SVU showrunner Neal Bear on Compassionate Storytelling
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Neal Baer, the former showrunner and executive producer for my favourite seasons of Law & Order: SVU (Season 3-12), is currently the Co-director of M.S. in Media, Medicine and Health Program at Harvard Medical School. His conversation with Jerome and and Julienne from narrativ.com podcasts was a delight. Sharing some of my favourite quotes from the podcast.
First, Baer reflects on how personal experience, his own identity and his time as a medical student during the AIDS crisis informed his creative decisions. His portrayal of HIV-positive characters in the shows where he was a writer and producer, wasn’t just a plot choice; it was a reflection of a shifting medical reality and the deep emotional terrain it carried.
“Lot of storylines I did (on ER, SVU etc.) were influenced by me being in the closet and my medical interest in HIV from a medical perspective as he was in the medical school at Harvard from 1991-1996, which was at the height of AIDS epidemic where not much could be done to suddenly we could do a lot. So when in 1994, when ER started, we couldn't do very much but in 1995 we could do a lot. It influenced the storyline we did with Gloria Reuben, Gene Boulin as someone who lived a fulfilling life after taking Antiretrovirals"
He talks about a philosophy shift from empathy to compassion and mentions that stories, for him, are not about pretending to be someone else, but about walking beside them. This distinction matters in both medicine and media as it calls for humility, and imagination.
“I did an address at Harvard Medical School where I said curiosity is the gateway to empathy but I have changed that now to curiosity is the gateway to compassion, because I feel that empathy is an overused word now. But what does it really mean? Can we walk in someone else's shoes and the answer is no. We can only imagine what their lives are like and that can be done through storytelling so I like the word compassion because I am accompanying you in your journey. I am not being you, I am not walking in your shoes and I can imagine what it's like.”
Baer talks about storytelling as a deeply human instinct, one that allows viewers to project their own experiences, beliefs, and uncertainties onto characters, fostering a more intimate and open-ended kind of learning. This was so relatable having seen it play out in multiple episodes of SVU in his tenure.
“I did some years ago, called 'Mercy' for SVU, an episode about a mother who euthanizes her baby with Tay-Sacs. I chose as a writer, a genetic syndrome that's always fatal and horrible and the child will die quite young. Then brought into through my characters, different positions that they took, given what she had done. So Meloni's character, who is a father of four says "if my child was suffering, I would do the same thing". Belzer's character who is from Jewish faith in the show, says "no it's up to God". Here is this a conversation that the member of the audience can bring their own experience to. Sometimes it’s dangerous, because they'll bring their experience which is very different from what they are watching is different. But that's what stories do, they bring us together but they also differentiate us. That’s why I like doing SVU because there were different opinions and we learned about our characters through their own personal journeys(....)Entertain is kind of funny word so I wonder if it means 'you don’t think'. For me, if I tell a great story that has that Oh My God moment, then I have done my job.”
