Benson and Fin will ‘have some fun’ that could get them in trouble in Season 26, ‘SVU’ producers say
Capt. Olivia Benson will leave her demons behind her — at least for a little while — as she looks ahead in Season 26 of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” which will feature some new faces, a return to classic storytelling and a bit of mischief between Olivia and her confidant Sgt. Odafin “Fin” Tutuola.
Benson, who has been portrayed by the invincible Mariska Hargitay since Season 1, “refound her center” in Season 25, according to the series’s executive producers, but her own trauma may get “reopened” midseason — “based on her love of another person that goes through something pretty horrible” (more on that later).
TODAY.com recently caught up with “SVU” executive producers David Graziano and Julie Martin to break down some of the events of the historic 25th season of “SVU” and to preview what’s to come in Season 26, which premieres Thursday, Oct. 3, at 9 p.m. ET on NBC.
Season 25, which was shortened due to the 2023 writers strike, kicked off in a uniquely cinematic way. Episodes usually begin with the events leading up to the crime of the week, but the January premiere started off with a montage of moments of Benson over the past 25 seasons and a voice-over done by Hargitay.
Graziano describes that season as “a morphologically weird” one “in a narrative sense,” due to the shortened episode order.
“We decided to be able to lean into that and be able to tell a little bit of a continuing story, a little more than the show is normally able to do,” he explains.
“That montage was a really great way, we thought, to look back on the provenance of the show and the history of the show and sort of celebrate it in a way,” he adds.
Graziano says they also wanted to show Benson at the beginning of her career (the show began airing in 1999) and “all the things she’s been through,” which, unfortunately, includes trauma.
“Anybody with a high-stakes, high-pressure job like that has vicarious trauma, and we wanted to be able to explore what that would be like for Olivia Benson to have to confront hers,” he says.
Part of dealing with that vicarious trauma for Benson meant trying a new kind of therapy: EMDR, which stands for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing and is a newer treatment in which patients move their eyes “a specific way” while processing “traumatic memories” with the end goal being healing from those experiences, according to the Cleveland Clinic.
While there aren’t concrete plans for Benson to return to therapy in the initial episodes of Season 26, Graziano says he and Martin were just discussing “a pretty big” reason Benson may need to eventually visit her therapist.
“We think that probably somewhere in the midseason there will be another sort of a way that Benson’s own trauma gets kind of reopened based on her love of another person that goes through something pretty horrible,” he says.
Another tool that helped Benson “find her way” in Season 25 was a compass necklace given to her by her former partner, Detective Elliot Stabler, played by Chris Meloni, who reentered her life in 2021 after an abrupt exit from the team at the end of Season 12. Stabler returned to the “Law & Order” universe with his own spinoff, “Law & Order: Organized Crime,” which Graziano was temporarily a part of at the end of the show’s third season after the previous showrunner stepped down, Deadline reported at the time. One of those episodes Graziano assisted on was the Season 3 finale, when Stabler gifted Benson the necklace and told her he hoped it would lead her to “happiness.”
Benson wore the compass necklace in every episode of Season 25, but she loaned it out to a victim’s mother in the season finale, saying, “This has gotten me through some tough times, and you can return it whenever you want.”
Martin explains the reasoning behind Benson’s decision: “In our minds, the necklace served its purpose for Olivia, for Season 25, and it helped her reset herself and find her way and brought her to a place she was able to pass it along to someone who needed it more than she did.”
In doing so, Martin says Benson “refound her center,” which she explains as Benson’s own healed trauma coming through to help others “heal their trauma.”
This “pay-it-forward-attitude” for Benson will “carry through Season 26,” Martin says.
“It’s back to classics, back to victim-centric, ripped-from-the-headlines stories of really engaging one-on-one with a lot of these victims and helping them through their trauma,” she continues. “And that’s how she is healing herself.”
In the final scene of Season 25, Benson called Stabler to tell him the necklace was “incredibly meaningful to her” and guided her healing, and that she lent it to a victim’s mother.
“Sounds like she needed it a lot more than you do,” he responded.
For the first time since Meloni’s return to the “L&O” world, he did not appear, physically, as a guest star on “SVU” in Season 25.
Graziano says that due to the shortened season, they did not have room “to tell all the stories that we wanted to tell.”
“One of the things we just decided to own early on was just making it a Benson-centric season,” he explains, adding they typically “hero” different investigators, like Fin and Detective Joe Velasco (Octavio Pisano), at different times throughout the season.
“It was just all Benson all the time last season,” he continues. “I think it allowed us to tell a little bit more of a streamlined story, but also one that had serialized elements that the show doesn’t normally do.”
Meloni recently told TODAY.com Hargitay will be making an appearance on the next season of “OC,” which is moving from NBC to Peacock.
As for if Meloni will pop up on “SVU” in Season 26, Martin and Graziano say, “We’ll see.”
“I love Chris,” Graziano says. “He’s amazing. I’ve had the pleasure of writing for him a lot toward the tail end of that season that I was on, and he and I have a great working relationship.”
For now, the pair is excited about new additions to the cast: Juliana Aidén Martinez joins as a new detective named Kate Silva, and Kevin Kane’s Detective Terry Bruno was recently upped to a series regular.
“We’re going to focus a lot of the early storytelling on introducing the audience to those characters,” Martin says, with Graziano adding he’s “excited” they’re adding Martinez’s character “in a couple of extra scenes in Episode 1.”
“We’re saying her dad is a very high-level figure in the NYPD,” Graziano explains. “He’s very well-regarded and loved: He’s the deputy commissioner of collaborative policing, sort of like a new mode of policing for the NYPD.”
He adds that he and Martin had the “benefit” of being able to see some real-life members of this team work in person.
Martin says “SVU,” for her, has “always been a reflection of what’s really going on in the world.”
“We have a responsibility to tell the stories about what’s really happening in real crimes in a responsible way,” she continues, “and this year, there’s, as we all know, there’s a lot of fracture and unrest in this country.”
The premiere episode is actually titled “Fractured” and centers on an attack on a group of law students. A camera discovered in the apartment may be the break in the case Benson and her team need, while ADA Dominick Carisi (Peter Scanavino) hopes to catch the defendant in a lie in order to make a conviction.
Martin says part of her and Graziano’s responsibility as “SVU” executive producers and writers is “to give the audience something that can bring us all together.”
Graziano agrees, saying, “We were like, ‘What’s in the mirror right now — of society?’ That’s our job, right? To hold up a mirror of society.”
Another Season 26 episode will involve a TV reporter who is the victim of sextortion coming to Benson for help, and Velasco going undercover as a potential target.
Graziano and Martin hope “SVU” is “an antidote” of sorts for viewers, where “at the end of an episode, things are going to make more sense than they did before you sat down to watch.”
“Life will go on,” Martin adds.
“People will come together and understand each other just a little bit better by the end of it,” Graziano says.
Newbie Silva and Benson may also understand each other better at a certain point in the series. The new detective ends up at the Special Victims Unit after working overnights for two years at Brooklyn’s homicide division, according to Graziano.
“Her dad thought for a second, 'Who better to work with than Olivia Benson?' Didn't help her, didn't put in a phone call or anything like that, but guided her in the direction,” Graziano says about Martinez's character.
“I think Benson and her will have some sort of commonality in the reason for wanting to investigate crimes of a sexual nature, and I think Juliana the actress is an incredible addition to the cast, but also the character is an incredible addition to the bouquet of detectives we’re building,” Graziano adds.
One of the detectives who has been a mainstay since Season 2 — and risen through the ranks to become a sergeant — is Ice-T’s Fin.
In the Season 25 finale, he got shot after a young kid accidentally fired a gun at him. Fin tried to protect the child by not revealing what happened, including to his boss and close friend Benson.
“The great thing about Fin is that Fin is always Fin,” Martin says about what’s ahead for the fan favorite character in Season 26.
“He is eldritch and permanent,” Graziano says, adding the same sentiment about Ice-T.
“Ice is probably one of the greatest living philosophers,” he continues. “As a character, he’s amazing to write for. He’s like Obi-Wan Kenobi must’ve been for George Lucas. He’s sort of the Obi-Wan Kenobi of ‘SVU.’ He gets to deliver some of his wisdom to everybody, and sometimes it’s couched in a funny, quirky, uniquely Fin way. But it’s very wise.”
It's a sentiment Martin also agrees with, adding, “He’s the OG. He’s Mariska’s right-hand guy — confidant.”
Graziano says they’re going to “have some fun” with Benson going to Fin with “some agendas that she wants to keep from other people, for whatever reason, and for her own reason, and just confide in Fin.”
He also teases: “Things that they can investigate together that they know might get them in trouble with the top brass, but it’s the right thing to do.”
“Law & Order: SVU” premieres Thursday, Oct. 3, at 9 p.m. ET after the premiere of “Law & Order” at 8 p.m. Both shows stream the following day on Peacock.
(Peacock is part of our parent company, NBCUniversal.)
This article was originally published on TODAY.com
