Black Lives Matter and the COVID-19 pandemic will be making their debut on the hit NBC series “Law & Order: SVU,” with future episodes tackling “Karens,” racial profiling, and police brutality, according to Ice-T, who has played Detective Odafin Tutuola for 20 years.
Speaking with TMZ, Ice-T said that the show will be living up to its reputation of ripping from the headlines with some timely episodes.
“We’re hitting it head-on. When we come back, we come back right in the midst of the pandemic. So, you’re gonna see us in masks. You’re gonna be seeing us social distance,” he said.
Ice-T elaborated that his own character will be struggling with the reality of having killed a black man and questioning whether or not he can continue as a police officer.
“In the season finale, I killed a black man. So now you’ve got Fin, going through the mental dilemma, like can he be a police officer in these times. And the last thing he ever wanted to do was to be a cop that shot a black man and killed him in front of his family. So, you’ll see my character go through that and question whether he can continue to be a police officer,” he said.
Simultaneously, the character of Olivia Benson, played by Mariska Hargitay, will be dealing with internal questions of her own racial bias.
“You’re gonna see Mariska deal with the challenge of, ‘Is she racist?'” he said. “We have this ‘Karen’ situation where we pick up this black guy, but did we profile him? Was implicit bias involved? Why didn’t we question the white lady?”
Ice-T commended the makers of the show for keeping up with the times and tackling difficult subjects head-on.
“So, I really commend Law & Order for hitting these topics head-on,” he said, “I’m very proud to be on a show that tries to stay current and tries to stay conscious.”
“I didn’t want to be dealing with the same problems from 20 years ago – the police brutality, the kids getting shot in the hood. 20 years later, here we are, still in the same place,” he later added.
“I think that we’re moving toward an era where the young kids, the Generation Z, is gonna really be active. … I just think it’s gonna be cool again to be in the mix of what’s going on. And I have hope for the future after seeing all these protests. I’ve been around a long time, I would love to see progress. Let’s say that, progress,” he concluded.
Since the killing of George Floyd at the hands of a white Minneapolis police officer, cop shows have been under tremendous pressure to feature episodes dealing with police brutality and racial profiling. In an op-ed for The Washington Post, Alyssa Rosenberg argued that such shows should be canceled entirely.
“There’s no question that it would be costly for networks and studios to walk away from the police genre entirely,” Rosenberg wrote. “Canceling Dick Wolf’s ‘Chicago’ franchise of shows would wipe out an entire night of NBC’s prime-time programming; dropping ‘Law & Order: Special Victims Unit’ and a planned spinoff would cut even further into the lineup.”