New York ? Last week, “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” filmed a tale of murder, a Catholic priest and sexual abuse.

The episode, “Silence,” had been set for next fall. But with a real-life scandal in the priesthood heating up, the show made a last-minute change. “Silence” will be ready for airing Friday to wrap the NBC series’ third season.

This should serve as a reminder how the “Law & Order” trio of New York-based police dramas scramble to keep pace with the headlines that inspire them.

Of course, topicality has always helped explain the appeal of the first-born, “Law & Order,” now in its 12th season. “Law & Order: Criminal Intent,” starring Vincent D’Onofrio as a detective with a Sherlock Holmes flair, has scored in its first year by similarly mining the news.

But even as the ratings for “SVU” have flourished (15th-ranked in households) and while its best episodes rival those of any crime drama, including its “Law & Order” siblings, this middle child remains something of a black sheep.

Why? Maybe, in its first season, by being too faithful to its pre-launch working title, “Sex Crimes.”

“SVU” premiered in fall 1999 declaring “sexually based offenses” to be “especially heinous” and thus the province of an “elite squad” (currently played by Christopher Meloni, Mariska Hargitay, Richard Belzer, Ice-T and Dann Florek).

Ratings were good, but the show acquired a tabloidy stigma, so much so that when Neal Baer took over as executive producer after that first year, “my wife said, ‘Sleazy sex crimes! I hate that show!”‘

Now, two years later, “there’s still a perception that it’s salacious, a ‘women’s panties’ show,” he adds with a sigh.

Medicine and movies

Baer, who turns 43 next month, earned master’s degrees in education and sociology at Harvard University before he fell into a filmmaking class.

	“Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” will air at 9 p.m. Friday on NBC, Sunflower Broadband channels 8 and 14.

He made several documentaries, then, after a stint as a science reporter for a Cleveland TV station, enrolled at the distinguished American Film Institute film school in Los Angeles.

After graduation, he was hired by John Wells, a boyhood friend from Denver, to write an episode of Wells’ drama series “China Beach” (1988-91). Soon Baer had gained a solid foothold in the industry. “But I always like to have a fallback position,” he notes, and eventually returned to Harvard for medical school.

“Then, in my fourth year, Wells sends me a script for a pilot that Michael Crichton had written when HE was at Harvard. I read it and I was like, ‘Wow! This is my life!”‘

Betting that “ER” would win a slot on NBC’s fall ’94 schedule, Wells invited Baer to brainstorm possible episodes.

Baer stayed on while finishing his coursework during production breaks and doing a protracted residency at a Los Angeles area clinic (working weekends for two years).

But after six seasons on “ER,” where he had risen to executive producer, Baer was ready to make a change.

“SVU” creator Dick Wolf was ready to make a change, too: His show “had problems” after its first season. “I wasn’t knocked out with some of the scripts,” says Wolf, “the back office needed an overhaul, and we were looking for a new show runner.”

Baer was game and deadset on scrapping the show’s Sex Crime of the Week routine.

“The first thing I tried to do was make the show about the psychological underpinnings of the crimes,” he said.

Varied treatments

To keep his audience guessing, Baer has resisted any single formula, jumping from week to week among at least three kinds of storytelling, which, in his lingo, are: Twisty-turny, Personal (which tracks the secondary impact of the crime on those who investigate it) and Social Issues (example: this week’s episode).

He has also made a practice of casting notable actors in against-the-grain guest roles. Eric Stoltz plays the Catholic priest at the crux of this week’s story. Recently Henry Winkler played a mild-mannered con artist who murdered his wife. Mary Steenburgen was the cold-blooded mother of a heroin addict.

“Dick keeps saying, ‘I don’t want to make it look like “Love Boat,” ‘ ” Baer says with a laugh.

Based in Los Angeles, where he works with the show’s writers, Baer makes regular hops to New York, where filming takes place. And, in his view, he never stops practicing medicine.

“I always say doctors have to be really good storytellers,” Baer explains. “They have to get the patient’s story and know how to present it so that other doctors can ask questions, fill in blanks, maybe take the story in a different direction.”

And when the show is ailing, come up with a cure.