The 2024 TV schedule is still about two months away from bringing NBC's biggest shows back to primetime, but premiere season feels downright imminent to me as I watch the network coverage of the 2024 Olympics in Paris. A promo for this fall's Law & Order Thursdays has already been airing during the commercial breaks, and it's fun to see even if all of the footage is from back in the spring. At the same time, though, a promo that normally would feature Law & Order: Organized Crime's Christopher Meloni along with the casts of Law & Order and Law & Order: SVU feels like it's missing something.
The promo has been airing throughout NBC's coverage of the Olympics in primetime, with clips cut together to put an emphasis on teamwork, justice, and not giving up on helping victims. The clips were only from Law & Order and SVU, which wouldn't have been the case just one season ago. That's because NBC's Law & Order Thursdays aren't going to have three hours of the franchise come fall. Law & Order: Organized Crime Season 5 hasn't been cancelled, but it has been cut from the network's lineup, and that's starting to feel very real now.
Law & Order: Organized Crime wasn't renewed when the other two shows were back in March, and months of fan campaigns and speculation were ahead before confirmation that Christopher Meloni's show would come back for Season 5... for Peacock Premium subscribers. OC will be a streaming original for its fifth season, and seeing NBC's promo for L&O and SVU just reminded me that we don't actually know when OC will release its first streaming episode. Christopher Meloni has been hanging out with Snoop Dogg in Paris for the Olympics instead of filming in NYC. It just feels odd!
After all, Organized Crime was the first show to create a Law & Order primetime block with SVU in recent years, when it premiered via an SVU backdoor pilot in 2021. The original L&O series wouldn't debut its first revival season until 2022. The three shows were able to pull off one mega crossover back in the fall of 2022, but not even OC and SVU had a proper crossover in the most recent season beyond a couple of voice cameos of Mariska Hargitay on Organized Crime and Christopher Meloni on SVU.
Hargitay told Variety earlier this year that she was "actually planning on" a crossover between the two shows, so fans don't need to worry that we've seen the last of Benson and Stabler together just because SVU is staying on NBC and OC is moving to Peacock. Of the three Law & Order shows, I do think that Organized Crime could be a great fit on streaming, since it has always been more serialized than SVU and L&O, and perhaps Stabler and Co. will be able to get a little darker than they could on network TV. The first four seasons are already available on the streamer as it is.
As for NBC's Law & Order: Thursdays, L&O will return at 8 p.m. ET and SVU will return at 9 p.m. ET on October 3. Season 2 of Mark-Paul Gosselaar's Found will take over the 10 p.m. ET slot that previously belonged to Organized Crime.
