“To be continued,” the episode’s intertitle announces, giddily, before the credits roll. Tchung-TCHUNG.

You could read that conclusion as typical of SVU, a show that weaves the aesthetics of the soap opera into the cadences of the police procedural. But you could see something else in it as well: the show’s assumption that to land a full punch to the gut, its retelling of the Epstein story needed to involve a threat to one of the show’s more familiar characters—one of the people to whom, over the course of several seasons, audiences have been used to expanding their empathies.

That is its own kind of plot twist. In the world beyond Law & Order, after all, the Epstein story is notable for not only its outrages—more than 80 women have accused him of assaulting them when they were young—but also the fact that, for years, those outrages were effectively ignored. SVU, for all its melodramas, has claimed to shed light on people who might otherwise be resigned to the shadows. It has claimed to care just as much about the supporting casts as it does about the stars. The gun that is currently aimed at Rollins’s head—a prop so anti-Chekhovian that it reads almost as camp—makes a different claim: The horror of the Epstein story is, for the show’s purposes, not quite horrific enough.

It took me a while to start watching SVU. I was aware of the show, definitely—some works of culture are so ubiquitous that they take on atmospheric properties. I knew the show’s premise and its cast and, somehow, the fact that Taylor Swift had named her cat Olivia Benson. But that was pretty much the extent of it. I write about sexual abuse as part of my job, and TV is a Darwinian proposition. When, after a long day, you can watch humanity at its worst or, alternatively, you can watch as a kindly British grandfather gives it his all in his bid to be named Star Baker, the decision pretty much makes itself.

I knew something else, too, though. People—women in particular, who comprise the show’s primary audience—love SVU. And they have loved it for decades, not only because melodrama has its merits, but also because SVU, long before it occurred to most other shows to do so, took sexual consent seriously. It took survivorship seriously. It had grim wisdom to impart. “Women, we don’t watch true crime,” the comedian Jena Friedman has observed. “We study it to make sure we don’t end up on it.”

And so, my curiosity finally winning out over my trepidation, I started watching SVU. I began with the pilot episode, first aired in 1999, when the show revolved around Benson (Mariska Hargitay) and her partner Elliot Stabler (Chris Meloni). And I went from there, as new detectives and district attorneys came and went, as American culture changed while the show’s core premise did not. SVU is now the longest-running prime-time live-action series in American history, and the feat of endurance alone provides a queasy commentary: The show features more than 20 hour-long episodes a season. It has never lacked for fresh material.