On Making The Mistake of Rewatching a TV Show From My Teens
on out growing formative things + we have got to stop shaming women for having sex
One of the constants in my life has been Law and Order SVU. I think I stumbled across on episode on TV (live, on one of the few channels we got with an antenna) when I was 14 or 15. I remember watching episodes on the Project Free TV website under the sheets with the family laptop that wasn’t supposed to leave the living room. I burned through all fifteen or so seasons that existed at the time and always jumped on a new season as soon as the episodes started airing. In college, I got myself a subscription to Hulu so I could watch all episodes the day after they aired. Even after college, as a working adult, I looked forward to Wednesdays in the fall because I could come home from work and watch the latest episode on the old TV that my roommate had gotten as a hand-me-down from her parents.
My first real TV love was JAG, but that’s a whole other essay. Law and Order SVU was one of my teenage obsessions, along with Criminal Minds and NCIS. But SVU, until recently, was the only one I kept watching as an adult. What was it about this show that wove itself into the fabric of my life? I’m not sure that I can answer that question. I loved this show when I found it, I watched every episode I could get my hands on, including the back catalog of nearly fifteen seasons. I was drawn in by the shocking and dramatic stories, but it was mostly a love for the characters that kept me up until 2 am watching old episodes.
I haven’t watched the show since I moved to the UK three years ago because it’s hard to find over here. It’s not of interest to a non-American audience, so it’s not on any of the streaming services. Usually. About a month ago, it popped up on one that my boyfriend had gotten a discounted subscription of for a few months on a deal. I was excited to watch it again.
The theme song took me right back to being fifteen. Right back to college, to being a newly minted adult with her first job. There are new faces in the credits, but Olivia Benson and Finn are still here.
The magic was short lived and the moment turned bittersweet as the episodes played.
The dodgy acting from the one episode actors didn’t use to bother me. Not only that, I didn’t even notice it. Now I can’t ignore it. But that wasn’t the only thing souring my teenage memories of this show.
I still think that SVU has its merits. Watching 26 seasons of SVU will give you a good education on consent. It’s never the victims fault. Yes means yes, no means no. Lack of a yes is a no. This was especially radical growing up in conservative Christian purity culture. The extent of the conversation around consent was limited to discussions of how sex was only for marriage and that your body belonged to your spouse (toxic af ideology that I’m pretty sure has gone way beyond what Paul meant in those verses everyone likes to throw around but I digress).
The thing is my thoughts and values around sex have continued to evolve and I don’t think the same is true of SVU. This became crystal clear during an episode centered on a sextortion scam titled “Economics of Shame.” The plot centers around a female newsreader who’s been targeted by a man who lures her into a date, films them having sex without her knowledge, and then blackmails her with the video.
No one blames her for this situation. No one judges her for sleeping with someone on the first date. That’s the progressive sexual ethic I remember from this show. But there’s a thread woven through this episode that drives me insane. Throughout the episode, there’s a running theme that this video is going to ruin her life and she’ll lose her job. She sums it up when she tells one of the detectives this video can’t get out because “no one will ever trust my judgement again.”
Because she’s a woman who had sex. People will know that she had sex. None of this is ever brought up in this show. No one brings up the fact that she shouldn’t be being blackmailed because no one should care that a woman had sex on the first date. No one questions why a video like this would result in her losing her job.
I cannot wrap my head around how a video of her having sex that was released without her consent means that she has poor judgement. Even a video of her having sex that was filmed with her consent wouldn’t indicate bad judgement. Except, oh wait, it would because we still shame women for having sex. If she hadn’t had sex, she wouldn’t be blackmailed. It’s deeper than that, it’s not about the blackmail, it’s about this proof of sexual activity. This newsreader who goes out to dinner with a man and then fucks him can’t possibly be trusted by news audiences.
The head of the network shows up because scandal: one of his reporters has had sex. There’s proof of it, right there on his phone in the form of a video the bad guy sent him. She’s at risk of losing her job. The more I think about this, the more it pisses me off. The issue here should be the awkwardness of seeing intimate moments that weren’t meant for him, not that an employee of his had sex. Because that’s what this boils down to.
One of the ways we could cut down on the revenge porn and the deepfake blackmail is by shifting our response to “so what?” Yeah, you’re an adult, you had sex. So what? A woman went on a date and had sex. Wild stuff. If the criminals can’t get a reaction, there’s less of an incentive. While she’s never blamed (again, one of the foundational messages of this show, it’s never the victims fault), no one ever points out that no one should care. Everyone accepts the premise that if this video gets out, it will ruin her career.
This premise is only true because we judge women who sleep with men on the first date. Because we judge women who take nude pictures of themselves. If there was no social shame, this wouldn’t be an issue (or would be less of an issue). If we didn’t try to police women and relationships, this scam wouldn’t work. Or work as well, there’s still the level of blackmail where no one wants a video of themselves having sex being put out on the internet without their consent. The fact remains that a lot of this is predicated on the judgement society still throws at women for daring to be sexual beings in the first place.
It threw me for a little bit of a loop, this foundational puzzle piece that no longer slots into my life. It’s a bit weird, this feeling that I no longer have a desire to watch this show that’s been such a constant throughout my life. The theme song that can still transport me back to being a teenager, to my first apartment after college. To washing dishes, laptop perched on the counter. To lying on my bed after work, exhausted, cat curled up next to me, Hulu playing on the laptop.
Part of SVU not fitting in my life anymore is the show isn’t as good to me anymore. I notice bad acting now, shallow plot points. I don’t really think of myself as someone with highbrow taste but these things bother me now in a way they didn’t when I was younger.
And while my values have continued to evolve and I have some issues with how SVU handles certain things now, I don’t think that would keep me from watching it. I just don’t enjoy it the way I used to because to be honest, I don’t really like watching TV anymore. Not the way I used to.
I don’t watch shows on my laptop anymore. I don’t watch anything on my laptop anymore. It’s not the phase of life I’m in. Overall, I watch a lot less TV than I did in my early twenties. It wasn’t just SVU, I had a pile of sitcoms that I would burn through every Wednesday when the new episodes were added to Hulu.
Now, I sit down in the evenings to watch an episode of something with my boyfriend, but apart from that, I don’t really watch TV at all. When I have an evening to myself, I usually read. There’s a way of telling this that makes me sound like I think I’m better than watching TV in the evenings. But that’s not it. Those afternoons spent flopped on my bed or maybe doing housework while half-watching a sitcom on my laptop perched on the edge of the kitchen counter weren’t how I wanted to be spending my time. It was jut the easiest thing to do. It was reaching for cheap and easy dopamine when I was exhausted after work. It was taking the path of least resistance, easily procrastinating when I had papers due in college.
I don’t have any tips if you also want to start doing more of the things you love and less of the mindless media consumption, because to be honest, I just got tired of it at some point. Tired of accumulating ideas for stories I wanted to write, piles of books I wanted to read, saved videos on Instagram of cute, fun ideas I wanted to try. My frontal lobe finally developed and I found the joy in creating over consuming. I don’t know.
It can still be a struggle to choose to read instead of scroll on my phone, but the battle is between Instagram and the rest of my life instead of Hulu and the rest of my life. I still have days when my screen time creeps higher and higher. But it’s also gotten easier to put down the phone and pick up something else — a book, a magazine, my metaphorical pen in the shape of my laptop, a real pen and notebook. My shoes to go for a walk.
For me, watching less TV has been part of becoming more of the person I wanted to be even back then. To make the most of my free time and actually do all the things I wanted to do, instead of watching TV.
My boyfriend, after realizing just how many streaming services he was subscribed to, decided to cancel his subscription to the only streaming service in the UK with Law and Order SVU on it. And I won’t be rushing to take out a subscription of my own anytime soon.