LAW & ORDER: SPECIAL VICTIMS UNIT: Warren Leight Teases the Dark—and Hopeful—Season 22 Finale

As LAW & ORDER: SPECIAL VICTIMS UNIT prepares to close out its 22nd season, the writers opted to shake things up in the season finale, “Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing.”

“I would say all TV shows do this except us, but [in the episode] we have an A-story, a B-story, and a C-story,” showrunner Warren Leight explains.

In the A-story, “There’s a really good [case] inspired by a horrible series of crimes involving who gets [shelter] from the subsidized housing,” Leight previews. “So we used that as a springboard. So that’s our dark case.”

Equally complicated is Garland (Demore Barnes) realizing how little the NYPD has changed over the past year, despite the public pressure.

“At the beginning of the year, I think he and a lot of people thought George Floyd’s [death] was an inflection point: the world’s going to change and the NYPD is going to have to reform,” Leight notes. “And here it is, a season later, and in real-life there’s been a lot of pushback.”

“And Garland is now being shunned by a lot of the brass in NYPD,” Leight continues. “You see it’s beginning to turn on Garland. Early on, he told Fin, this is an inflection point, things are going to change. And Fin looked at him and said, ‘If you say so.’ Fin, as usual, had a general sense of how things go.'”

Fin (Ice T), meanwhile, will have his hands busy for a very different reason: his impending wedding to Phoebe (Jennifer Esposito).

“I thought for once, let’s not end the season on a cliff,” Leight says. “Let’s not end the season with Olivia being held at gunpoint by William Lewis, or whatever. It’s been a hard enough year. We had been hoping to get Jennifer Esposito back a few [more] times, but scheduling and COVID protocols got in the way. And so we kept hoping to get to this moment, where Phoebe and Fin and all friends and family gather.”

“Now, it’s SVU, not everything goes perfectly,” he continues. “[But] just the notion that after the year we’ve all had, to have a moment where you see the squad, as a family, dressed up on a nice day; I thought we could all use a breather, a moment of hope. But it’s SVU, so there’ll be guns—but it won’t be a blood wedding.”

While, traditionally, most of the officers on the show have had tumultuous and/or short-lived relationships, “I got tired of seeing every cop on every cop show in a miserable relationship—either widowed, divorced, or alone,” Leight says. “Those are the basically the three statuses of most cops on most shows. So we thought, ‘Well, isn’t it possible somebody has found somebody?’ And what does that hint at for other people in our squad room?”

Adding to the intensity of the moment for the complicated duos of Rollins (Kelli Giddish) and Carisi (Peter Scanavino), as well as Olivia (Mariska Hargitay) and Elliot (Christopher Meloni)? Fin and Phoebe’s wedding is for two former partners who reconnected years after they worked together.

“How can it not [impact them]?” Leight says. “I remember I was in a long-term relationship, on-again, off-again, in my youth. And every time we got invited to a wedding, it brought stuff up. It’s just how that goes. So why would our characters be any different? When you’re at a moment, a passage, for someone that you’re close, it makes you think about where you are in your life.”

It’s especially thought-provoking for Carisi, who recently started dating someone new. (Scanavino previously teased of the finale, “When I read it for the first time, I got goosebumps…And I think, hopefully, a lot of people will be happy and excited.”)

“For someone like Carisi, he has a line in the episode that just goes by…he thought he’d be married and have kids by now,” Leight previews. “It never occurred to him that he’d be single or beginning [a relationship]. He thought by now, he’d have a family. So each person looks at the wedding and then looks at where they are in [their respective] life.”

LAW & ORDER: SPECIAL VICTIMS UNIT, Thursdays, 9/8c, NBC

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