What happens when a super rich girl gets cut off after her umpteenth parentally funded business venture fails? Well, since this is SVU, a grisly double homicide hastily staged to look like a murder-suicide, followed in short order by a slew of hits taken out on the Unit after they ignore Sarah Paulson/Anne Gillette's extreme white privilege, and an off-the-books massive undercover fake jailbreak operation against Cragen's explicit orders that they were all off the case.

There's also plenty of class warfare, crapping on abstract art, and multiple undercover ops, one of which includes Liv domming out on a bootlicking blue blood. And don’t worry, this still opens plenty of doors to vanish through, so if you want to know how abstract art got funded, and what nefarious organization was doing it, look no further than this episode of Munch My Benson.

Sure, this SVU spends a lot of time presupposing that we are heavily invested in the lives of minor recurring characters, but it also introduces us to a delightfully crass BBQ slinger with a penchant for lewd double entendres and forces us to go down all kinds of wild Munchian rabbit holes. Does Rollins have a separate person for her vacations at clothing-optional, adult-only all-inclusives? What scandals have engulfed the world of professional canoeing? Is Adam capable of surviving as a single parent for more than a week? Did we just watch an extra torpedo a "career" in background acting for the chance at one pay bump? This is definitely one for the Munchie-curious as a full 45 minutes of banter about Josh's concert going, Lucas Duda, and the Yiddish language (among many, many other things) had to be left on the cutting room floor. Enjoy!

What happens when SVU drops a fading Norman Mailer analog into a Ripped-from-the-Headlines family drama with his daughters pitted against his new wife, who the daughters think is sending dear ol' dad to an early grave by way of force-fed Viagra? Rectal probe electroejaculation and lewd talk of stiff, varnished eels, obviously.

In a return to randomness after last week's Munchies' Choice, the Munchie Boys were thrown back into the pre-historical realm of Season 1, where SVU was still trying to figure out what it was. "Hysteria" was the franchise's first foray into the world of serial rapists/killers and sex workers, and given what we've seen thus far in Season 1, it's fair to assume that these subjects are handled, ummm, indelicately.

Don’t worry, there’s also tons of weird stuff like improbable shoe detective work, random doctors prescribing self-administered hot meat injections, the trans/cis sex workers’ turf wars of this universe leading Adam to look into the history of Times Square, both the Def-Leppard-related and non-Dep Leppard-related past of the diagnosis of hysteria, and real-life Vice cops going down in brothel busts. This one is wild in the ways you want an SVU to be.

When we asked our Patrons to select an episode for us to watch, we were asking for a choice as depraved and cruel as this, the episode that see beloved ADA Rafael Barba exit the show in ridiculous (and frankly, insulting) fashion. This episode has everything--if by 'everything' you mean bad acting, nonsensical writing, bizarre plot holes, and Phillip Winchester attempting to cry. Bad though this episode might be, we have so much to talk about including whether or not it's a good idea to rear a spite child, Adam's day at the museum, and the importance of a showrunner. Fans of our digressions should head over to Patreon to hear extensive deep dives into Japanese Onsen culture and minor league baseball.

Why does Rollins hate sex workers? Why is Wayne Knight only in this episode for two minutes? Why did they commit zero screen time to showing why the perp did what he did? Why did they rip this story from the headlines to inelegantly wedge trans rights into the final third of the show? We watched "Service" from Season 19, and ideally there would be answers to all of those questions, but the Season 19 qualifier is all you actually need to know. There may not be answers to your questions. Such is life in Season 19 of SVU.

Sometimes an SVU really does the racism. Then there's S7E6 Raw, which for an unfathomable 20:51 unfurls bigotry at an astonishing rate--an average of once every 23 seconds. And it doesn't even start until past the 16-minute mark. They pack so much hate into this episode that it left Adam and Josh dumbfounded.

If one were to carve a Mount Rushmore of bad moms out of someone's holy mountain, Diane Venora's character from this SVU would certainly be on it. This lady sucks a lot. While we get deep into her antics, we also talk about Adam's sickness (spoiler alert: he shouldn't have gone to that Yankees game), Belizean airports, nonsexual hygge snuggling, trashcan chicken, and Kenny Rogers.

In a true whirling dervish of an episode that turns the audience around and around, we start at a "kick-ass loft party," careen into a sexual predator in an ambulance, and end up back where the B-plot started with Calvin courtesy of his mother filching jewelry from a different crime scene. "Rescue" (S12E10) takes us everywhere. Along the way, we touch on improbable sampling of large members, insane PowerPoint presentations, and the Duke faux sex thesis controversy. This one goes to some weird places.

Ever wonder what would happen when Benson, Stabler, and the Unit get tangled up in an investigation that sends them looking into the Gulf Cartel, the FBI, Los Zetas, the CIA, and Cuban revolutionaries? Well, wonder no longer because this time around we are diving in to Season 11, Episode 6 "Spooked" featuring Vincent Spano reprising the role of FBI Special Agent Dean Porter. It starts with the SVU version of the Wet Bandits finding a pair of staged corpses with a rape tree and some stolen implants in the back of a box truck and just gets stranger from there. It may not make sense, but “Spooked” is a helluva nonsensical fever dream.

In the course of watching 112 episodes of SVU, few things have shocked us as much as seeing the writers of this show take a measured and nuanced approach to not one, but two decidedly problematic issues in polygamy and female genital mutilation. That these both appear in an episode that gives screen time to topics including "stop snitching" culture, tide charts, epilepsy, and one of Elliot Stabler's former flings means there was a whole lot to discuss. The true die hards will want to check out our Patreon for an extended history of the Biafran War from Adam, Josh going full on Rage Against The Machine, and the two of us nearly coming to blows over the availability of liquor stores in southern Utah. There is way too much fun/dumb stuff in this one folks!

This week, The Randomizer selected "Lowdown," which features Fin's exquisite description of "down low" culture. Sadly, this episode goes so hard on inappropriate "humor" that Josh was forced to make a running count of things you wouldn't (and shouldn't) say on TV in 2022. As we break this down, you'll hear about the police riot on Adam's block, Kevin Brown's sinker, and the art of mise-en-scène. You won't, however, hear the nearly 50 minutes of wild digressions about dumplings, Kenny Rogers, Kelvin's muscle boys, and the Kinsey scale unless you subscribe to our Patreon.

Well, we've got ourselves another Mo-Mo incident in Times Square... Needlessly picking up right from the smoldering wreckage of Liv freeing herself from her captor William Lewis, we get a stark ripped-from-the-headlines episode delving into the infamous Ariel Castro case. Kidnapping victims are held in cages in the basement and raped for decades, and Liv's PTSD is still very real. This episode dwells in darkness.

When last week's episode ended with Olivia Benson being taken captive by über-psychopath William Lewis, we knew that we'd be going deep into the darkest hour of SVU's storied run this week. This is 43 full minutes of torture porn so bleak and visceral that it's honestly shocking it aired on network television. Please prepare yourself for how messed up this episode is. Thankfully, Josh and Adam munch it up by talking about a diverse range of European arthouse classics you wouldn't want to bring a date to, our coffeeshop orders, and whether or not Pizza Man exists within the Fur Humper Cinematic Universe. Oh, and lest we forget, Adam has an outlandishly bold theory which just might change the way you look at Olivia Benson forever. Enjoy!

The Randomizer decided that everyone needed to wallow in the darkness of the William Lewis Saga again, this time starting at the beginning with “Her Negotiation,” the season finale of Season 14 complete with cliffhanger leaving our hero Olivia Benson in a very dark place. This obviously means the Munchie Boys have to deal with fur-humping, Plein Air Painters, the life's work of Frederick Law Olmstead, and the shooting star that was Matt Harvey's early baseball career. Oh, and a pastiche serial killer drawing from some of the darkest imaginable sources.

This week, The Munchie Boys tackle a Finisode preoccupied with unpacking Fin's history while an undercover with Narcotics, more than a decade after the fact. Rollins gets improbably shot, which leads to an unhealthy dose of police brutallity and metaphorical prison rape threats, but that's not nearly as shocking as some truly disturbing home-decor-driven revelations upon meeting a seemingly normal family with a secret left unspoken.

Wherein the Munchie boys dive into an episode that treats schizophrenia with an altogether un-SVU-like degree of nuance. Along the way, we wrestle with the consequences of our actions as we are forced to issue the very first Munch My Benson correction thanks to listener, Kara, who noted that Connie Nielsen's accent shenanigans were explained in the show, and in the SVU Fandom wiki page. Josh dog sits, Adam gets into a fight with pharmacy employees, and we go extremely deep on the munchiest of topics: the mechanics of Casey Novak's softball swing, window screen installation, the origins of the Albanian language, the many, many failings of CSU Burt Trevor, and a whole lot more.

Adam and Josh wrestle with a high-profile headline rip as Reasonable Doubt casts Bradley Whitford as the Woody Allen/Roman Polanski analog in an episode that doesn't do a particularly good job of establishing what its title might suggest it should: Reasonable Doubt. Rollins and Amaro don’t believe women, a faux celebrity couple act out the Woody/Mia divorce virtually note for note, and anti-Tibetan racism runs amok. In other words, SVU still SVUs. Adam looks into the Roman Polanski rape case and the victim and poses the ideal solution for what the US Government should do with the frozen real estate of Russian oligarchs, while Josh wonders whether this episode acts in tandem with the one that follows it in sequence to mete out some revenge on The West Wing. Y’know, Munchie stuff.

It's our 100th episode of Munch My Benson, and what better way to celebrate than with an episode of Law & Order: SVU that does not have Olivia Benson in it at all. In classic fashion, The Randomizer threw us a curveball and drew a Beckisode fronted by Connie Nielsen for our benchmark podcast which features a stand-out performance from apex-child-actor, Elle Fanning. Come along as we discuss primary nuclear strike targets, NXIVM, the correct name for the 2008 film Rambo, and projecting a 17-year-old Josh Brolin.

The Munchie Boys pick up where they left off last week, trudging through the murk as Ray’s tall brother faces the fallout from having been charged as a serial rapist while the Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association possibly threatens Barba’s life for having the temerity to come after one of their guys. This fallout includes the first—and thus far, only—time an officer on the Unit dies in the line of duty, which gives Adam and Josh quite a bit to mull over while wondering why the stakes were lowered so much before offing him. Any episode that has Chekhov’s gun go off while also not having Chekhov’s gun go off means there’s going to be plenty of plot discussion to be had. There are also plenty of discussions about the typically insane things that SVU forces one to reckon with, namely intimidation wizards, phantom door-locking chicanery, the hilarity of needing apple boxes in hostage shoots, and much, much more.