When Allison Janney snagged her fourth Emmy for her performance on “West Wing” in September, she made the altruistic/condescending call to her fellow nominees to join her on stage; apparently hoping to extend some second-hand glory-basking to some notably worthy actresses. Only one nominee bashfully accepted the call: Mariska Hargitay, the oft-overlooked co-star of “Law and Order: SVU.” Snatch. As was much noted the following morning; both ladies were wearing green—double snatch.Last night at the Golden Globes, Hargitay won a private invitation on-stage to receive her award as Best Actress in a Televison Series (Drama). Hargitay was stunning as she cried and emitted thank-yous in that classic leading-ladies-are-human-too form perfected by front-page movie stars like Halle Berry and Gweneth Paltrow. For the millions of viewers that tune in to SVU every week (or every hour, if you manage to get the TNT-NBC-CourtTV scheduling grid under control), the win—the first for any lead/supporting actor on any of the “Law and Order” programs—was simply deserved.
Why? Because Olivia Benson kicks ass.
It’s not surprising that actors from the L&O franchise are often neglected when awards season comes around. The program’s plot-emphasized formula enables viewers to tune in to the show’s weekly installments and syndicated episodes at random. The lack of episode-to-episode character-driven storylines have helped hoist the program to the top of the Nielsen charts for the almost 15 years it has been on the air.
SVU writers, however, have taken more liberties with character development and Hargitay, daughter of screen legend Jayne Mansfield, has constructed a complicated personality for Detective Olivia Benson. The sexually-based crimes investigated on SVU have a ruthless human underbelly, and it’s one that insistently penetrates even the most two-dimensional TV-detective cutouts. SVU often brings the crime home; previous storylines have woven in subplots like Elliot Stabler (Chris Meloni)’s problems with disciplining his daughter and the death of Benson’s mother.
In a particularly memorable episode, Benson sums up the emotional conflict of an SVU detective: “You kill yourself to make something happen. Or you do nothing and it doesn’t matter. There’s always another child molester. There’s always another rapist. And it’s like you have to sell a little piece of yourself to get the job done. So what the hell’s the point?” Elliot Stabler, her partner, a father and husband, responds: “I don’t know. Maybe there isn’t a point. Maybe the cost is too high. Olivia, no one’s making you do this. The difference between you and all the victims is you can walk away.” She responds; “No, I can’t.”
Benson doesn’t date very much and she’s not married—two characteristics which separate her from most female television ingénues. She admits to Stabler that men are no longer interested when they find out what she does, and that looking at sex crimes all day makes it hard to have any sex drive whatsoever. Like her co-worker, John Munch (Richard Belzer), she has almost given up all hope of a personal life outside of SVU, but she rarely expresses regret. It’s an interesting gender reversal—the man (Elliot) has the family, the woman is the lifetime “bachelor”--and Benson also steers clear of the “feminazi” stereotype often applied to strong female characters (making “working women” both a threat to the instruction of family and the inherent femininity or heterosexuality of the woman herself, as if hard work and womanhood are mutually exclusive)—she is real and tough, likeable and human, and consistently heroic. Benson, Munch, Stabler and Fin Tutuola (Ice-T) form a “team” of truly dedicated detectives, a drama-ripe powerhouse of people wholly willing to sacrifice a life in pursuit of justice.
It’s a distinctly American ethos, and it’s wholly deserving of it’s ratings, it’s fanfare, and now—it’s Golden Globe. Her fellow nominees, who Hargitay gracefully allowed to remain in their seats, are also worthy recipients of the prize. But it’s nice, after all, in a category where three of the nominated actresses (Christine Lahti, Edie Falco and Joely Richardson) play characters who exist most notably in their relationship to lead actors (Lahti is the mother of aspiring presidents Jack and Bobby, Falco plays the wife of mob leader Tony Soprano, and Richardson is the wife of plastic surgeon Sean MacNamara) to have a winner who stands on her own two feet and still looks stunning in her beautiful, one-of-a kind, Vera Wang pink gown.
Marie Lyn Bernard