Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Families" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired February 10, 2004)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After watching the most recent Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode, I dug out the season five boxed set of the same show (at the height of my lust-driven infatuation with Christopher Meloni, I bought the boxes for all 12 seasons of SVU that featured him) to watch “Families.” I’d wanted to see that particular episode again ever since I saw the episode a week before “Post-Rage,” “Aperture,” about two teenagers who grow up as part of a blended family, only the boy has romantic, or at least sexual, feelings towards the girl while the girl sees him as her brother and isn’t at all interested in him “that way.” In “Aperture,” which I wrote about at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2025/05/law-and-order-special-victims-unit_9.html, the virtual siblings end up in a sexual encounter the boy arranges with an online acquaintance from another city to stage a mock “kidnapping” and hold them at gunpoint to force them to have sex with each other, when in fact it’s all a setup because he wants to have sex with her and she doesn’t. Watching “Families” over 21 years after it first aired was welcome because it was a great chance to get reacquainted with the marvelous actors who’ve since departed the show (and in at least one case has departed the planet): not only Christopher Meloni at the height of his hotness but also Richard Belzer (d. 2023), Dann Florek, B. D. Wong (the openly Gay man who became a star as the male concubine of a French diplomat stationed in Beijing in David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly), Tamara Tunie (I love her name!) as medical examiner Dr. Melinda Warner, and Diane Lane as the prosecutor assigned to the Special Victims Unit. (In the original SVU the prosecutors assigned to the unit were all female – as they had been for the original New York Police Department Sex Crimes Unit that was the model for the show – but more recently the prosecutor has been a man, Peter Scanavino as Dominick Carisi, Jr., and I think the show has suffered from it.)

“Families” is in some ways the mirror image of “Aperture”: in this case the two amorous teens are related as half-siblings, though only one of their mothers knows that. The teen lovers are Aidan Connor (Patrick John Fleuger) and Shannon Coyle (Jenna Gavigan), and the only person who knows they’re biologically related is Shannon’s mother, Susan Coyle (Helen Slater). The police find Shannon’s body in the course of investigating another crime, and when she’s autopsied they learn that not only was she pregnant, but 62 percent of the fetus’s genes were biologically related to her – meaning that the pregnancy was the product of incest. The cops at first suspect Shannon’s father, Jason Connor (Tom Mason), and also her brother Brian (Spencer Treat Clark), but ultimately they learn that Susan Coyle and Jason Connor had been involved in an extramarital relationship that had lasted at least two decades, and Aidan was the result. Susan had covered for Jason by claiming that she was married to someone else who was continually out of the country on “business trips,” but later we learn that there was no such person. There’s the sort of red herring beloved of the SVU writers in the early days, as the police uncover a pedophile choir teacher, Steven Abruzzo (Geoffrey Noffts), who was having a sexual affair with Shannon’s 17-year-old classmate Lisa Faber (Stefanie Nava). The police have already started to suspect Steven of having an affair with Shannon and killing her to cover it up, but it turns out that Lisa is the girl from his prep-school choir he’s been doing. The cops actually find Steven and Lisa in flagrante delicto and bust Steven (in having more than one crime going on at once this episode, written by Jonathan Greene and directed by Constantine Makris, starts encroaching on Midsomer Murders territory), but they soon clear him of the murder even though he’s clearly on his way to prison for screwing an underage student.

Things take an even darker turn when Jason Connor is found murdered and Susan Coyle is indicted and actually put on trial for it. But the real killer is Jason’s wife Debra (Jane Seymour, a more prestigious actress than we’re used to seeing on SVU), who knocked off Jason when she caught him planning to leave her for Susan once and for all and found they’d booked plane tickets to Cuba to get away from her. (This was a bizarre plot hole given that in 2004 direct travel between the U.S. and Cuba was still strictly forbidden; when my mom, my brother and I went there in 1977 during Jimmy Carter’s “thaw” we had to get to Cuba by first flying to Mexico.) As for Shannon, it turned out that Jason had accidentally killed her before his own murder. The film ends with Aidan almost literally throwing up at the knowledge that the girl he had sex with was his (half-)sister, and the SVU police telling Aidan that he’ll need to be there for his half-brother Brian given that Jason’s dad is dead and their mom is on her way to prison for killing him. I’ve been haunted by “Families” since I first saw it and it still holds up quite well, even though Mariska Hargitay as Detective Olivia Benson (before the series of promotions she got later in the show’s run) was still wearing her hair almost murderously short. She looked a lot better in the role once she started to let it grow!