We follow up last week's nuanced depiction of the damage American prisons cause to those stuck inside with a wholly different take on the subject in "Escape" (S5E11). In this SVU, two ex cons buy their way out of the joint, galavant around the town in drag, and take Olivia Benson to the Jersey Shore. We meet one of Liv's former paramours, decide whether or not unfortunate early '00s fashion choices were the result of America's imperialist adventures overseas, and listen as Adam summons an ancient one.

Coming off back-to-back Bad Dad eps, the Randomizer gifted the Munchie Boys with 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.

Because Father's Day now lasts an entire week, the Randomizer gifted us with another standout bad dads episode of Law & Order: SVU ("Clock" S8E2), wherein a young, but not criminally young, girl with mosaic Turner's Syndrome concocts an elaborate scheme to run away from her Canada curious father and into the arms of her proto-pedo lover. Of course we have plenty to talk about including abhorrent British comedy troupes and Yankees games from the early mid-Aughts. Munch Away!

For Father’s Day, the Randomizer decided to troll dads everywhere with a tale of woe and trauma that sure makes one father look AWFUL. We watched Redemption in Her Corner (S21E13). Don’t worry though because plenty of other people get some stink on them too because this is Law & Order: SVU, after all. As per usual, Adam and Josh go down innumerable rabbit holes—trying to figure out just what Liv’s birthday actually is, wondering what Barba was doing in Iowa investigating election fraud for primaries that don’t exist, the origins of the boxing for fitness craze, and the origins of Italian soups. Fathers everywhere should listen to remind them that there are a lot of bad dads out there, and they should work to make sure they’re not one of them.

As always, Law and Order: SVU manages to make a heartbreaking story ("Closet" S9E16) of one man's loss of his husband, his career, his brain function, and his celebrity into fodder for the Munchmill. We discuss our least favorite Oscar winners, lament the demise of office culture, shine the spotlight on a particularly bad grandpa, and spend entirely too much time discussing a character that is never seen nor directly heard from in the episode. Please rate and review and support other Indie Podcasts!

What happens when a new showrunner takes over Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and doesn’t understand the characters at all? Or how SVU tells stories? Well, the Randomizer selected “Gone Fishin’” (Season 19, Episode 1), so the Munchie Boys found out the hard way. Fin kidnaps a perp who absconded to Cuba? Dean Winters and Peter Jacobson coexist in an episode where Jacobson isn’t Bart Ganzel, Cassidy’s pimp employer from the Cragen waking up with a corpse in his bed three-part saga, challenging the strength of the space-time continuum? How ridiculous can a soundstage set that’s supposed to pass for Cuba get? The answers to these and so many other befuddling questions lie within the confines of this installment of Munch My Benson.

This week the Munchie boys watched "Counselor, It's Chinatown" (S21E7) a wildly inappropriate Law and Order: SVU, which has Josh and Adam careen from such wildly disparate topics as: Is noted scumbag Chris D'Elia is a cardigan guy? Which professions suffered most during the Chinese Cultural Revolution? And, does the NYPD have an undercover dog requisition service? We'll rub and tug our way to the bottom of these and many, many more questions. Sadly, due to climate change, there is a lot of Max on this one.

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” (SVU - S9E11) like a blanket on a mattress--or a high society douchebag, 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, serial killing, cult leader dad who isn’t afraid to go big. True Munchies will enjoy the divergent rides 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.

What do the business of sports, Adam's email inbox, Stockton California pizza chains, and the contents of Amanda Rollins's stately pleasure dome have in common? Well, they all come up in our especially tangent prone rundown of "Hunt, Trap, Rape and Release" (S22E7) Munch My Benson's first taste of SVU Season 22. Along the way, we rate the loudest blouses in SVU, the greatest challenges in home laundry, and the least believable cast members of Law & Order: Criminal Intent among many, many other topics.

The most beautiful thing about Law & Order: Special Victims Unit is that it’s provided a truly insane platform for some of the most inspired stunt-casting in television history. Not only is “Slaves” (Season 1, Episode 22) a sterling example of what SVU can do in this arena; it’s the first foray into that arena for the show and blazed a helluva trail for any who followed this ‘80s Brat Packer. If you didn’t know you needed to see your beloved star of Mannequin and Weekend at Bernie’s Andrew McCarthy portray an exacting maniacal sadistic sexual psychopath, take our word for it, you need to see it here. Come and check out Andy Mac’s Crash-parry in the McCarthy/Spader kink-off because this is some next level insanity. This is MUST-WATCH SVU.

Law & Order: SVU is often salacious and upsetting and certainly problematic, but rarely does an episode—”Brotherhood” S5E12—reference foreign object anal penetration a whopping 22(!) times. Obviously, for the love of all things good, please be warned that we will be talking A LOT about that triggering subject. Of course we will also be discussing exotic woods, waste water treatment facilities, Lutheran traffic patterns, Josh's COVID scare (he's negative), and Adam's salad days. You're not going to forget this one anytime soon, and you will NEVER look at a wooden handle the same way again.

When proceedings kick off with a pooch gleefully dragging discarded afterbirth down the sidewalk, you know you’re in for something special. “Taboo” (S7E14) delivers on that opening promise, proffering some of the wildest, most disgusting things seen in the Munchie annals. As Adam and Josh frolic through the filth, they talk pseudocyesis, the history of Bellevue, bus fight Twitter, and the epidemic of incest in the U.S. And speaking of incest, wow, does this installment of SVU find a way to make something already SUPER disturbing mindblowingly revolting. This episode is so nuts, you’ll feel the Unit needs to interview you afterwards. Hold onto your butts coz this one is BONKERS.

While we felt like the title of SVU season 8 episode 22 "Screwed" was a little on the nose, it did provide ample ground for the usual Munchie business. We brainstorm a potential series of extreme #Beachhead fanfic, Adam casts his dog's voice actor, and Josh proposes an elaborate conspiracy by the show runners against their own cast members. Enjoy!

Strap in for a wild ride, Munchies. This episode of SVU—”Ritual” (S5E14), featuring Emmy-winner Michael Emerson—starts in a park with an apparent ritual sacrifice and dives head first into the world of child slavery, complete with a Fin undercover op and possible Upper East Side blue-hair slave auctions. Along the way, Adam and Josh practice Santeria, lament the stolen Elgin Marbles, assess what jewelry screams slave owner, and wonder what Adam’s glasses being donned by a gruesome murderer means for him. They also finally chat about the 1980 exploitation chase flick, Night of the Juggler.

Another week another problematic turn from the heinous minds at Law & Order: SVU. This time we are watching "Rockabye" (S7E9), an episode which upsets Max, poses numerous questions about the cutlery skills of a mid-Atlantic runaway sex worker, and forces Josh to make highly problematic threats against Billy Chenowith's awful Dad.

After Adam tells of his travails in the recent Texas winter storm and ensuing power outages, the Munchie Boys get down to business, reckoning with the ghosts of series past while persevering through an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit featuring a robot child mimicking human emotion stuck in the strangest of custody battles in “Stolen” (S3E3). While dealing with a bonafide Cragenisode courtesy of his former partner Max Greevey’s cold case getting tossed in the microwave, Adam and Josh also dive into post-9/11 SVU credits, do some height detective work, walk the Appalachian Trail with Mark Sanford, and unearth a fictional Juris Doctor degree. They also follow up on last week’s promise to watch and talk about the late ‘90s truckin’ Swayze gem, Black Dog.

Look, we don't expect Season 1 episodes of SVU to get all the details exactly right, but in "Chat Room" (S1E18) the show gets the basics of the internet so gloriously wrong that it actually conjures many, many things into existence that didn't exist yet. Catfishing? Yeah, SVU invented that. Revenge porn? That too, sadly. Bitcoin, ffs?! Yes, Dickwolf is/was/will be Satoshi Nakamoto. Along the way to all these discoveries, we learn that SVU is a baseball show, that there is no wiggle room on chicken, and discerning listeners will be enchanted by Josh's deliriously deep dive on celebrity ocelots. Folks, we always recommend that you watch the episode in question before you listen, but this time we mean it. Enjoy!

Sometimes the Randomizer giveth; sometimes it taketh away. It’s sort of like SVU that way. This week it gave an episode that takes us all on a wild ride from a stairwell in Chelsea to the grim realities of life in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Along the way, jealousy abounds, Benbot enjoy a romantic candlelit dinner, Adam breaks down the past 150 years of strife in the Congo, Amazing Grace and Chuck is deduced to have done some ripping from the headlines, no one wants to believe our victim—Lainie McCallum, played by Diora Baird—and a cut hand yields some unexpected outcomes. The Munchie Boys tackled “Witness” (S11E16), so hold on to your butts.

What happens when a quaint little ripped-from-the-headlines Law and Order: SVU plot becomes a raging storm of insanity that sweeps the nation and leads a ragtag mob of jet ski dealers, realtors, and Neo-Nazi extremists to invade the United States Capitol? Well, the Munchie crew does their level best to answer this question and many many more as they watched "Real Fake News" (s18e17). Do you want to know what a teenaged Adam was watching at 1 in the morning on Austin cable access? Are you intrigued by the concept of a hot pot fusion restaurant that fully immerses you in a 4D psychedelic experience? Are you ready to mainline some pro-MSG propaganda and get fully Umamipilled? Everything they told you is a lie, unless, of course, they told you to fire up this hot Munch My Benson.

You know things get weird when Adam cops to snagging discarded prosthetic body parts from beside a dumpster, but that’s the journey that “Parts” (S6E22) takes the Munchie Boys on this week. A wildly discordant episode sends us careening from possible psychopathic killer dismembering his victims to the interesting world of the hasidim to body parts for sale to black market organ transplants, figuring out a way to shoehorn Marlee Matlin and Isiah Whitlock Jr. into the proceedings. Munch feels things. It delivers a bunch of cringe, and by the end, the severed head found in a Topaz with a throat full of seed is but a distant, resoundingly forgotten memory. Come for the insanity, stay for the deep dives on Haredi Judaism and a willed body mess that grew into a full-blown tempest.