'Special Victims Unit' violates laws of predictability

Idle readers: Please excuse me if this column is tamer than usual. I'm breaking in a new editor. So I won't claim that I have incriminating pictures of certain people at the IDS with strippers like I did when my column got bumped to the opinion page.\n (Columnist's note: That last part was a joke. I don't have any pictures of IDS Weekend editors at a strip joint...yet).\n Moreover, I didn't have anything particularly intelligent to write about "Law and Order: Special Victims Unit" (NBC, 10 p.m. Friday). I feel creatively constipated, and since my old editors Brett and Eden are gone, I am seeking advice from that Yoda of journalists: Harlan Cohen.\n Dear Harlan,\n Let me say off the bat that I'm not the kind of person who usually writes to you. I don't trust pundits, and I don't have a girlfriend who uses a trumpet as a vibrator. But I do need advice: I just can't say anything worthwhile about legal dramas.\n Maybe I'm the problem. I haven't felt funny since my near-nervous breakdown in October. Perhaps I need to do something drastic to get funny again, like sacrifice a virgin to Mel Brooks. Maybe you could help me out with that.\n Or maybe it's the genre that is the problem -- I think the legal drama is dead. "Law and Order" seems to be in a state of permanent exhaustion. I'm tired of watching Sam Waterston trying to thwart evil defense attorneys who bore legal loopholes into the constitution like maggots and allow the scum of the earth to slip through.\n And although "Special Victim's Unit" lacks the redundant courtroom climaxes of "Law and Order," it has inherited much of its predecessor's predictability.\n As a fellow columnist, you can appreciate how much I cringe at predictability. My loyal readers -- both of them -- can attest that in the middle of just about all my columns I go on some rant about something that has nothing to do with what I'm writing about. Like the time when I claimed to be Jesus Christ and accosted an innocent person on my floor with a plunger.\n And they know that I will return to my original thought by writing "Getting back to the topic."\n Getting back to the topic, it's not that SVU is a bad show; it's that it's a typical legal drama, which means you know what's going to happen if you know the rules.\n Rule 1: If the case seems open-and-shut, the victim is the culprit. In one episode I saw of SVU, a young girl was beaten and apparently sodomized. As any seasoned couch potato knows, the guy whom the cops arrest in the first 15 minutes isn't the real bad guy, and even I could tell that the alleged victim was really a con artist.\n Once you know this rule, you can figure out the rest. For example:\nRule 2: No one is who they seem. On SVU, this means at least one character in each episode uses a fake identity a la "The Maltese Falcon."\nOh Harlan, my life is so empty that I actually sit around and find patterns on television shows. I pontificate because I'm shallow. \nBut I have a duty to continue to dispense with wisdom about television, and I decree that the characters on SVU prove legal dramas are dead.\nAs Dorothy Parker would say, detectives Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni) and Brian Cassidy (Dean Winters) "run the gamut of emotions from A to B." The actors are not at fault here; it's the genre, which requires cops to be more wooden than characters in a Sergei Eisenstein flick.\nOn the HBO drama "Oz," Meloni and Winters are magnificent, especially Meloni, whose character Chris Keller is a caged animal with enough raw, animalistic sexual presence to seduce Sister Peter Marie Reimondo, the prison's nun-psychologist.\nMeanwhile on SVU, Stabler has the personality of cement. At the end of one episode, he gives a pitiful speech about how he can't protect his daughter, squawking away like a dying bird. I would pay real money to see Chris Keller beat up Stabler.\nAdditionally, Richard Belzer's character John Munch, lifted directly from canceled NBC cop series "Homicide," seems out of place with his wisecracking, like Dennis Miller on "Monday Night Football." And Olivia Benson, the female detective on SVU (Mariska Hargitay) is like the Sigourney Weaver character in "Galaxy Quest": Her main function is to strut her boobs.\nSo Harlan, I've written you about my woes, and I know what you're thinking: "You need to stop watching TV and improve your sex life by finding a partner for God's sake!" Well I can't. I'm a TV critic!\nHelp me Harlan!\nSincerely,\n"Scum of the Eart"