‘Law & Order SVU’: Dick Wolf Fought Against Changing Olivia Benson After Chris Meloni Left
Law & Order SVU shook things up in a big way after Chris Meloni left the series. One of the major shifts was the development of Mariska Hargitay’s Olivia Benson. But doing so went against Dick Wolf’s one rule when it came to his Law & Order characters.
Dick Wolf was adamant that ‘Law & Order’ characters shouldn’t change
Meloni’s sudden departure from SVU resulted in many changes that still affect the show to this day. New characters like Kelli Giddish’ Amanda Rollins were introduced to help fill the role Meloni’s Elliot Stabler left behind. Not only that, but Meloni’s departure meant that Hargitay would be leading the show without her partner. This would put more focus on Hargitay’s Olivia Benson than ever before.
Warren Leight was hired to run SVU during this tumultuous period. He spent years writing for Dick Wolf’s Law & Order franchise, so he already knew the ins and outs of Wolf’s universe. But with Meloni gone, Leight felt it was time to shake up SVU a little by giving Olivia Benson some growth and character development.
Leight spoke briefly about this experience in a 2016 interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
“The first year was very hard. There was so much animosity and loss about Chris’ departure,” Leight said. “There were a lot of people on crew who really wanted to see things change, and then there were people who just wanted to do exactly what we had been doing.”
But it was hard to grow SVU the way Leight wanted because Wolf wanted to keep his characters static. This caused Leight and Wolf to butt heads a little over one of Wolf’s strictest rules.
“It’s one of the conventions of Law and Order that the characters aren’t supposed to change. I think the problem is when a show runs as long as SVU has run, if the characters don’t change, it begins to look wrong on them,” Leight said. “Dick and I had many discussions about that and, in fact, still were having them for the finale.”
Why Warren Leight felt that Olivia Benson had to change
It seems that Leight got what he wanted. Olivia Benson has grown in a way that she might not have if Meloni stuck around. Fans have seen Olivia Benson being promoted, forge new friendships with fresh faces. She even had her own subplot adopting a child, mirroring Hargitay’s own real-life experiences with adoption.
It was the kind of development Leight felt Olivia was missing when he was brought on board. And he was eager to fix that.
“Her character, when I got there, was stuck in this sad apartment and was eating spaghetti out of the can over the sink. In a weird way, Elliot’s departure freed her up,” Leight continued. “It’s not a diss on Chris or Elliot, but that character was in a long-term relationship that prevented her from having the kind of relationships she has since developed. In a way, realizing when he left that she was in many ways the most experienced detective and the most vital detective in that squad room empowered her.”
Why Dick Wolf didn’t want to deal with the personal lives of his characters
Over the course of the show’s seasons, SVU has been exploring the lives of characters like Olivia outside of work. But this was once taboo for Wolf, which might’ve been one of the reasons he wanted characters to stay the same.
Wolf described the Law & Order franchise as a workplace drama. Audiences were permitted to spend as much time with the cast as they would with some of the co-workers they worked with. And similar to some workplaces, the relationship between fan and cast was not permitted to go beyond the office.
“We don’t deal with their personal lives because… if you work in a corporation or company and you look around there aren’t that many people whose apartments you’ve spent time in or houses you’ve gone to,” Wolf told The Futon Critic. “It’s a work environment that goes from nine to five and then you see those people the next day. So the main job has been finding people who were credible in the roles that they were being cast for. And we have been extraordinarily lucky.”
