Emily Nussbaum: “The audience was two-thirds female, young women, for the most part – the same demographic that drives fan fiction, romance novels, and vampire stories. ‘Oh, you enjoy this, do you?’ an angry john says, in the SVU pilot. ‘Is this how you get your rocks off?’ He’s talking to some detectives, but he might as well have been addressing viewers, for whom the show’s pulp appeal was simultaneously addictive and faintly shameful.”