Law & Order: SVU plans to address George Floyd's death in upcoming season

Law & Order: SVU plans to address the recent protests, police brutality, death of George Floyd and the coronavirus pandemic in an upcoming season.

Appearing on The Hollywood Reporter podcast TV's Top 5, Showrunner Warren Leight said that Floyd's death "has to come up and it will."

"There are ways, we will find our way in to tell the story. Presumably our cops will still be trying to do the right thing but it's going to be harder for them and they're going to understand why it's hard for them," he explained on the podcast.

In light of the growing Black Lives Matter movement, Leight said that the show is making an "effort to bring in new voices, fresh voices, different voices" to the writers' room.

Reflecting on the show's representation over the past year, the showrunner said that he thought Law & Order: SVU has made an extra effort "to show how class and race affect the outcomes of justice in society, but I'm beginning to suspect 'really hard' wasn't enough."

He continued, "This has to be a moment where people make themselves uncomfortable — where people in power have to make themselves uncomfortable."

According to Leight, shows that glorify cops are part of the problem.

"There are shows with flawed cops at their centre," he said. "I don't mind a flawed cop at the centre, but a flawed cop with a tendency to violence that's glorified, to me, is a real recipe for legitimising police brutality. That's what I see the most that disturbs me."

He added, "I've been made uncomfortable by a number of shows that glorify the use of violence in interrogation or the use of threat."

However the producer said that he draws a clear difference between Law & Order:SVU's lead police officer Olivia Benson (played by Mariska Hargitay) and police brutality that is playing out in real life across America.

"Olivia makes mistakes ... but she's empathetic, which is I think what separates the cops on our television show from a lot of what we're seeing these days on our live streams."

In the wake of recent events, Leight said he hoped that it would bring about change in how the police are represented on TV shows.

"I hope to God it's an inflection point," he said. "Change will start taking place on shows individually. There'll be lip service paid, probably across the board, but I wonder how deep it will go."

And given 2020's unprecedented events, the hit cop drama also plans to cover COVID-19.

"We're going to reflect New York in the pandemic. What happens to someone who is sexually assaulted during the height of the coronavirus outbreak," he told the show's host.

Earlier this year, Deadline revealed that actor Christopher Meloni would be returning to his role as Elliot Stabler in a new, as yet unnamed spinoff series.

The 13-part season from the mastermind of the longrunning TV show, Dick Wolf, will reportedly follow Stabler as he heads up the organised crime division of the NYPD.