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.

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.

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).

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.

A high-period Neal Baer episode which careens wildly from squabbling cub scouts to open-relationship-having MMA legends to racist frat houses and finally to Riker's Island prison gangs educated by one of the absolute legends of alt-country with a healthy dose of our favorite single season star, Chester Lake, thrown in. This SVU goes places none of us could have expected, including having one of the most recognizable guest actors in the episode die in the most disrespectful way possible after a single line of dialogue. It's really something.

A series of seemingly unconnected rapes forces Fin Tutuola to join forces with a man who never sleeps. A man who knows the precise tenor and pitch of every recycling center's lunch whistle in the city limits. A man who walks. A man named Chester Lake. We also meet our first perpetrator who staffed the Obama White House, and one of the vics totally isn’t Amanda Rollins—she just looks like her, right?

NYPD officers who've been serving in Afghanistan are getting pretty violent, domestically, and the Unit has to race against a *gasp* journalist to get to the bottom of what's going on in this week's Ripped from the Headlines edition of SVU. The Army are very bad, doctors are huge cowards, and journalists may or may not be bottom feeders in this screed where no cows are sacred and no army wife is safe.

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.

Special Guest Star(?) Erika Christensen swoops in from outer spa—er, the FBI to help the Unit find a gruesome serial killer and his likely next victim. Of course, nothing is as it seems and Lake and Benson have to try to figure out what all is amiss in an effort to find said victim. And obviously, the entire time you watch this episode, you wish that this Special Agent Cooper was a better-known Special Agent Cooper and that this one was not making mistakes that Dale Cooper would never make. The weirdness of this SVU also forces Josh and Adam to reckon with what might be the darkest Second Unit shoot in this show’s illustrious history, gets Adam looking into his urban foraging options in Central Park, and diving into the case of The Toy-Box Killer.

The Munchies thought they were sending us down a dark and unprofessional path when they selected this haired-brained thriller of an SVU episode which begins with a dead Topekan tourist in Central Park, traverses a Lady From Shanghai-esque fun-house sequence in Coney Island, and tiptoes around all manner of Dale Stuckey-related content on its way to unceremoniously killing off one of Munch My Benson's favorite characters as a prelude to some kinky Liv and Elliot fan service. Little did they know, that we are just messed up enough to enjoy this wild, and very much not SVU, romp. Also, Adam suffers some very real life consequences from trying to record this episode in his bedroom.

In an episode Adam already covered on his guestisode of the These Are Their Stories Pod, we watched a preposterous reimagining of the various Michael Jackson sexual abuse allegations in which an uber-wealthy toy mogul lures children into his low-rent pirate-themed sex lair to dress them up in precious pajamas and have his way with them. Was it fun? Yes, absolutely. Did it feature enough lemur? Sadly, no.

This installment of SVU pits very recognizable teacher against an also recognizable student in a he-said-she-gonorrhea'd-me/she-said-he-raped-me exercise in who can we believe for the Unit and the audience. Sure, the teacher is Sabrina/Clarissa, but if we know anything about this show, it's hard to believe the potentially stuntcasted. And, yeah, the kid is basically known for playing quiet lunatics, but they can't both have done it, right? This one's fun AND strains credulity in all the best ways.

The Munchie Boys are dealt an SVU episode with super-AIDS and methed-out party boys running roughshod all over the gay party scene. This one is chock-full of problems, in all the best ways. How far does it go? Well, let's just say that if you have to wonder whether you're seeing hand or dong on a posed nude corpse, you found yourself in a pretty wild place.

This episode of SVU is so goddamn fun, guys. Rebecca De Mornay (no, not from the homeless shelter) hatches possibly the most outlandish plot ever devised on network television involving implanted mouth semen and Special Forces assassins, all to ensure that her milquetoast husband only ever has eyes for her. Wild stuff. Obviously there is a TON of stuff to talk about including the 1951 Academy Awards, the unionization of Strip Clubs, Lethal Weapon, the greater Shermerverse, the Bronx Zoo, and the future of this podcast. This is an episode to enjoy with your entire family--provided, of course, that they are down to listen to detailed discussions of the half-life of jizz loads. Special thanks go out to my other favorite Rebecca De Mornay, Sonya Eddy, who has sadly never performed in a Law & Order franchise.

Sometimes an SVU really does the racism. Then there's S7E6 Raw, which for an unfathomable 20:51 unfurls bigotry at an astonishing rate--an average of once every 23 seconds. And it doesn't even start until past the 16-minute mark. They pack so much hate into this episode that it left Adam and Josh dumbfounded.

If one were to carve a Mount Rushmore of bad moms out of someone's holy mountain, Diane Venora's character from this SVU would certainly be on it. This lady sucks a lot. While we get deep into her antics, we also talk about Adam's sickness (spoiler alert: he shouldn't have gone to that Yankees game), Belizean airports, nonsexual hygge snuggling, trashcan chicken, and Kenny Rogers.

This week, The Randomizer selected "Lowdown," which features Fin's exquisite description of "down low" culture. Sadly, this episode goes so hard on inappropriate "humor" that Josh was forced to make a running count of things you wouldn't (and shouldn't) say on TV in 2022. As we break this down, you'll hear about the police riot on Adam's block, Kevin Brown's sinker, and the art of mise-en-scène. You won't, however, hear the nearly 50 minutes of wild digressions about dumplings, Kenny Rogers, Kelvin's muscle boys, and the Kinsey scale unless you subscribe to our Patreon.

Wherein the Munchie boys dive into an episode that treats schizophrenia with an altogether un-SVU-like degree of nuance. Along the way, we wrestle with the consequences of our actions as we are forced to issue the very first Munch My Benson correction thanks to listener, Kara, who noted that Connie Nielsen's accent shenanigans were explained in the show, and in the SVU Fandom wiki page. Josh dog sits, Adam gets into a fight with pharmacy employees, and we go extremely deep on the munchiest of topics: the mechanics of Casey Novak's softball swing, window screen installation, the origins of the Albanian language, the many, many failings of CSU Burt Trevor, and a whole lot more.

It's our 100th episode of Munch My Benson, and what better way to celebrate than with an episode of Law & Order: SVU that does not have Olivia Benson in it at all. In classic fashion, The Randomizer threw us a curveball and drew a Beckisode fronted by Connie Nielsen for our benchmark podcast which features a stand-out performance from apex-child-actor, Elle Fanning. Come along as we discuss primary nuclear strike targets, NXIVM, the correct name for the 2008 film Rambo, and projecting a 17-year-old Josh Brolin.

This week, the world's largest airline ensured that this episode could not be released on time. To all of the listeners whose Monday mornings were tragically impacted by this unfortunate event, we at Munch My Benson are truly sorry.

Sadly, the writing staff of Season 13 of SVU was absolutely unapologetic in thoroughly trashing the second largest city in the state that SVU calls home. We've seen this show look askance at lesser states and provinces across the continent, but the glee with which this episode implies that Buffalonians will stop at nothing to ensure that their own children grow up in unsafe homes is truly shocking. Josh and Adam, of course, talk early childhood education, examine the films of Satyajit Ray and Michael Cimino, describe bottomless brunches and lil' squeezers, and plumb the depths of Rollins's depraved backstory. Enjoy!