Another Paternity Leave Installment is here, and this one could ruin your childhood.

When The Wonder Years ended almost 30 years ago, no one could have imagined the incredibly dark turn that Kevin Arnold's life would take. Yes, Mr. Arnold's death, Paul's going to Harvard, and Winnie to a long and successful career on the Hallmark Channel were all disturbing outcomes, but this is much worse. This SVU shows little Kevin Arnold beating, raping, and then re-victimizing women across the Upper West Side. This obviously provides tons of fodder for the Munch mill as we dig into a really great episode of television. We talk Jeopardy! prep, our favorite lawyer lover plot twists, and Josh takes us on a particularly unexpected trip through the shenanigans of the Warwick R.I. city council. Enjoy!

Another week, another Adam's Paternity Leave release, this time we've got the one, the only Patricia Charbonneau, about whom this podcast is centrally concerned. As mentioned last week, this is content that's been behind the Patreon paywall for a while. Patreon payments are frozen for the time being. New Munchies can't join as paying members until that's unpaused, but you can join as a free member and at least be kept abreast of pod news...

When questions like “If I die, and there’s a hot tub, can I be made a saint?” get posed, you know things got weird. This installment in Munchstory has Adam and Josh covering “Streetwise” (S9E11) like a blanket on a mattress—or a society doucher, apparently. This episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit has it all. Mae Whitman going from glitz to gutter and back again. STUNTS! Adam Beach. A bum family complete with a pretty messianic cult leader dad who isn’t afraid to go big. True Munchies will enjoy the diversions through high society, defunct Swedish automotive companies, the conditions necessary for beatification and the Christianization of the Welsh, defunct NYC music institutions, the nature of paintball, and much, much more.

Another week, another Adam's Paternity Leave release, this time we've got some of the best acting we've seen in MMB history...

The Munchie Boys watched a helluva SVU featuring Oscar-nominee Stephen Rea in a truly spectacular guest performance in an episode featuring a slew of great acting and seriously interesting direction. This week’s installment was “Solitary” (S11E3), and it’s one of the most existentially introspective and unique shows that has fallen into our laps. And of course, judging by the title of this week’s episode, other weirder stuff also got discussed, including Elliot’s extramarital dip into formicophilia, a roach and its wrangler getting jobbed out of residuals, tide charts and greater New York water temperatures, and narrowly averted wartime disasters. If we’re talking about how lots of people should have won Emmys for this episode, it’s a special one.

While Adam is on paternity leave, check out this banger:

Thomas Jefferson once declared coffee “the favorite drink of the civilized world,” but the wild world of coffee trading on display in Season 9, Episode 18, “Trade” would seem to imply that it’s also the favorite drink of loaded scumbag fathers who look eerily like the pater familias in the Christian-propaganda family dramedy 7th Heaven. It’s rare to have an episode of SVU with as much gold as this, but in the O’Halloraniest episode in Early Munchstory, the world of coffee trading yields a veritable mother lode for Adam and Josh to ingest. Whether it was the complete lack of understanding as to how to coffee trade actually works or the jaw-dropping shocks delivered at every turn, this glorious wildly inappropriate pun fest delivers the goods. Strap yourselves in and get ready for a jolt because Reverend Camden was let loose, and the ensuing havoc knows no bounds.

In an unprecedented turn in the annals of Munch My Benson history, this installment of SVU from Season 3 is simultaneously the standard bearer for representation of a marginalized and underrepresented subset of our population and one of the starkest examples of why it's always best to choose an actor who's a representative of that segment of the population. When given the choice to cast two characters with Down syndrome, they chose an accomplished actress with Down syndrome and an actor who'd later be the top-billed star of prestige dramas for her love interest. The results were something that needs to be seen to be believed.

The discovery of a dead baby found in a cooler floating on the Hudson inspires SVU to JD Vance levels of state aggression towards pregnant people. They cast aspersions at every customer of a beloved uptown health food store then wantonly ruin the lives of every family member of every Hudson U student they can find. Sadly, after a fast-paced first act, this settles into a paint-by-numbers Tay-Sachs morality play for the second half.

I know all there is to know about the SVU. I've had my share of the SVU. First there's a body, then there are slurs. And then, before you know where you are, you're saying Dick Wolf.

Once again, we meet a trans character who is placed in the middle of a brutal scene, and the usual ham-fisted SVU shenanigans ensue. Buckle up, kids!

This one gets all up in the confessional, culminating in a no-holds-barred Catholic-off between Stabler and Father Michael Sweeney (Eric Stoltz--or is it Stolitz?). Red herrings and misdirects abound, and since we're watching an SVU dealing with the Catholic Church, you can assume that some priest were taking some liberties with parishioners of an underage variety. While this one might kick off with some jarring early-season transphobia, it also has a lot of wild fun stuff, and if you weren't paying attention to the priest's name, don't worry, Josh caught it.

In conjunction with this week's interview with Michelangelo Milano, who plays Patrick Binder, Larissa/Brandy's boyfriend in this episode, we are dropping this classic episode back into the feed. Make sure to listen to Michelangelo's interview which dropped today, and check out his podcast, The Return Slot... Of Horror (YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify).

Wanna hear what happens when an episode breaks the Munchie Boys and their patented SVU-episode scoring system? Well, “Possessed” (Season 12, Episode 12) broke it like the Kool-Aid Man. Next to every other of the 96 episodes they’ve watched so far, this beautiful piece of art had Adam and Josh contemplating some pretty grand concepts like: was Jerry Horne’s Twin Peaks walkabout really a representation of the liminal state at the end of his life where he was just looking for his Brandy? what exactly was contained within the pages of Buzz’s skin mags that Kevin couldn’t wrap his head around in Home Alone? where is the line where we progressives can stomach police brutality? are we seeing the tripartite peak of pedo performance?

If this were a podcast that employed trigger warnings, it’d probably have to get tagged with all of them. Instead, you are advised to hold onto your butts. There is simply an abundance of insanity that’s too fantastic to ignore. Bask in the glow of “Possessed,” listen, and rejoice.

We all remember that great teacher from high school who would go the extra mile for all of their students. This episode of SVU presupposes that that exemplary educator is most likely a gang-bang addicted sex-club enthusiast on the side. This wild ride takes us from the heights of the pre-2.0 internet to the depths of "Dante's Inferno" and to every lurid second unit photo shoot in between. We need to give special mention to both art department who spared no depravities in their work for this episode, and for the outstanding quality of the background actors, who give (too much?) life to their wordless roles.

This week's installment really takes the Munchie Boys on a wild ride, starting with a working boy stumble-crashing a wedding in his boxers, dipping its toes in the water with Finnish furniture design and Altoona-style pizza, and finishing with a perp stroking Elliot's hand asking if he's going to protect them. Along the way, we take a voyage through high-end gigolo culture, the world of political donors and ambassadorial appointments, and one of the most extreme instances of folie à deux imaginable for a married couple. This is a classic early season journey where we're a pinball flicked between weird plot points in a way that's truly refreshing after spending so much time in late-season SVU.

When an overprotective mom has a second daughter disappear, only to be accused of smothering the second daughter and murdering the first, you know SVU is going to be involved. This one features an aggressively weepy Joan Cusack and some seriously sassy kid work from Bailee Madison. Watch as the entire world gaslights this mom into insanity while she's right about what happened all along. Oh, Liv also turns down a date for no good reason.

After nearly four months, the Randomizer finally rolled a Neal Baer-era SVU for us to watch, and despite a slow beginning, "Design" really delivers the wild stuff we love. This episode was supposed to star disgraced former President Donald J Trump as a hot piece of genetic material who's disrupting the mortuary sciences industry. Instead it features a laundry list of famous faces with strange backstories. What kind of madness allows the Munchie Boys to say "electroejaculation" 21 times in a single episode? Listen and find out. We also learn some terrible news about Odafin Tutuola's taste in music. Somehow, this is a crossover episode that terminates in Law & Order "Flaw" (S16E2).

If Popular is any indication, being a kid actor on SVU in the early days was not for the faint of heart. They’ll either have you playing a scumbag turning out your girlfriend for whichever old reason, or they’ll have you perping on your best friend’s girl who isn’t into you but who he instructed to bone you anyway despite the fact that you can’t stand him, or they’ll have you get turned out, contract gonorrhea, have your parents find out you’ve become ensnared in a beej-for-beer barter middle-school party scene, and have everyone say you are not attractive. No complexes developed here…

This week, we meet an Irish-American father-of-daughters who is even angrier than our own, beloved, Stabler. However, instead of 'swinging from a pole,' said daughter is possessed of superhuman hearing and a charming inability to be "normal" due to her Williams Syndrome. Thankfully, our super daughter is able to help the SVUs get to the bottom of just how many dudes were in mom's bedroom the night she was attacked, and exactly which noises they were loudly producing.

The first installment of the Neal Baer era is a doozy, pitting our intrepid SVUs against the defense-industrial complex. In a momentary distraction from family time, which became all too common during his time on the Unit, Elliot Stabler is pulled away from his family--in this case Maureen, a daughter who follows instructions POORLY--for a case in which he literally cannot help but become embroiled. Sure, jurisdiction and the vic's very speculative status as a special victim as it burned to a crisp are real-life hurdles that are completely ignored as Stabler and the Unit dig into the vic's eventually uncovered extremely terrible past.

Along the way, we find out that the US government paved the way for an especially odious pedo to victimize innocent youths without any roadblocks or pushback. We also get a Stabler traumatized for the first time and the introduction of one of the most beloved characters in the entire L&O universe. Fun is had amidst the tragic but fairly realistic world in which our victims live.

It wouldn't be a peak-era SVU episode if we weren't treated to an investigative red herring that eats up an entire act of television only to be discarded unceremoniously, forever forgotten and treated as though it never have happened. That misdirect usually isn't a NINE MINUTE NECROPHILIA KICK that plays as exploitative and shocking, leaving the audience's collective jaws on the floor, all while having the perp in question just brush up against the periphery of the Unit's case. It's a real shocker, and "Waste" provides it. It also has nothing to do with the pregnant woman in a permanent vegetative state who was knocked up while in the hospital.

Obviously, when you have one of the most decorated actresses in European film history (Isabelle Huppert) acting across from a legendary American actress (Sharon Stone) in the Season 11 finale, you're going to expect an episode to remember. Well, the minds behind SVU might have forgotten to write or fully fund this episode. Seriously.

Munchies, however, will be treated to LOTS of tangents about Adam's travels, Friday Night Lights, and Heaven's Gate.

For the second time, the Munchie Boys go back to the well from the earliest episodes of the podcast to reevaluate (with the benefit of having now seen and rated more than 170 episodes of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit) the truly brainmelting Season 3 banger, Ridicule, which gives us Casey Novak's very disturbing origin story before she changed her name from Amelia Chase. The world of SVU is upside-down in this one as women sexually assault men, tumescence exams are discussed, and autoerotic asphyxiation is de rigueur. And… Casey Novak—er, “Amelia Chase” is involved in almost all of that.

A dead, naked male prostitute is found in a cemetery which leads SVU from hell house to Long Island proto-mega church to the responsible brother from Wings to his accountant over the course of the investigation. Hilarity ensues assuredly.