John Oliver discusses the wildly popular television franchise, what it’s been teaching us about law enforcement, and some tricks for how to get to sleep in two minutes flat.

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-♪ ♪ -♪ ♪ -♪ ♪ -♪ There we go.

For our main story tonight, we're gonna do something a little different and talk about another TV show, specifically Law & Order, the wildly popular franchise that's been on TV for decades, treating us to incredible dialogue like this.

Do you think that there was a reason that the killer sodomized your husband with a banana?

Even if I wasn't listening to the words coming out of Mariska Hagerty's mouth, I would know, based on her delivery alone, that the killer had sodomized this person's husband with a banana, unless she was simply trying to figure out why.

Now, it turns out the victim's wife actually answered that question, and think of the funniest possible response.

Do you think that there was a reason that the killer sodomized your husband with a banana.

I simply love the idea of a killer asking, before I murder and sodomize you, I've got just 1 question.

Do you have any allergies I should be aware of?

That exchange is just 1 of the reasons why Law & Order is the king of cop shows.

Between all its various spin-offs, there are over 1, 200 episodes of it.

It's been around for so long, it is genuinely hard to think of an actor who hasn't appeared on it at some point, because it's featured everyone, from Chevy Chase, to Samuel L.

Jackson, to Philip Seymour Hoffman, to Angela Lansbury appearing with her lawyer, Bradley Cooper, to Adam Driver, who's on series 13, episode 11 of SVU, for approximately 3 minutes and 32 seconds of screen time, if you're the kind of person who counts that sort of thing.

Even politicians have been on it, like Rudy Giuliani, Mike Bloomberg, and Joe Biden, all of whom guest-starred as themselves.

Which is a little weird, although it would clearly be weirder if Biden appeared as someone else, like a Times Square Ninja Turtle who stumbled across a grisly murder victim suffering from banana-phylactic shock.

-♪ ♪ -♪ ♪ Law and Order is on all the time.

And for many, it is comfort TV, but it, and shows like it, have a real impact.

1 study found viewers of crime dramas are more likely to believe the police are successful at lowering crime, use force only when necessary, and that misconduct does not typically lead to false confessions.

But if you're watching this show, you probably know it is not.

And law and order in particular has become an American institution with huge cultural influence.

Some have argued its formula shaped a generation's understanding of the legal system.

And you've probably seen people using it as a go-to reference point like this.

My legal experience is watching, like, a Law & Order and Law & Order SVU.

I think the average viewer of Law & Order probably knows that you're not supposed to

Well, I went to a great law school, but most of what I do on a day-to-day basis is based off of what I learned on Law & Order.

I'm not saying there is nothing you can learn from Law & Order.

I've learned a ton from Ice-T's Twitter feed alone, where he drops truth bombs like a real nut, feels like every bone in your body comes out the head of your dick, say no more, I'm done, Fall asleep in 2 minutes.

If you can't handle the ice, stay out of the freezer.

It can be genuinely alarming just how seriously some people take the show.

In fact, just listen to Warren Light, Law & Order SVU's former longtime showrunner, talk about an unexpected group of viewers that he learned about.

We've also found out over time, and this is a little, anxiety-provoking for me, that a lot of cops aren't trained in how to, how to do their job in cases of sexual assault.

And a lot of cops get a lot of their information from watching SVU, which a lot of police departments don't have the time or the money to put people through formal training.

Nobody should be learning how to do their job from a TV show, unless, of course, your job happens to be telling jokes to mask your deep-seated feelings of emptiness and existential dread, in which case, keep watching, you might pick up some tips.

So, if Law & Order is being co-signed by elected leaders, and everyone from TV pundits to actual cops are using it to learn about law enforcement?

We thought tonight, we take a look at what this franchise has actually been teaching us.

And let's start with the fact that the line between cop shows and actual cops has always been deliberately blurry.

In fact, The first smash hit cop show, Dragnet, which debuted on TV in 1951, made a big selling point of its authenticity, right from the start of each episode.

Ladies and gentlemen, the story you are about to see is true.

The names have been changed to protect the innocent.

to say, the surprising thing there for me is that it starts with, ladies and gentlemen, as that sounds like the sort of voice that would say, letting your wife watch television could give her notions.

But that claim of verisimilitude came at a price.

Dragnet star and creator Jack Webb agreed that scripts would be formally approved by the LAPD's Public Information Division.

And in return, the show could shoot wherever they wanted, have cops for extras, and use police vehicles and equipment, which was a pretty good deal for both sides.

The show got a patina of authenticity, and the LAPD got a flattering portrayal, which it frankly needed, given that right after Dragnet premiered, approximately 50 LAPD officers brutally beat 7 men in their custody for over an hour, leaving them hospitalized with broken bones and ruptured organs in an incident that later became known as Bloody Christmas.

So if Dragnet really wanted to be authentic, every episode should probably have started like this.

Ladies and gentlemen, the story you are about to see is bullshit.

The names have been changed to protect the LAPD because they helped us save a bunch of money on props.

-♪ ♪ -♪ ♪ Dragnet had a big impact on viewers at the time, including 1 particular little boy who later reminisced about being 5 or 6 years old and allowed to stay up late because Dragnet was on.

That boy eventually grew up to become such a household name.

The words, -"Executive Producer Dick Wolf."

The man said he got it because he's obsessed with law and order.

Perhaps that is why Ice-T himself once simply tweeted, -"Dick Wolf, " and it got 108 likes.

Dick Wolf is 1 of those names like Steve Madden or Charles Schwab that you see all the time, even if you have no idea what Dick Wolf himself actually looks like.

Case in point, that is not Dick Wolf, that's Charles Schwab, this is Dick Wolf.

Except it isn't, that's Steve Madden, this is Dick Wolf.

Is what I would say if that was Dick Wolf, but it's just a stock image that came up when we searched business grandpa.

And Dick Wolf was the six-year-old dragnet superfan who then grew up to create Law & Order.

And interestingly, he actually started out in advertising, where among other things, he helped create this wildly sexist ad campaign for National Airlines.

Or fly me to New Orleans on the only DC-10s.

You can fly me morning, afternoon, or night.

I can only imagine the target demo of that were men aged 18 to 40 who live by the motto, -"Can't fuck it, don't want it." -$20, 000.

The whole Fly Me campaign was a big, big success.

And Dick Wolf later bragged about it to the least appropriate person imaginable.

You were in advertising before, as a writer.

As a writer-producer, I made commercials.

of the commercials way people recognize these commercials?

Immediately going to prison 7 years interestingly enough I think it was at the time 1 of the most successful airline campaigns ever because it was aimed at...

And all the stewardesses were from the University of Florida and were 22 years old.

I'm surprised that didn't end your career.

If you've out-misogynied Roger Ailes, the man best known for sexually harassing so hard he died, you know you've made an outrageously wrong turn.

It's like someone saying, you look lost, and it turning out that that someone was Amelia Earhart.

Now, after leaving advertising, Wolf worked on cop shows like Hill Street Blues and Miami Vice, and in 1990, he had his monster hit, Law and Order, which he even gave his own version of the Dragnet preamble, 1 that I'm guessing you can basically recite by heart, because you know how it goes.

In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by 2 separate, yet equally important groups.

The police who investigate crime, and the district attorneys who prosecute the offenders.

-♪♪ Now, the these are their stories part there is really important, because a big selling point for Law & Order is that, similar to Dragnet, it draws inspiration from real life cases.

In fact, as Wolfe recounts, when the network asked him, what's the Bible for the show?

He said, the front page of the New York Post, no writers are gonna do better than headless body found in topless bar.

Which is a catchy thing to say, but I'm not sure it's true.

Asless corpse found at Bottomless Brunch.

And like Jack Webb in L.A., Dick Wolf cultivated a close behind-the-scenes relationship with the NYPD, employing officers as consultants and boasting about the access he had.

I probably spend more time with cops than anybody who doesn't carry a badge.

I mean, when you meet people, you meet cops, you meet whether it's Bill Bratton or Ray Kelly or Sheriff Baca, you know, there is a shared interest in putting bad guys away and having cops, you know, shown in a decent light.

I am kind of unabashedly pro-law enforcement.

Dick Wolf is the most enthusiastic chronicler of Blue Lives since James Cameron.

And while not as formal as Dragnet's arrangement, Law & Order has similarly benefited from its relationship with the NYPD.

1 writer who's worked on the show has said, there was always the sense that if we told stories that reflected too badly on the police, the NYPD could make it very difficult for us to shoot in New York, which does make sense, doesn't it?

The NYPD is famously anti-shooting unless they're the ones doing it.

In fact, for as much as Dick Wolf brags about how the show is written in shades of gray or how it'll show both sides of an issue.

There is 1 side that it's always on, and that's the police.

Because however flawed his characters may be, they're all fundamentally pursuing justice.

And cops love being portrayed that way, as actors on the show have attested over the years.

Police around the country, I must say, are big

fans of the show because they feel it's authentic.

Couple of homicide cops came over to visit.

They just had wonderful things to say about the show.

They said, thank you, and they were thanking me, which was weird.

They felt like they were being well-represented.

My favorite quote from the police is, keep making us look good, which is a nice compliment.

Although, for what it's worth, there is a pretty major difference between they feel it's authentic and they feel it makes them look good.

And it's the same difference between these 2 photos.

1 is a mirror of reality, and the other is a lie.

And look, thanks to Law & Order's close collaboration with its police consultants, the show does get a lot of smaller details right, like specific laws, jargon, and crime scene procedures.

But crucially, it also makes a lot of choices that significantly distort the big picture of policing.

For instance, most episodes arrest the right perpetrators at the midpoint, and then convict them at the end.

And it's structured like that for obvious reasons.

It is a self-contained episode of TV, and those need satisfying narrative arc fulfillment.

But as we know, in reality, not only do many cases simply go unsolved, almost none of the ones that do get solved go to trial.

Prosecutors put massive pressure on defendants to take plea deals, meaning that 97% of criminal cases don't go to trial.

And obviously, law and order cannot reflect that reality.

Nobody wants to watch a show where 97 percent of episodes end with 2 lawyers striking a deal in a windowless room, and then you get to watch the defendant serve 6 months, then struggle to get a job at their local Jiffy Lube.

But the courtroom half of Law & Order actually represents a significant departure from TV tradition, because historically, lawyer shows centered defense lawyers, like Perry Mason, who tried to work against the system as the underdog and free innocent people.

But Law & order is different, and that is very much by design.

Dick Wolfe has said, I believed that the heroes weren't the defense attorneys who were getting these scumbags off, the heroes were the prosecutors.

And you can see that on his shows, where defense attorneys are usually presented as an impediment to convicting obviously guilty suspects.

And they're the target of lines like this.

If a cold chill just ran up your spine, it's because a defense attorney just walked in here.

I believe in monsters and things that go bump in the night, Jack.

May they rot in hell, along with their attorneys.

Well, let me guess, Del is errand boy, otherwise known as a defense attorney?

1, yes, that is a post-OC Mischa Barton doing some award-worthy eyebrow acting there, but 2, defense attorneys are a vital part of the justice system, so it's a bit weird that law and order can sometimes go out of its way to present them like the Babadook.

And again, you can absolutely justify those decisions by saying, come on, they're making fiction, not a documentary.

Not everyone wants to watch hyper-realistic portrayals of our ever-desiccating society, John.

But it's not just the portrayals of defense lawyers where big editorial decisions are being made.

1 study found that offenders on Law & Order were disproportionately white, male, older, and from the middle or upper classes.

Dick Wolf's actually explained his reasoning for why the show's criminals skew that way, saying, there are no rich white guy pressure groups.

You can do anything you want to rich white guys, and nobody cares.

And you can see why he might not want to make a show in which his good guy cops are disproportionately targeting communities of color.

But The result of all of these creative decisions is that instead of depicting a flawed system riddled with structural racism, the show presents exceptionally competent cops working within a largely fair framework that mostly convicts white people.

And while it is true that they have occasionally done episodes focusing on individual bad cops or referenced real-world criticisms, especially recently with discussions of anti-police sentiment, sometimes being shoehorned into conversations.

In general, police reforms are often portrayed by the main characters as, at best, a nuisance to them, and, at worst, a threat to public safety.

They cut back on the stop and search, his people start carrying him.

You 2 had him yesterday and you let him go?

There wasn't probable cause for an arrest.

After Eric Garner and the Stop and Frisk lawsuit,

Like it or not, Nolan, the big bad police department is our partner.

And in case you haven't been paying attention, they're under attack.

Every decision, every arrest is scrutinized.

There are people trying to defund them, for God's sake, and here you are, asking me to castrate them?

You know, It's pretty telling that even in this fictional universe, basic police accountability is treated as an equivalent to getting your balls cut off.

But maybe the best expression of the disparity between law and order and real life is in its most popular spin-off, SVU.

It is a show built on the appeal of having cops who will stop at nothing to crack horrific cases.

Cops like Elliot Stabler, who, before getting a spin-off show, routinely did shit like this.

I get a little clumsy around scumbag pedophiles.

Because you still got 1 good arm left to break.

So I should put you in pigtails, you little bitch?

I don't know what the hell you're talking about.

Look, I admit, as a viewer, it is something to see Stabler chew up the scenery and spit it out directly into Matthew Modine's face.

-♪ ♪ -♪ But generally, the thesis on SVU is that the cops deeply care about getting justice for victims, and their gut instincts mean that they almost always get the job done in the end.

In 1 episode, we learned that Slaver has a 97% case closure rate, and people love this show.

Christopher Meloni is the internet zaddy, and you can see why.

And Mariska Hagerty has a huge cult following too.

Taylor Swift has a cat named for her character, Olivia Benson, and there are even TikToks like this.

I'll haunt this, my shit All the girls ♪ Talk to me like this ♪ Few times I've been around that cat ♪ So it's not just gonna happen like that ♪ Cause there ain't no holler back, girl ♪ There ain't no holler back, girl Look, in general,

I think I've made my position on police brutality pretty clear, but even I will admit, it is hard to resist the sight of Olivia Benson slamming an asshole's head on a table to the beat of Hollaback Girl, in which case, go off, girl boss, lean into state-sponsored violence.

-♪ ♪ -() And there is, there is something incredibly appealing about the idea of a world where survivors of sexual assault are taken seriously by the police.

Hargitay's even spoken openly about some of the show's positive real-world impacts.

Encountered people that have said, because of this show, they knew what to do after their assault.

Because of this show, they had a rape get done.

Because of this show, they reported and had faith in that.

And because of this show, most of all, they didn't feel alone anymore.

When I started hearing those stories is when I knew that...

Look, that is obviously genuinely moving.

And I don't doubt the show is doing important work in forming or even providing catharsis for some of its viewers.

In between, that is, showing her slamming a suspect's face into a table like she's a toddler making 2 Barbies kiss.

And to her real credit, Mariska Hagerty has tried to parlay her fame into advocacy, founding an organization which advocates for survivors of sexual assault, domestic abuse, and child abuse.

But if, as Hargitay says, the show encourages people to avail themselves of this system, it is worth knowing what that system can look like in practice, because it's not good.

Government and press reports have repeatedly shown that New York's actual sex crimes unit is set up to fail victims of sexual assault.

And its case closure rate is a long way from Elliott Stabler's fictitious 97 percent.

The NYPD's official figures show that they only close about a third of sexual assault cases, but 1 analysis of cases handled over a two-year period found they had a closure rate of just 6 percent.

Also, a damning 2018 investigation quoted multiple prosecutors describing improper handling of cases by overloaded or inexperienced investigators who until recently were only given 5 days of formal specialized training.

Is it any wonder that some cops are watching SVU for tips?

Which honestly, may not be a bad thing when you get Justice Crusader Olivia Benson, but it gets a little hairy when you get use of excessive force zaddy here.

And while the NYPD insists that they have since improved staffing and training, the DOJ recently announced their own investigation, citing reports that the unit's officers were failing to conduct basic investigative steps and instead shaming and abusing survivors and re-traumatizing them during investigations.

And yet, the portrait SVU paints of the division is so convincing, that when a new commander took it over in 2020 and did an interview discussing that scathing internal report that I just mentioned, here is how the anchor wrapped up their conversation.

You know I'm gonna ask this because I'm obsessed with the TV show Law and Order SVU.

The dedication you see on TV with the investigators, that's the same dedication that we have within the real Special Victims Unit.

As heinous as you see them on TV, we are seeing the same thing in

So many of them are ripped from the headlines, you know?

Are you really as cool as you seem on TV?

Do you sometimes make the car go wee-woo, even when it doesn't need to go wee-woo?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

♪ And it's worth knowing some survivors have spoken about what it is like seeing these detectives valorized on TV, with 1 saying, "'Law and Order SVU' gave me the false impression that this squad cared deeply about victims and their jobs." And another saying, "'If I had a dollar for every time I heard "'This can't be true, Olivia Benson would never let this happen, ' I would have enough to cover my hospital bills and therapy for my trauma.'" And you should know, even the real world inspiration for the tenacious, uncompromising Olivia Benson and the show's tough ADA Alexandra Cabot has a significant asterisk, because an early model for both characters was Linda Fairstein, the woman now infamous for prosecuting the Central Park 5, or as they're now known, the Exonerated 5.

And I will say, some behind the show are keenly aware of its role in perpetuating a false narrative about police.

In fact, in 2020, at the peak of the Black Lives Matter protests, Warren Light reflected on the role that the show plays in our discussion of policing.

So, you know, individually, am I doing, am I contributing, mis-contributing to society?

I have pitched the, by the way, I think every writer has pitched the Innocence Project series to the network.

I bet it has a better chance of going now.

Within the Dick Wolf Law and Order universe, it won't be likely that they're going to do a show that reveals...

That bases itself on cops behaving illegal.

Even if the people working on the show, the actors, the writers, and the showrunners have really good intentions about correcting the record, there is only so much they can do.

Law & Order is never going to grapple with the reality of policing in a meaningful way, for the same reasons that Daniel Tiger won't do it.

It's never gonna happen, and honestly, you'd be pretty weirded out if it ever did.

Because fundamentally, the person who is responsible for Law & Order and its brand is Dick Wolf.

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