We are IN the new season of Law & Order Special Victims Unit and any fan would know what the sad news is: Detective Elliot Stabler is missing in action. It seems the talented Christopher Meloni, who plays Stabler, is going to be missing for the entire season and not just for one or two episodes.
In the last season we saw the ever controversial lawman shoot at a young girl who was waving a gun in public. We were led to believe that, being a man of conscience, Stabler had retired because he felt bad.
It was not the closure we thought we would get, but perhaps given the real reason Meloni left, there was no time to say a proper goodbye. Several reports point out that the talented actor could not come to an agreement when it came to his new contract. This is simplified as Meloni may have wanted a raise and the producers were not hearing any of that, and he threatened to leave – and they said by all means.
It is almost like the situation at Generations right now. In showbiz, the show must go on and no one is bigger than the show.
That only works for soapies because of the loose and slow pace of the storytelling process. It gives the viewer time to adjust to the newly introduced characters. In drama series the pace is much faster. In action series, we meet the principal characters from the onset and it is here where we decide whether we like them or not.
So as it stands we can demarcate between the people who feature in Law & Order, Law & Order SVU and Law & Order UK. Each title has its team and that forms part of its identity. If you were to buy older SVU DVD sets you would see Meloni and Mariska Hargitay on the cover – they are the faces we associate with the series.
It is easier to remove a character from a group as they do on Grey’s Anatomy, but when a show has a pair of actors, when one is gone it is hard to move on. Take the Charlie Sheen situation in Two and a Half Men: as talented as Ashton Kutcher is, he is not Sheen. The same goes for Stabler’s replacement, Danny Pino. He is like that perfect white denture where there was once a front tooth; he’ll work but the “smile” will never be the same.
- Law & Order: Special Victims Unit airs every Wednesday at 8pm on Universal Channel (DStv channel 117).