episode. She had “a top-secret memo” to prove she was merely a consultant. “But I didn’t tell anyone. I would just come out here on weekends and vacations and . . . have my brain picked for days. Finally, after like two and a half years, Neil asked: ‘Can you write?’ I said, ‘Uh, I’ve written reports and documents and case reviews and plenty of stuff but I don’t know TV.’ He goes, ‘Hey, you (already) give us the stories and dialogues and twists and turns and plot points. You’re writing; you just don’t know it.’”
She accepted the doctor’s prognosis. In season three, “Counterfeit” was Green’s debut as an official
SVU
employee.
Another Baer prescription was to reduce the surfeit of personal details about lead characters. “I felt that the show was going home with Stabler and Benson too much,” he explains. “That detracted from solving the crime. You can explore their personal lives through the crime and don’t have to interrupt the investigation.
SVU
needs to be about the very dark nature of the human psyche.”
Baer seems to believe the human psyche can also be reflected in fashion. “(I wanted) no more espadrilles and bad beige suits for Stephanie March,” he says. “She needed to be an Ice Queen in Armani.”
The Ice Queen was not terribly confident. “I think the first season of any new thing is rocky,” March says. “When (David Burke) was gone and Neal came in, I thought: ‘OK, well, I guess this is how it is. Maybe they’ll fire me too.’”
Instead, she remembers that Baer met with her and said, “‘I’m really excited about your character; I can’t wait to write for your character.’. . . It’s such an obviously better show after that.”
That forward movement also seems to have worked wonders for Mariska Hargitay, who remembers that, “I hadn’t found my stride, I wasn’t inspired. And I have to be inspired . . .
SVU
was still finding its way. We’d had a writer that was really kind of a negative. We had a second writer that didn’t work out, didn’t know our voices, and I thought nobody was doing well with the material. There wasn’t a communication between the writers and the actors. The directors were different every week. There was no consistency. Dick wasn’t really here. We had no leader, we had no vision.”