Law & Order: Special Victims Unit: The Unofficial Companion Read Online Free PDF Page B

dream,” he suggested during a 1997 interview for a book about the original show, “because it’s all about words.”
    Words can be fickle, however. “I know you’re a creative person,” Wolf told Kotcheff early in SVU ’s season one. “But in a season of twenty-two shows, we’ll do four great episodes, four terrible ones, and the rest lie somewhere in between.”
    The East Coast executive producer’s response: “I can’t approach a season in that frame of mind.”
    Somehow, the two frames of mind merged enough to impress the studio and the network.
    “I thought for a while we would never get to episode thirteen, that it would turn into rape-of-the-week, child-molester-of-the-week, and I’d be out looking for work again,” Kotcheff notes. “But we were asked to do nine more episodes, a full season. Then, we were invited back for another year.”
    The network’s pat on the back eased any worries Wolf might have been having. “I don’t think we had many growing pains,” he says. “But there (was) some re-evaluation of stories and characters, which is normal.”
    Although Dann Florek had three seasons on the Mother Ship under his belt, he found SVU to be an entirely different experience. “There was definitely a sense of feeling our way,” he notes. “And I also think if you go back and look, probably a handful of our weakest episodes were in that first year, when we were still figuring things out and getting the right writers for the style of the show, and where could we go, you didn’t want to just be grisly.”
    Yet, grisly was almost the mantra in those early days with episodes that never seemed to stray from the horrific crime into the relative calm and, well, order of a courtroom. The victims were varied—a teenage model, a prostitute, a male travel writer, a college student, a Wall Street financier, a TV news reporter—but the somber caseload was unrelenting.
    “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