Spoilers ahead for Episode 14 of NBC's Law & Order: SVU Season 26 in the 2025 TV schedule, called "The Grid Plan" and available streaming next day with a Peacock subscription.
Law & Order: SVU found a formula that works going back to the pilot in 1999, but the NBC hit sometimes departs from that formula. That was the case for "The Grid Plan," which not only revealed the assault in a different way than usual, but featured a victim who proactively made herself part of the investigation. Doing so didn't really help her case, but a scene between Megan (The Perfect Couple's Donna Lynne Champlin) and Benson (Mariska Hargitay) clarified what was driving her. Champlin spoke with CinemaBlend about the powerful episode.
Megan came to New York City to have fun with as many Broadway shows as she could fit into her week away from Iowa, but this being Law & Order: SVU, something went horrifyingly wrong for her when she was attacked in an alcove in Times Square. "The Grid Plan" didn't actually show her assault at the beginning the way episodes often do, and I started to wonder if a sequence that Donna Lynne Champlin mentioned in our interview had been cut.
Instead, it was saved for later, and Megan spent much of the episode involving herself in the investigation until the Special Victims crew stopped her. Benson finally seemed to get through to her, pointing out that Megan was displacing worries about her health with the assault that she believed she could do something about. Benson confided something that she certainly doesn't tell every victim, and Donna Lynne Champlin broke the scene down, telling me:
Mariska's character talks to me and sees that I'm doing this [displacement], and tries to tell me that I'm doing this. She tells me, 'My father was a rapist, and now I'm the head of the SVU, so I know a little bit about displacement.' But unfortunately, my character isn't at that moment quite able to hear that and also be, I think, appropriately supportive to her character. I remember we did a couple takes of that. My first reaction to that when she says that line to me, my character is like, 'Whoa.' And I then got a note. I got a direction, which I agree with, that was like, 'That's a healthy person's reaction. Your character is still not in a great place, so you have to give me an unhealthy person's reaction to that.'
The reaction of a person who hadn't been recently hit by a dire medical diagnosis and then a brutal sexual assault would likely be sympathetic and kind; Megan wasn't in that kind of place emotionally, which Champlin connected with after receiving a note on her performance. She went on:
I was like, 'Oh, right, of course.' That was really the biggest struggle for me in that scene, was to not react with as much compassion and empathy as I would. That's one of the reasons why this episode was kind of an Olympic event, because my character is constantly feeling everything and then feeling nothing, and then acting rationally, and then acting absolutely insane. It was just these really fun, really quick switches. Even in the middle of a scene where she's calm, all of a sudden she's speaking too loudly, and she just looks around like, 'Oh, that was really loud. I'm sorry.' It was just so much fun, and any scene with Mariska is just like nirvana.
Megan stopped interfering with the investigation as the trial approached, but that didn't mean that she was ready for what awaited her in the courtroom. When she was on the stand, the defense attorney both announced her MS diagnosis in open court and then more or less interrogated her about whether her assault was actually consensual sex.
It was when Megan was being bombarded with harsh questions on the stand that she flashed back to the assault scenes in Times Square, which Donna Lynne Champlin filmed in silhouette in an alley. The actress had to deliver emotional performances while simply sitting in a chair on the witness stand, and she explained what she enjoyed about it:
I thought it would be harder than it was. I actually really enjoyed it. I enjoyed not having to worry about blocking. I just really enjoyed the luxury of talking and listening. It is a luxury, especially on a TV set, because everything moves so quickly. You block the rehearsal in like five minutes, and then you shoot it. I really kind of loved not having to worry about anything but the words. And I found that much easier to navigate the emotional roller coaster of that scene.
The only ones who do much moving in SVU's courtroom scenes are the attorneys, and even that depends on how active Carisi is in a given week now that he's on the mend form his own ordeal. That means quick blocking in rehearsal, but challenges in other aspects of filming. Champlin continued:
The only hard part on TV and film when you're doing a big long scene – I think it was eight pages, we spent all day on it – is when they do pickups. A pickup is when they feel like they have the beginning, which, as an actor, is your emotional ramp, and they go, 'Okay, we're gonna start with Megan's sobbing, and we're gonna pick it up from somebody saying, 'Please don't sob.’ And you're just like, 'Ah, can I just have 10 seconds?' [laughs] That's the hardest part as an actor, when they do pickups in the middle.
Champlin went on to say that it "always makes me laugh when they" ask for pickups that involve jumping right back into heavy moments, but she has her "own toolbox" and "own way of doing it." While there wasn't a lot to make Megan laugh in her episode of Law & Order: SVU, she got as happy an ending as possible: a guilty verdict, a supportive husband, and the realization that her ordeal didn't ruin New York City for her.
The format was just a bit different than usual for Law & Order: SVU with how involved the victim was from start to finish, and you'll be able to revisit the episode streaming with Peacock. New installments of SVU will also continue airing on Thursdays at 9 p.m. ET on NBC, following Law & Order at 8 p.m. ET. As for the third show in the franchise, Law & Order: Organized Crime Season 5 finally has a streaming premiere date.
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