Here's What Fans Really Think Of Olivia Benson

For a very, very long time, there were no good acting roles for women — or at least, in television and film, they were few and far between. By the mid-90s, this began to change, with significantly more television shows featuring women as female leads.

"The proliferation of female-centered dramas in the late 1990s made good business sense because the fragmentation of audiences among new broadcast and cable channels made 'narrowcasting' — or explicitly targeting just a female audience—a more viable strategy," Amanda Lotz, assistant professor of communication studies, explained to The University Record.

Amongst those '90s female protagonists were Buffy Summers aka "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"; Dana Scully of "The X-Files"; Xena, the Warrior Princess; Carol Hathaway of "E.R."; and of course, Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), NYPD detective on "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit" (via Bustle).

And while the rest of the aforementioned shows have come and gone, "Law & Order: SVU" remains on the air. Over the years, Olivia Benson has become the show's rock, injecting the show with necessary humanity.

"I felt the part in my soul," Hargitay would later recall of her audition (via CheatSheet). "When I went in to read for Dick, I saw other actresses in the waiting room, and I told him, 'I need you to understand, this is my role.'" And turns out, she was right.