Can NBC's Law & Order shows be saved?

As an NBC programmer, you don’t renew the three Law & Order shows to worry about them; you expect Dick Wolf and his army of showrunners to keep the melodrama flowing in a pleasingly pressurized stream. (The network’s Chicago dramas, particularly Fire, do this incredibly well, with formulas that are so tight that cast members are basically interchangeable. Knock an eight-season veteran or two off Fire’s heavy-breathing roster, and viewers hardly notice.)

Unfortunately, it’s time somebody rang an alarm. Last season, all three Law & Order shows became the low-key delinquents of NBC’s primetime schedule, suffering from a lack of basic guardianship. Comprising one full evening and a giant chunk of the network’s scripted programming, Law & Order, SVU, and Organized Crime—which kicked off their new seasons last week—are all, to varying degrees, flailing in basic matters of character and storytelling. The saga has been going on for so long (Organized Crime has been foundering for three full years) that it’s hard not to wonder when the ax will fall on the whole blighted neighborhood.

So, in that spirit, we present a look at the three shows that comprise NBC’s “Law & Order Thursday” and dig into where they’ve been and where they need to go.

Law & Order

The reboot of Law & Order, now in season three, has underperformed from episode one. The biggest issue is the writing, which has ranged from weak to atrocious. Original recipe Law & Order never had a reputation for subtlety—in the ’90s, characters basically recited USA Today headlines back and forth—but the reboot has somehow managed to forge bigger hammers for application to our craniums. The show experimented with the wrong things (originally dropping the classic everyday-New-Yorker-discovers-corpse cold open, which is like reviving Dragnet without anyone referring to facts) and showed no ambition to elevate the cultural conversation. Provocative and timely hints of racial tension between original reboot detectives Anthony Anderson and Jeffrey Donovan were clumsily handled and quickly dropped.

Direction is also a problem: A churning cast of talented actors are giving oddly constipated performances. As captain, The Practice veteran Camryn Manheim seems barely engaged, as did returning L&O vet Anderson, who left after season one. No one bothered to tell Donovan that his NYC patois sounded more like Boston, and Hugh Dancy—so effective as the moral center of Hannibal—comes off oddly lightweight here, seemingly concentrating more on maintaining his American accent than finding a character. The sole bright spot has been Odelya Halevi as the Lebanese millennial ADA who doesn’t mind going insubordinate. Last season, her character drove the story that’s come closest to genuinely emotionally affecting, when she convinced an Arabic immigrant to turn informant and promised her protection, only to see ICE deport the woman and her young daughter.

The first episode of the new season revealed that Donovan is out, replaced by Veep veteran Reid Scott. This is a promising and curious decision: Scott has a natural, devious comic spark, and it could be a sign the show is trying to recapture a Lenny Briscoe-type seen-it-all wisecracker who’s less abrasive than Donovan. Yet in the season premiere, Scott’s character seems green, revealing his lack of experience after a shooting.

We need to see that someone on this show knows what they’re doing. The writers would be a good start. Unfortunately, the premiere showed little sign of improvement. It dealt with a Palestinian-sympathizing college professor who coerced a starry-eyed white student into murdering a Jewish college president. The thuddingly obvious script was garish slop, neither suspenseful nor thought-provoking. We had to resist switching over to the Australian Open. At least there, the moves were unpredictable.

Law & Order: SVU

Meanwhile, Law & Order: SVU maintains the most consistently compelling storytelling but can’t get its cast together. Numerous additions and quick deletions in recent years led to truly gratuitous turnover last season. Fan favorite Amanda Rollins (Kelli Giddish) was dropped after 11 years. Budget cuts were cited as the reason, but dramatically, the move made sense: SVU partly turns on the personal lives of its officers, and Rollins had been through so many wringers—including an addiction backstory, two pregnancies, and a life-threatening shooting—that there wasn’t much left to wring. No doubt NBC pressured the show to go younger, to add some apple-cheeked backup for Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay, who, at 59, is more than a decade past typical NYPD retirement age) and Fin Tutola (Ice-T, who, at 65, is officially a senior citizen).

Soulful detective Joe Velasco (Octavio Pisano) fits in well as an ex-gangster gone straight: He’s an Ice-T who can actually act. Partway through last season, the show brought in Rollins’ apparent replacement, Grace Muncy (Molly Burnett), a former gang unit officer in her twenties. Muncy was introduced in a solid episode that gave her a compelling backstory (including an unusual empathy for victims), in which Burnett registered strongly.

But the show pretty quickly gave Muncy almost nothing to do, then turned her character into a one-dimensional hot-head keen on bashing perps. It was sad to watch a good actor choke on her lines, nearly visibly arguing that these scripts weren’t what she signed up for. Meanwhile, the series brought in Bronx recruit Tonie Churlish (Jasmine Batchelor), who started getting more camera time than Muncy, a character in the opening credits. Watching Law & Order last season, you didn’t necessarily know the characters’ motivations. Watching SVU, you didn’t even know who was really on the squad.

Well, in this season’s premiere, we learn that both Churlish and Muncy are gone, and the regular cast is down to four: Hargitay, Ice-T, Pisano, and Peter Scanavino. Rollins—who magically became a criminologist last season—popped up for a guest appearance that seemed like an emergency fill-in. As for the episode’s case, the script careened from real-life compelling (a teenage girl abducted off the street while her parents momentarily looked the other way) to utterly ridiculous (a racket involving real-life sex dolls crafted on social media photos) with zero resolution. This is a show cutting its losses, with no vision for the future.

Law & Order: Organized Crime

We never intended to like Law & Order: Organized Crime. We just meant to check it out and ended up getting hooked for all 13 initial episodes, which featured beloved SVU vet Elliott Stabler (Chris Meloni) going up against a sexy, compelling villain played with mustache-twirling glee by Dylan McDermott. It was grade-A melodrama—suspenseful, densely plotted, and well-cast in the squad room, with Danielle Mone Truitt providing unusual depth and warmth as Stabler’s captain and Ainsley Seiger so spikily effective as the Gen Z tech whiz who can crack code, chase down perps, and lay undercover honeytraps that she deserves her own show.

There’s no good reason why Organized Crime’s serial format—antithetical as it may have been to Law & Order’s episodic approach—shouldn’t have worked. In the ’80s, CBS’s Wiseguy portrayed an undercover agent tangling with various mob figures (including stunt-cast celebrities like Blondie’s Debbie Harry) in multi-episode arcs that were clearly defined, well-promoted, and critically acclaimed. But somehow the Wolf organization has managed to take this template and fuck it up.

Immediately after the first 13 episodes, McDermott departed and OC ran aground in terms of story. Original showrunner Ilene Chaiken was released, replaced, and replaced again (and perhaps again … we’ve lost track) by people who cast dynamic performers like Denis Leary and Lolita Davidovich as villains and tossed them paltry (and occasionally incomprehensible) storylines while fiddling around with poorly differentiated supporting characters. As it begins season four, OC is now on its fourth (or is it fifth?) showrunner.

Has any series incurred so many self-inflicted wounds and kept stumbling around for our approval? Someday, someone should write a book on this mess (hey, we’re free!), but right now, we would like to see Meloni, a highly capable dramatic lead, realize the potential of this highly viable premise. Why is the most commercially successful dramatic production company on TV holding him back?

We were not encouraged by the new season’s premiere, which saw Stabler going up against a fuzzily defined fentanyl ring. Again, the show’s strengths (Meloni, Truitt, and Seiger) were clear; so were its weaknesses: Where are we going here? Give us a good villain. How many shows have obtained the services of one of America’s greatest living actors (Ellen Burstyn, as Stabler’s dementia-ridden mother) and given her nothing consequential to do?

The fundamental problem with the Law & Order universe is that it contains too many shows and not enough personnel to give them adequate life. Before this season, we would have axed OC and merged its key assets into Law & Order—shifted Meloni into Donovan’s job, replaced Manheim with Truitt as captain, and put Seiger in the role of L&O’s tech specialist.

As linear television continues its inexorable decline and networks attempt to find some equilibrium between exorbitant (and highly unprofitable) streaming budgets and airing something other than sports, Dateline, and a test pattern in network prime time, fans of middle-of-the-road comfort TV like the Law & Orders are, to quote the spurned wife in 1976’s Network, probably in for some dreadful grief. Network TV’s future almost certainly holds more game shows and fewer expensive scripted dramas. But if the Law & Order trio is allowed to twist in the wind for another season, there won’t be too many mourners at the funeral.