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.

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.

What happens when Zack Morris turns up gut-shot in an alley behind a gay bar with multitudinous loads found in his person when he's examined at the hospital? Utter insanity, that's what. Not to be outdone, a young Elizabeth Banks pops up as his adult film star wife, and we go to set where she's about to treat some workmen pretty well. This is a wild one. What a time to be alive.

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.

Things aren't going well for Churlish, Velasco, and Muncy this week as their bitter arguments over Churlish's white-foods-only habit reaches a boiling point. This week, we meet Muncy's brother Teddy, who is also Stabler's brother, who is also Kat's real-life husband. He leads us down the rabbit hole into a world of macho, MMA-training bartenders who work as gophers for a bizarre ring of South Asian chemists who procure unconscious young professionals to be raped by awful Canadian businessmen. Yeah, there's a lot going on here guys.

This week, ADA Peter Stone's fast and loose lifestyle during his younger days when he was still a baseball player comes screaming into the world of our SVUs. What happens when a main cast member is the lead suspect in the case the SVUs are investigating? Well, that largely depends on the showrunner and the according professionalism with which they execute the production of a television show. In this case, we're watching an episode from Season 20, and the results are... NOT GREAT, BOB.

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.

When the dedicated detectives of Season 1 SVU wander into the world of fashion, you can't help but assume the worst is coming. And it is. Fashion is scary, children, and it's especially scary if you're a minor, as our vics find out. There's a ton of peripheral weirdness in this ep, and we discover yet another TV show that's in the larger SVUniverse.

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.

If watching beloved characters make terrible choices thereby endangering the careers and lives of basically everyone they come in contact with is your cup of tea, then this week's SVU starts hot and keeps on delivering. In it, we see Detective Olivia Benson blunder from one bad decision to another in a bizarre attempt to share a few giggles with a brother she'd never met until she started running an unauthorized, after hours stakeout on him. We also see Stabler, without house or family since we are deep into Season 8's bad Stabler, come very close to being kicked off the police force as a result of covering for his partner, and of course we see our beloved Captain Cragen have to clean up his "two best detectives" bullshit so many times that I'm shocked he survived this one without a massive coronary.

A teen girl in a domestic disturbance call ends up being pregnant and unwilling to divulge much information about who provided the batter for the bun in her oven. While fighting off the urge to vomit, the Munchie Boys dive into the disgusting reality of what stepkid smut would have you believe is titillating but ABSOLUTELY is not. They also take up arms in a fight that must be waged, defending the honor of a state being unjustly impugned by a writers staff with wanton disregard for actual laws on the books.

We were fortunate enough to have been graced by the presence of Michelangelo Milano this week, who dedicated listeners will know as Patrick Binder, the boyfriend of Taryn Manning's character, Larissa in Season 12, Episode 12 "Possessed." Not only does he appear in one of just TWO EPISODES OF SVU TO RECEIVE A PERFECT 10.0 FROM US, but he plays a huge part in what might be the most memorable scene we've ever seen in the history of this show. We had a great chat with Michelangelo, who told of his life's path to a random apartment in New York where he just so happened to grapple for hours with the older brother in Home Alone (who was wearing nothing but a creepy mask and a pair of whitey-tighties) and where he's been since.

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.

Stepdads can really be jerks, right? This episode of SVU definitely agrees with you. Your stepdad might be a one-of-a-kind A-hole, but I'm guessing he didn't get you into an underground fight club run by the white cabbie cabal where their adolescent children or charges throw down instead of them. This being Season 12, the episode careens all over the place, but it ends up with Elliot case-blocking Hardwicke in a prime Fatherly Stabler moment.

In our first brush with Season 25 of SVU, we are immediately thrown into a deep backstory flashback featuring a character hitherto unknown to Munch My Benson. If that wasn't jarring enough, a certain hit single from the seminal '90s album Pocket Full Of Kryptonite features heavily in said flashback, which obviously means the Munchie Boys have A LOT of reminiscing to do about Spin Doctors. In a shocking twist, Vice Presidential candidate--and couch lover--JD Vance might have made an appearance here as well. Lots to unpack folks.

The rape of a woman just outside her apartment building frays the social fabric of New York, when so many of her neighbors saw something happen, but none of them took action to help or even notify the police. This being a season 17 SVU, one can't help but notice the racism bubbling very close to the surface in the portrayal of the 3 bad teens who assaulted her, and of the urbane Lower Manhattanites who refused to notice a damsel in distress. We, of course, were more interested in which East Village coffeeshops allow the open sale of ketamine inside during business hours, and why Adam never visited during his time there. We also meet a magical drunk man on the witness stand, and a Carisi unlike any we've seen before.

Picking up where we left off in MMB 219, we had a SUPER bad dad who was just found not guilty of ummm, SAing his son to show him what a real man is. The Munchie Boys were left to wonder what fresh hell awaited them upon returning to this foul ground in a second part that seemed unnecessary, and this one did not disappoint in terms of exceeding their already low expectations. There are bad episodes of SVU, and then there's this week's installment, which achieves lows hitherto reached only once before.