Don't try and tell Ice-T Law & Order: SVU is too "woke"

Despite having, on its own, little-to-no actual merit as a critical descriptor—since it basically boils down to “This work engaged with modern issues of representation or diversity in ways that I, personally, get kind of weird about”—we do find that the term “woke” has at least one really powerful use: It lets you easily ID the people who use it as, well, “the kind of people who get mad when they think something is woke.” It also produces moments like a recent Twitter exchange with Law & Order: SVU star Ice-T, when a fan online tried to tell him that the show had gotten too w-word of late, only for the actor and rapper to respond in beautifully Ice-T fashion.

“What the F is Woke? lol Like I give a Fuck,” the actor, who’s been on SVU for 24 years at this point, shot back at the fan in question, going so far as to unleash the dreaded quote-tweet. The tweet has since gotten 120,000 likes, presumably on the basis that it is exactly the blend of indifference and amusement you would want to hear Ice-T use in response to these kinds of criticism being lobbied at a show he’s been starring on for more than a third of his full human life. When another pundit wrote that (paraphrasing) “woke” meant tearing down John Wayne statues to replace them with Spider-Man statues that spray “gay beer on my lawn”—ah, the internet—Ice T fired back, “That sounds dope. F John Wayne.”

It’s genuinely hard to view SVU through a “woke” lens, in any case: The series takes, as its basic premise, the need to protect vulnerable populations from predators, while also playing in to all sorts of ratings-friendly forms that those “predators” might take; we’ll admit we haven’t kept up with the series in recent years, but series executive producer Dick Wolf has never been in the business of giving up money by alienating anyone who watches TNT on a weekday night.

Interestingly, and as noted by Variety, Ice-T has talked about coming to terms with the show’s inherent politics in the past: He discussed, a few years back, the complications of starring in a TV show valorizing police officers, saying that he came to terms with the series after Wolf urged him to play “The cop that we need. And if I play the cop that we need, I won’t have any problems with it.”