Law & Order: SVU season 19 – Harvey Weinstein episode coming — with a twist

Many out there likely predicted that a Law & Order: SVU season 19 – Harvey Weinstein story would be coming up. After all, the sex scandal that broke last month is one of the most horrific in recent memory and it has inspired a movement like no other. Dozens of other high-profile figures have been accused of either improper behavior, sexual harassment, or rape since the Weinstein story first broke.

Now, SVU is going to present their own interpretation of it later this season, but not in the way that you would think. While this episode is going to have many familiar tie-ins and themes to what transpired with Weinstein, it’s being transposed over to the airline industry. For more, here is what executive producer Michael Chernuchin had to say to Entertainment Weekly:

“We are hitting Harvey Weinstein head-on, but it’s not in the realm of the entertainment business … It’s a real important episode about the rape culture in an industry, and we wanted to try [to] stretch the law to criminalize that sort of environment .. We were actually working on a story about airline pilots and what a boys club that is. We were beating the story out and said, ‘Wow, this is exactly what the actresses go through in Hollywood. It’s the same environment.’ So we got all of our Harvey stuff out with airline pilots.”

Like with any “ripped from the headlines” episode of SVU the very clear goal is going to be to figure out a way in which to tell this story in a way that feels authentic both to the SVU story as well as real life. You don’t want to do the episode just for the sake of doing it — you want to be able to offer up some sort of new take or give viewers something more to think about. It feels like everyone is well aware of that fact that the actions of Weinstein (and others) are downright unacceptable; what we’d like to see this installment focus on is the environment in which that allows some of these behavior patterns to fester and if there is a way in which this can be improved.

Following this episode, it would not come as a shock if SVU were to tackle something more tied to the entertainment industry later this year. Just remember how many different terrible headlines have come out in the past few weeks alone.

What do you think about the idea of a Law & Order: SVU – Harvey Weinstein story? Share in the comments below!

Remember that there is another new episode of the series coming up next week entitled “Something happened.”

(Photo: NBC.)