Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (season 5)
| Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (season 5) | |
|---|---|
Season 5 U.S. DVD cover
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| Starring | |
| Country of origin | United States |
| No. of episodes | 25 |
| Release | |
| Original network | NBC |
| Original release | September 23, 2003 – May 18, 2004 |
| Season chronology | |
The fifth season of the television series, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit premiered September 23, 2003 and ended May 18, 2004 on NBC. Law & Order: SVU moved away from its Friday night slot to Tuesday nights at 10pm/9c. Casey Novak, the unit's longest serving ADA, was introduced in the fifth episode when Diane Neal joined the cast to fill the absence left by Stephanie March.
Early reports about Stephanie March leaving the cast at the end of Season 4 indicate that the first Season 5 episodes were written if not filmed by May 2003.
The sixth episode "Coerced" shows Elliot Stabler and George Huang at odds with each other about how to get through to a schizophrenic man. Jonathan Greene, who wrote the episode, said that Neal Baer has "instilled in all of us this fascination with how the mind works, and the nexus of where the mind and the law cross." During a 2012 interview for the show Media Mayhem, Neal Baer revealed that the most controversial episode of his career came from the fifth season. About the episode "Home", he said "I never ever dreamed that I would get so much hate mail" and explained "children who go to private or public schools are seen by lots of people and that's a safety net." The nineteenth episode "Sick" was based on the allegations of child molestation against Michael Jackson. The evidence used in the episode included evidence that never made it to trial in the real case. Writer Dawn DeNoon maintains that the jury should have delivered a guilty verdict and said "Justice wasn't done in the real arena, so I kept closer to the true story in this one than in most of them." In the real-life case to which DeNoon refers, the evidence that was not introduced in the 2005 trial was introduced in the 2 1994 grand jury hearings after the civil settlement for the civil case. Both grand juries disbanded after several weeks and did not indict Jackson, claiming the evidence did not match the accuser's description and citing lack of other evidence.
During the filming of the fifth season, SVU still did not have its own courtroom set. A 2011 video with Diane Neal reveals that the directors were still using the Law & Order courtroom. She reminisced "my memories of this set are of waking up at the asscrack of dawn on a Saturday when they weren't using it and shooting courtroom for twenty-two hours."
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