Mariska Hargitay as Det. Olivia Benson on Law & Order: SVU (NBC)

The showrunner for Dick Wolf’s last standing Law & Order program, Special Victims Unit, was struggling to understand how people watch “marathon” sessions of the show he manages. “The children episodes are disturbing, even to us,” said Mr. Leight.

He singled out one such episode, entitled “Friending Emily,” in which detectives go to an FBI office to view images of abused children. Mr. Leight sounded shocked, tired and a little bit horrified over a detail that he and his writers chose to put in the episode. He sounded a lot, in fact, like SVU’s former protagonist, Elliot Stabler.

“There is a kid in diapers whose photo we show,” said Mr. Leight. “We found it on an Internet pornography site. It had 37,000 hits in the last four days.” (Which, it turns out, is the exact line that a government official says during the episode.)

“I mean, a bunch of us on the writing staff have children,” he said. “Nobody really wants to write this stuff. It’s dispiriting.”

The show may upset its own writers, but Law & Order: SVU has outlasted every other show that Dick Wolf created. It’s been two years since NBC nixed the original Law & Order, after 20 seasons. Even after the cancellations of two highly promoted spin-offs, Law & Order: Criminal Intent and Law & Order: Los Angeles (not to mention an ill-fated fourth spin-off called Law & Order: Trial by Jury), SVU is still going strong.

It’s one thing to say that violence sells. It’s another to say that gruesome sexual attacks on the most vulnerable members of society, children, can power the remaining show in an unusually successful franchise. Even last season, when its ratings were at their lowest, SVU was still the sixth most watched show on NBC, ahead of 30 Rock, The Office and everything else in the Thursday night lineup. At its peak, SVU was able to topple the original Law & Order when they were on the air together.

What’s clear: people love watching Special Victims Unit, especially young women and mothers. In fact, since the show launched 13 years ago, females age 18 to 34 have been its most consistent viewers. “Two-thirds of our audience are women,” Mr. Leight said. “I honestly don’t understand why, completely. I don’t get it when parents say they watch the show with their kids, either.”

Lisa Friel, a lawyer who spent nearly 30 years in charge of sex crime prosecutions in the New York City District Attorney’s office, understands the impulse. Ms. Friel, who actually oversaw SVU-style prosecutions at work, used to watch the show with her high-school-age daughter, now 18 and a college freshman.

Some of the subject matter they may have encountered: an episode titled “Consent,” in which a young girl is drugged with GHB; the aforementioned “Friending Emily,” in which an older frat brother conspires with a newer pledge to kidnap and rape a high schooler and then broadcast the videos of her molestation on the Internet; and “Brotherhood,” in which a pledge-master is murdered after raping several women as well as the fraternity’s own pledges.

“It wasn’t like I was watching it with her when she was 7,” Ms. Friel told The Observer. “But when the time was right, when she was old enough and when I thought it was appropriate to start dealing with these issues, it was another way to open the dialogue.”

The writers’ lunchroom is plastered with New York Post and Daily News front covers, enough to extinguish one’s creative juices ... or appetite. Every Law & Order installment has a noted “ripped from the headlines” element, and at times the show has even presaged the news. During Mr. Leight’s tenure, for instance, SVU had an episode (“Personal Fouls”) about a basketball coach using his charity as a conduit for kids he could molest. The show aired “two weeks before the Jerry Sandusky story came out,” Mr. Leight noted, with a hint of pride.

As Gothamist asked its readers at the time, “Not to pull a total conspiracy theory here, but this particular story scales pretty high on the ‘just a coincidence’ scale, don’t you think?”

Mr. Leight explained that the story line wasn’t based any on inside information, but that it wasn’t a complete coincidence, either. SVU has a team of rape counselors, crime survivors, detectives and other law enforcement experts who advise the writers on plot points. “Male-on-male sex crimes was just something that people were telling us was happening,” he said. “The show had never really tackled that issue in a substantial way.”

Confessions" Episode 1003 (NBC Photo: Will Hart)

But the show hasn’t always been an easy sell. When Law & Order: Special Victims Unit premiered in 1999, starring Christopher Meloni and Mariska Hargitay as detectives Elliot Stabler and Olivia Benson, it was criticized for sensationalism. There was just no TV precedent for a series that tackled not just the rape or molestation of adults, but also, with disturbing frequency, of children as well. It wasn’t unusual to have a scene in which a small boy or girl was found wandering around the city, dazed, with blood running down his or her legs.

The most brutal episodes violated yet another TV taboo: some of the kids were murdered as well. Longtime viewers of the show may have seen a 15-year-old found in the bushes, a dead baby discovered in a cooler and a 14-year-old war refugee with a slit throat.

Lisa F. Jackson is one of the show’s critics. “SVU portrays a universe of sexual violence that doesn’t really exist,” said Ms. Jackson, director of the HBO documentary Sex Crimes Unit. To make the film, Ms. Jackson spent two years inside the Manhattan District Attorney’s office with the prosecutors of sex crimes.

“SVU shows a universe that people prefer over the reality of rape and sexual violence,” she said. “In real life, most victims don’t show physical signs of assault, and it’s a lot harder to identify victims because they don’t come forward.”

Especially during the final Christopher Meloni years, SVU seemed intent on pumping up ratings with increasingly outlandish crimes and plot twists. Stabler’s own children were kidnapped, a hackneyed plot recycled from 24.

“I think people are remembering stuff from season 10, season 11,” said Mr. Leight carefully, when asked about the more exploitative aspects of the show’s story lines. “I think toward the end of the Meloni era, it got a little ... fetishistic. It was like anything else: you had these great writers on the show for 10 years working with the talented [original showrunner] Neal Baer, and they keep pushing the limits, pushing the limits. When we came in two years ago, our whole idea was to bring the show back to the basics.”

SVU has sailed past its 300th episode, is well into its 14th season, and has survived the loss of one of its two stars. It might be worth considering that there is something in it besides cheap thrills. It’s hard to think of SVU as entertaining. Riveting, perhaps.

Mr. Leight would have us believe that SVU exists as a public service, and that the writers get no pleasure in creating these dark stories, especially if they involve children. Like SVU’s relation to real-life sex crimes, his contention probably has some element of the truth, but isn’t the whole story.

During our interview, Mr. Leight asked us what we thought of the recent accusations that Kevin Clash, the voice of Elmo, had once been sexually involved with an underage teen.

We said we thought it wouldn’t be too long before an episode about a child-molesting puppeteer would make it onto SVU.

Mr. Leight coughed and was quiet for a moment. “Yeah ... probably not for a while.”

That night, Mr. Leight would write on @warrenleightTV Twitter account, “Memo to: FBI/CIA/NATO/SesameStreet From:SVU Writers’ Room—Please slow it down, we’re having a hard time getting this all down.”

His subject matter will be familiar territory, according to Variety. The one-hour show, called Lost and Found (what, no ampersand?), will revolve around "an unconventional female detective who identifies anonymous murder victims, and then solves their crimes."

Mr. Wolf will executive produce the pilot for which he's corralled writer Chris Levinson to provide a script. Ms. Levinson has worked with Mr. Wolf on Law & Order, Law & Order: SVU and Law & Order: Trial by Jury. She also wrote episodes of Dawson's Creek and Charmed.

NBC will pick up the show based on what producers can pull for a cast. With the Dawson's Creek scribe on the payroll, will Katie Holmes return from crazy Cruiseland to pout on the small screen once again?

NBC is not seeking monetary damages. Rather, the suit asks for “declaratory relief” or a rewriting of the contract.

All up and down the East Village stretch of First Avenue this Friday morning of Memorial Day Weekend, bitches are frantically hailing cabs, their multiple tote bags swinging like gloppy fat tentacles. There is an observable tendency among this younger set to plonk their petulant feet down about eight feet downstream from someone who actually lives here who already has an arm or a leg extended to feed from the thin thin cab population.

Back in the day, this would have resulted in a funsy screaming match. But the new folk are so soft, all it takes is a gentle "Excuse me...." from the person behind, and off they scamper. So The Transom supposes its real tip is this: if you jump into a line at the coffee shop or in front of a fellow cab-desirer on a corner, don't back down, youngster. Consider profanity, and the cabs will be yours.

Also? When just those little numbers on top of the cab are lit up? That means it's actually for hire. Don't you pay attention to details while you consume your nightly educational Dick Wolf shows in your crappy Murray Hill sheetrocked shoeboxes?

The self-aggrandizing media buzz over Deadline is particularly thick here in New York, where the NBC series is being filmed. Not since Opie Howard wandered into town with the script for The Paper in the early 1990's have the city's ink-stained wretches been so gaga over a Hollywood-born production. Egos were only stoked further when the enthusiastic, broad-shouldered Mr. Platt dined at Michael's, scarfed hors d'oeuvres at an Inside.com launch party and researched his role with the gang at the News , among others. Elsewhere, bigfoot scribes, normally dismissive of Tinseltown, coughed up free advice to Deadline producers faster than a bad oyster–not because they were, uh, star-struck or anything, but because they wanted to ensure, you know, that the show had the proper verisimilitude .

The capper is that Mr. Wolf & Co. have secured the old New York Post headquarters on South Street to serve as Deadline 's set, giving the series a chunk of real Manhattan newsbiz cred. Tom Conti, who plays the publisher of Deadline 's fictitious tab, The New York Ledger , now occupies the former office of none other than Mr. Rupert Murdoch himself.

Meanwhile, icky, inside-baseball speculation has raged about the inspirations for Deadline 's cast of newsroom characters. Is Mr. Platt's character, the larger-than-life, borderline-obnoxious columnist Wallace Benton, based on Jimmy Breslin? Mike Royko? Steve Dunleavy? Is Benton's journalist ex-wife, played by Hope Davis, based on omnipotent showbiz writer Lynn Hirschberg? Is Conti, in fact, doing Rupert? Is Lili Taylor's friendly gossip-society columnist based on … The Observer's own Frank DiGiacomo ?

Such shameless buzz has a positive side, of course–you won't find journalists yapping this much about the season premiere of Daddio , for example. But there's an obvious double-edged sword to any program that dares to employ reporters as dramatic vehicles. While every group of professionals will nit-pick the way it gets portrayed in TV or film, no other occupation has such access to ink by the barrel. After all, as Mr. Platt himself acknowledged, Deadline 's success, to a certain degree, is going to depend "on how journalists react to it."

Mr. Wolf, his usual cool-as-a-cucumber self, didn't sound too worried. "Hopefully, members of the working press are going to watch it and only be marginally enraged by the way they are presented," the Law & Order creator said. But Deadline 's executive producer and head writer Robert Palm, a former reporter himself, acknowledged that, yes, there has been some on-set worry about the way the drama will be received in media circles. "Some of us were kind of nervous and anxious–if we don't do it right, they'll skewer us," he said.

Mr. Platt pleaded for journalists to give Deadline some elbow room. "This is not a docu-drama about the state of American journalism," he said. "It just isn't. It's entertainment."

But at the same time, it's clear that Deadline is striving to be a little more realistic than, say, Just Shoot Me . "Do we want to get it right?" Mr. Platt asked. "Absolutely, just like I imagine the guys on ER want medical people to think there's a certain degree of verisimilitude. Will we always? Of course not."

Indeed, famously nitpicky journalism careerists may have a field day with Deadline 's premiere episode, in which Mr. Platt's character, Wallace Benton, is introduced as some kind of Upper East Side tabloid superman–a trust-funded Pulitzer winner who writes a populist column, lives in a gazillion-dollar penthouse in Tudor City, dresses like a Barneys hostage, slugs Bushmills, verbally spars with his hottie ex-wife, teaches a journalism class and, oh yeah, finds the time to dig up, Scooby-Doo style, at the last possible minute, evidence to free a pair of convicted murderers on Death Row.

Still, Deadline has its moments. Whether it's his frenzied job, his boozing or his suffer-no-fools obnoxiousness, Wallace Benton is enjoyably against-the-grain for a prime-time television protagonist. ("I don't think he leads a terribly examined life," said Mr. Platt.)

The supporting cast of Mr. Conti, Ms. Davis, Ms. Taylor and Bebe Neuwirth (who plays the Ledger 's sharp-tongued managing editor) is pretty dang accomplished, and while they're not given much to do in the first couple of episodes, their roles apparently broaden in subsequent shows. And though Deadline 's first couple of plotlines are more Columbo -esque capers than journalism case studies, there's enough attention to newsroom detail and lingo to make people in the chronically insecure profession feel at least a teensy- weensy bit loved.

As for the real-life inspirations for Wallace Benton, Mr. Wolf called the fictitious columnist "an amalgam of Mike McAlary, whom I knew, and Breslin, whom I've met a couple of times, and Murray Kempton and Jack Anderson and a sort of hodgepodge of all of them." He added: "The worst mistake that I could make would be to try and do Breslin." Citing his respect for the veteran columnist, he said: "Would this kind of journalism exist without Jimmy Breslin? Absolutely not. [But] I assiduously tried to avoid Breslin in my research, for the same reason I don't want to watch All the President's Men 100 times."

Mr. Platt has taken some gentle ribbing for his recent ubiquity in New York's high-profile media circles, even though it was done in the name of said character research. But he rejected suggestions that journalists have been sucking up to him. "I don't mean to sound disingenuous, but I don't see it that way," he said. "I see it as these guys are being nice to me. First of all, through my brother [Adam, a food writer at New York magazine], I know a lot of these New York media types, and they're being nice to me. Why does it have to be sucking up automatically?"

For his part, Mr. Wolf is mum on exactly whom he's been huddling with in the Fourth Estate. "Various people have contributed anecdotes and insights that I never got a disclosure agreement for," he said cryptically. "They are very forthcoming, but they know the power of background."

If Deadline lives long and prospers (an open question because, among other things, the show's 9 p.m. Monday time slot puts it up against Monday Night Football , Ally McBeal and Everybody Loves Raymond ), Mr. Wolf envisions a situation where real-life journalists might do cameos on the show once in a while. George Plimpton (surprise, surprise) has already filmed a scene at Elaine's with Mr. Platt, and Mr. Palm said that producers eyeballed Pete Hamill for another episode, but the scribe had a scheduling conflict. "We're hopefully going to have some prominent members of the Fourth Estate in the show playing themselves," Mr. Wolf said. "I mean, that's part of the fun. If the show catches on, we'll probably be there [at Elaine's] with some more recognizable faces. If not, everybody will lose our number."

Of course, interest from journalists alone will not be enough to sustain Deadline . With the media sliding down somewhere between N.F.L. referees and I.R.S. agents in opinion polls, selling Wallace Benton to Middle America could be an uphill climb. But Mr. Wolf believes there's enough energy, conflict and dramatic glue in the news business to make the show work.

"Journalists are fascinating people because, for better or worse, you all fall within the 95th percentile of intelligence but are sort of traditionally underpaid, because you are doing something you really like to do–as opposed to doing something you have to pay people to do," Mr. Wolf said. "At the same time, you are exposed on a daily basis to foibles and idiosyncrasies of people who are making a lot more money. So my take on journalists is that most of you guys are pissed off about that."

Ouch! If you think that deconstruction stings, Mr. Platt pledged that future episodes of Deadline will probe one of the most delicate, unspoken truisms of the newspaper business–that for all their ego, blather and bluster, journalists are actually pretty thin-skinned folks.

"One of the most interesting things about journalists to me is that, for people who make a living out of kind of psychoanalyzing people and tearing them new orifices, they are extremely sensitive when the scrutiny is turned upon them," Mr. Platt said. "And that, to me, is very, very interesting, and something we plan to harness."

So Deadline 's starting to sound like a two-way street, huh? Journalists will take their shots, and television writers will take theirs.

"There's a little bit of a no-win situation in terms of keeping everybody happy," Mr. Platt said. "But I'm not going to lie to you and tell you I don't care [what journalists think of the show]. Of course I care. I'd be lying through my teeth if I said I didn't care."

Tonight on WNBC, catch the real-life New York journalists who care on the Newschannel 4 News at 6 . Those TV guys make more money, but they don't make Dick Wolf money. [WNBC, 4, 6 p.m.]

Thursday, Sept. 28

NYTV heard an intriguing story from a young Asian-American actress who had recently done some voice-over work for NBC's schmaltzy Olympic coverage. The actress, who lives in New York, said she was hired to do voice-overs for a taped segment about a Chinese Olympian–when the segment showed the Chinese athlete speaking in her native tongue, the actress translated in English. But the actress was also asked to do the English translation with a Mandarin accent–a bit of a stretch, since the actress doesn't normally speak with a Mandarin accent.

"I faked it," said the actress, who asked that her name not be used.

And the NBC people were fine about that?

"Yeah," she said. "They seemed to be fine. As long as it sounded like it was [Mandarin] enough."

The actress said that she felt she did a pretty good job with the voice-over, even though she felt a bit creepy later.

"It's a little offensive, you know, for her voice-over to have to have an Asian accent," she explained. "That is a little strange. But more jobs for me!"

Calls to the NBC Sports office in New York were referred to the network's Olympic headquarters in Sydney, which did not respond to telephone and e-mail messages by press time.

Tonight on NBC, more 15-hours-late, message-in-a-bottle coverage from the 2000 Olympic Games. [WNBC, 4, 8 p.m.]

Friday, Sept. 29

Tonight is the final night of Big Brother . If you have watched all 70 episodes of this thing, please now walk to nearest window, open, jump. [WCBS, 2, 8 p.m.]

Saturday, Sept. 30

On CBS, The Pelican Brief . In which Sam Shepard steps into a car, and the car blows up. That's the highlight. [WCBS, 2, 8 p.m.]

Sunday, Oct. 1

Tonight is the final night of the 2000 Summer Olympics . If you have watched all 441 hours of this thing, please now walk to the nearest window, open, jump. [WNBC, 4, 7 p.m.]

Monday, Oct. 2

A final note about Deadline, which premieres tonight: The plot of tonight's pilot episode revolves around the execution-style murders of five fast-food employees in a burger joint. In the show, two men commit the murders shortly after the restaurant closes. Mr. Wolf said the script for the pilot was written six months before the real-life May 24 Wendy's massacre in Queens–in which two male suspects are alleged to have shot seven employees shortly after closing time; two survived. In fact, the Deadline pilot was shot in March, two months before the real murders.

Spooky, huh? Mr. Wolf, who said that he's occasionally seen plotlines of Law & Order replicated in real life, sounded a bit weirded out by the Deadline pilot coincidence. "These things do happen, but of all the ones that have happened, the Wendy's one was the most disturbing," he said. [WNBC, 4, 9 p.m.]

Tuesday, Oct. 3

The 2000 Presidential Debates . Round one. Per order of the Bush camp, this debate is live from Kennebunkport, with a pie-eating contest, mandatory nap time and questions from panelists Arsenio Hall, Carson Daly and Rip Taylor. [WCBS, WABC, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and so on, 9 p.m.]