Greetings and salutations, dear readers! This week I have found you articles about a show focusing on rape, an episode from an anthology series about toxic masculinity, and one about porn…

On the 20th, Hazel Cills of Jezebel, talked to some of the people who worked on some of the most infamous episodes of Law & Order: SVU:
“But despite its early reputation as Law & Order’s scandalous sibling, the show has surpassed the original in longevity. While the former focused dryly on complex court cases and crimes not limited to homicide, SVU was much more unpredictable and faster-paced, focusing specifically on rape, abuse, and murder cases. It’s been 20 years since Law & Order: SVU introduced a generation to its heinous crimes and started a conversation about sexual violence with millions of viewers.”

Also on the 20th, Alan Sepinwall interviewed Rob McElhenney about the longevity of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, on Rolling Stone:
“TV series are not meant to run this long. And something like Sunny, a scruffy show about five dumb sociopaths (Rob McElhenney’s Mac, Glenn Howerton as Dennis, Charlie Day as Charlie, Kaitlin Olson as Dee, and Danny DeVito as Frank) hanging around a bar and making the worst possible decisions at every turn, would seem particularly ill-suited to longevity. Yet Sunny not only lives, but is still pretty darned great a lot of the time, with the modern-dance number that concluded Season 13 — Mac trying to find a way to express his feelings about being gay and newly out of the closet to his incarcerated father — among the show’s best scenes ever.”

I usually don’t usually use two articles from the same source a week, but as a lover of mysteries, I’d be amiss if I didn’t share David Browne’s Rolling Stone article about “the most mysterious song on the internet” from the 24th:
“With its rigid beat and dry, monotone vocals, the song sounds like a synth-pop hit you would have heard in a dance club in the Eighties. (Or at least on an Eighties Spotify station.) Close your eyes and you can imagine a music video: awkwardly lip-synching musicians, exploding lightbulbs, foggy streets. It’s familiar. But the name of the artist or band doesn’t come to mind.”

Bless Mehera Bonner’s heart because she gave us a list of the greatest porn movies of all-time on the 24th, over at Marie Claire:
“Watching pornography is a normal extracurricular activity for many women. Yet, the storylines in most porn flicks center on a delivery guy/repair man showing up unexpectedly (eye roll). Why should you sacrifice a good plot for great sex? Get you some porn that can do both.”

Finally, on the 25th, Cyrus Cohen analyzed the Black Mirror episode “USS Callister” for Film School Rejects:
“Media can and should be an escape from everyday discrimination instead of a constant reiteration of it, but the real damage is not being done to sentient bits of code or software in the fictional realm of the show. Rather, ‘USS Callister’ encourages its viewers to consider the real people who are being objectified, threatened, abused, or, in increasingly frequent cases, murdered by these same insecure men who conceptualize themselves as the true victims in all of this.”

Enjoy!