Duh-Duh
If Dick Wolf’s dreams can come true, why not ours?
This week, Jack Hughes skips all his greatest hits to welcome back the biggest hit of all time: Law & Order. It’s back, baby.
by Jack Hughes
It’s been way too long since we had good news. With the pandemic, extreme weather, and social injustice, when anyone asks, “Have you heard?” our reflexive reaction is to brace for the latest disaster. But our world changed for the better this week when NBC and Dick Wolf Productions announced they’re bringing back Law & Order. No, not another derivative spinoff. The true O.G. classic. The one that started it all.
We’re talking 100% pure Law & Order, the criminal justice system procedural which ran from 1990 to 2010 with the best district attorneys and detectives ever seen on network TV. With all due respect to Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Law & Order True Crime, Law & Order: Trial By Jury, and Law & Order: Organized Crime, all of them are Cop Rock compared to the original.
Law & Order struck the perfect balance. It’s no-frills set format showcased a half hour of police investigation followed by a half hour of blistering courtroom drama. That formula was followed religiously except for the odd sweep’s week crossover event. Every week was a new case ‘ripped from the headlines’ which moved crisply between crime scenes with quick cuts to black punctuated by a percussive ‘dun-dun’.
Even the announcement from super-producer Dick Wolf, father many other popular television franchises such as the ‘Chicago’ dramas Chicago Fire, Chicago P.D., and Chicago Med, as well as the ‘FBI’ dramas FBI, FBI International, and FBI: Most Wanted, made clear the original Law & Order was the favorite of all his children. “There are very few things in life that are literally dreams come true. This is mine.”
To be clear, this isn’t a reboot or reimagining, the series is returning and resuming after what’s been described as an “11-year hiatus.” When the show is back on NBC’s schedule, it will be Season 21 – “[continuing] where the show left off in 2010, with the classic format that explores two separate but equally important groups – the police who investigate crimes and the district attorneys who prosecute the offenders.”
This is likely being done deliberately as the original series was cancelled on the cusp of passing Gunsmoke as the longest running scripted drama series on television. The fact that milestone was subsequently surpassed by Law & Order: SVU seemed to sit uneasily with Wolf – who has now revived his firstborn for another run. It won’t win longest continuous, but it might eventually secure most seasons and most episodes.
No commitments have been made on casting, but diehard fans will be gutted if S. Epatha Merkerson and Sam Waterston don’t reprise their iconic roles as Lt. Anita Van Buren and District Attorney Jack McCoy. Beyond that, Law & Order could draw on its rotating roster of great characters played by great character actors, even notwithstanding some fan favorites have sadly died either on the show or in real life.
Of those who will be missed the most, there are two standouts – Det. Lennie Briscoe and District Attorney Adam Schiff. Briscoe was performed to perfection by Jerry Orbach who died in 2004. Schiff – no connection to Democratic Congressman Adam Schiff despite the fact the latter actually worked as an Assistant District Attorney in New York in the 1990s – died with the passing of actor Steven Hill at age 94 in 2016.
While it’s not inconceivable Law & Order could return for Season 21 with the exact same cast it had in Season 20 back in 2010, it’s not clear that’s what producers have in mind – even assuming all of the six actors are otherwise available. (Merkerson is currently another Dick Wolf program, Chicago Med, so her scheduling wouldn’t likely be an issue.) It’s probably more likely that they’ll bring back illustrious alumni.
The top of many people’s fan-fiction wish list would be Chris Noth’s Detective Mike Logan who appeared both in the original series as well as on later iterations. We last saw him on Law & Order: Criminal Intent back in 2008. After 25 years on the force, with a mixed career of ups and downs, we were simply told Logan quit the NYPD. He could come back to work for Van Buren, who was always his biggest supporter.
If not Noth, why not Andre Braugher? The beauty with Braugher is he could be any number of characters. He could reprise his role as Det. Frank Pembleton from Homicide: Life on the Street – who exists in the Law & Order universe based on crossover events. Pembleton left the Baltimore P.D. but could easily follow Richard Beltzer’s Det. John Munch who transferred to New York to join Law & Order: SVU.
Braugher could also join the District Attorney’s office as Bayard Ellis, the criminal defense lawyer he portrayed in six episodes of Law & Order: SVU. The character formerly represented drug dealers but later founded the New York Center for Civil Liberties. (When Braugher’s Ellis meets Beltzer’s Munch in one episode of SVU there’s a wink and a nod to viewers when Munch asks him, “Have we met before?”)
The third, and admittedly least likely option, would be for Braugher to go full ‘Ed Asner/Lou Grant’ and take a popular police character he played in a comedy series and turn him into a dramatic lead. That character, of course, would be NYPD Captain Raymond Holt from NBC’s recently wrapped up sitcom Brooklyn 99. It might be a stretch, maybe too gimmicky, but if any actor could pull it off it would be Braugher.
Two other great actors who’d be welcomed back by longtime loyal fans are Carolyn McCormick and J.K. Simmons who played the clinical psychologist Dr. Elizabeth Olivet and psychiatrist Dr. Emil Skoda respectively. Dr. Olivet was one of the few characters to appear in almost every Law & Order spinoff in addition to the original series. Simmons has since won an Oscar, Golden Globe, SAG Award, and a BAFTA.
Perhaps the hardest desks to fill would be in McCoy’s District Attorney’s Office. He went through several co-counsel during his lengthy tenure, with many of them not exactly parting on the best of terms. According to the Hollywood Reporter’s official ranking of the best Law & Order cast combinations, the character most would love to have revived is actress Jill Hennessy’s Assistant District Attorney Claire Kinkaid.
Without giving away any spoilers to those who’ve never seen the show and intend to binge watch the first 20 seasons before it returns to the air, suffice it to say it’d require overcoming some obstacles. Yet, they’re not insurmountable. Hennessy has an identical twin sister, Jacqueline, who once played Kincaid in an episode when Jill was unavailable. If truth isn’t stranger than fiction, perhaps Kincaid has a twin, too?
If Dick Wolf’s dreams can come true, why not ours?
Jack Hughes is a communications consultant based in Canada. His previous contributions to The Experiment include “Same of Thrones,” “Tippecanoe and Agnew Anew,” “Harris / Shuri 2020,” “Bidenfeld,” “Firth and Firthiness,” “The Ballot of Bill McKay,” and “The World Wants ‘The West Wing,’” among others. His inexplicably extensive writings on Dan Quayle are “The Unusual Suspect,” “The Unusual Suspect II,” “The GOPfather,” “Porqua, CoQau?”, “Quayle’s Hunting Season” and “I Told You So.” Connect with him on LinkedIn here.
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