I didn't get into acting to be a public service announcer or an advocate and yet, by virtue of this show and how we handle the subject matter that we've been given, that's kind of how it's evolved in certain ways.

Crime is one of the leads of the show. If there's ever anything that deals with a character's personal life, you don't have to worry about it getting too crazy. People don't have to worry about character arcs. Each episode is a self-contained unit.

How that works is our first season was the year we had a threatened writers' strike, so what we did was that instead of doing 22 episodes, we did 30. We put 10 in the bank.

Christopher Meloni Quotes