On “SVU,” the worse the stories get the stronger Olivia Benson becomes. Illustration by Michael Gillette

Fifteen years ago, the rules changed when it came to sexual violence on cable television. With “Oz” and “The Sopranos,” television creators began to include rape, child molestation, and even torture as central elements in the stories they told. Dr. Melfi was raped by a stranger on “The Sopranos”; Gemma was gang-raped on “Sons of Anarchy”; Joan was raped by her fiancé on “Mad Men.” These shows weren’t necessarily averse to using graphic imagery for a queasy jolt, as on “Game of Thrones,” but they were also aiming for something deeper, a confrontation with real-life pain, done with adult directness.

But all the while, on network television, another show was addressing sexual violence through a very different lens—the episodic crime procedural. Like “The Sopranos,” “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” launched in 1999. It was a spinoff of Dick Wolf’s popular NBC crime series, with the familiar cha-chung sound and torn-from-the-headlines plots. But this iteration was pure red meat, dedicated to an N.Y.P.D. unit investigating sexual crimes. (The original title was the blunt “Sex Crimes.”) It starred a powerhouse pair of actors: the tough, warm-eyed Mariska Hargitay, as Olivia Benson, a detective who was conceived in a rape; and Christopher Meloni, who was best known as a sexually predatory sociopath on “Oz,” as her partner, Elliot Stabler. Together, they became a team as potent as Scully and Mulder, with a prickly chemistry that reflected shifting, unspoken notions of them as victim and predator, protector and protected.

When the original “Law & Order” débuted, in 1990, it starred no women; only under pressure from NBC did Wolf cast actresses (mostly stunning assistant district attorneys). In contrast, “Law & Order: SVU” felt like a woman’s show, at once prurient and cathartic, exploitative and liberating—with an appeal much like that of the old Lifetime channel, that pastel-tinted chamber of horrors. The audience was two-thirds female, young women, for the most part—the same demographic that drives fan fiction, romance novels, and vampire stories. “Oh, you enjoy this, do you?” an angry john says, in the “SVU” pilot. “Is this how you get your rocks off?” He’s talking to some detectives, but he might as well have been addressing viewers, for whom the show’s pulp appeal was simultaneously addictive and faintly shameful.

But why am I using the third person? I’ve done my share of marathon-watching, soaking in the show’s titillating misery and puzzle-solving shortcuts. (If you recognize an actor, you can bet he’ll be the culprit.) Even bad episodes—and there are plenty—hold my interest. It’s fun to tot up the clichés: the rotten rich kids, the weaselly husbands, the witnesses who won’t stop planting shrubbery while the cops question them. When I was pregnant, my unsavory addiction felt something like pica, the disorder that causes people to eat dirt and fingernails.

“SVU” does share a method with Nancy Grace, feeding, as she does, off tabloid scraps. This season included a script that was a pastiche of recent campus rape stories, opening with a hot drunk girl being assaulted by frat-boy predators. Although the episode ended on a stirring note, with silent protesters holding the school’s administration accountable for a coverup, along the way it wavered uneasily, as “SVU” often does, between P.S.A. and pornography. Cinematic sex has always worked that way: when you record something, you create a fantasy. At its greasiest, “SVU” becomes a string of rape fantasies, justified by healing truisms.

On the other hand, in a fantasy the world is controllable. That’s the appeal of all fiction, but it’s even more strongly the allure of pulp. As in a dream, “SVU” takes the grisly stories that dominate the news—Steubenville, Delhi, the U.S. military, the torture house in Cleveland—and reorganizes them, reducing the raw data to a format that viewers can handle. You can pause an episode, you can laugh at a bad guy. The cheesiness (cha-chung!) is itself a reassurance. For young women, who are endlessly bombarded with warnings of how to avoid assault, watching can feel like a perverse training manual. What is it like to be cross-examined about your sex life? Is there any way to foil a home invasion?

For survivors, there may be something validating about seeing one’s worst experiences taken seriously, treated not as the B story but as the main event. But the show also has a strange therapeutic quality for any woman, a ritualistic confrontation with fear: it might upset you to watch one rape story, but it thickens your skin to watch a million. (As Bart Simpson once put it, “If you don’t watch the violence, you’ll never get desensitized to it.”) And, of course, the show is also a fantasy about something else, something largely out of reach: an incorruptible legal system, in which the police are eternally in the rape victim’s corner.

After fourteen seasons, “SVU” is in crisis. The sole survivor of the “Law & Order” line, it’s got competition not only from cable but also from network shows like “The Following” and “Hannibal.” In 2011, the playwright Warren Leight became the showrunner, and, after contract negotiations failed, Meloni left the series. None of the new cast members have quite his magnetism, although the Broadway star Raúl Esparza is a major asset as the dandyish A.D.A. Rafael Barba. “Objection!” Barba announces, when someone accuses Benson of being a man-hater. “Argumentative. And ridiculous.”

As with any network procedural, the quality varies. A story based on Rihanna devolved into a bilious, puritanical fantasy of a pop star getting murdered. A few backstory episodes fell flat. Despite the show’s feminist bona fides, it’s striking how many stories have retrograde themes. In one, a classic “bad rape victim”—she lies, she cheats, she dresses trashily—is redeemed because she’s a good mom. In another, a workaholic detective murders a kindergarten teacher because she got what the cop couldn’t: a proposal and a baby. The dialogue can lean hard on stereotypes. “Detective Rollins, I’m Hashi Horowitz,” a lawyer who might as well be named Jewy Jewowitz announces. “The guy who’s going to get you out of this mishegoss.”

Yet even flawed stories can be saved by great guest performances, including the one by Patricia Arquette as an aging hooker, Denis O’Hare as a tormented priest, and, in one of the season’s standout chillers, Hope Davis as a worried mother and the great child actor Ethan Cutkosky as her sociopathic son. The show has long made cunning use of red herrings, hooking its audience with a “splashy” plot in order to make a political point, as in an episode that starred the real-life rapist Mike Tyson as a death-row prisoner and an icily good Ed Asner as a pedophilic summer-camp director. In the first act, the plot played off the Jerry Sandusky scandal, but it became, by the final scene, a story about poor black prisoners deprived of decent legal representation. Other episodes have used the same type of bait-and-switch to raise awareness about rape in the Congo and the backlog of unexamined rape kits.

Still, none of this would work if it weren’t for Hargitay’s Benson, a Xena with empathy, the woman created from—but not destroyed by—rape. The worse the stories get, the stronger she becomes; it’s the show’s unspoken dialectic. Which made it all the more alarming when, in this year’s finale, the series broke its own rules, not by putting Benson in danger but by leaving her there. When I saw the opening shot—of Judith Ivey, pointing a camera in Central Park—my heart sank. Sure enough, the plot was drawn from the horrific recent rape of an elderly bird-watcher, but, even for “SVU,” the dialogue was gruesome overkill. Then it ended with a cliffhanger: Olivia being held at gunpoint by a sadist, which left us to imagine her being brutalized until the next season begins. It felt like an imitation of another kind of television—“Scandal” or “Homeland”—and, instead of a meaningful risk, a betrayal. For all “SVU” ’s excesses, we expect it to keep one promise: no matter how bad things get, the story will end. ♦