Free from the network TV censors, Peacock might pick up Law & Order's Hate Crimes spin-off
NBCUniversal’s Peacock streaming service is set to launch on July 15, finally giving the world a chance to stream TV shows and movies over the internet, and NBCUniversal is predictably keen on making sure that it has loads of high-profile content to serve up to fans of A.P. Bio and 30 Rock. To that end, Deadline says NBC is “currently in conversations” with Dick Wolf about landing what will be his first original project for the Platform. Peacock already made a deal for the Law & Order and Chicago Whatever archives and Wolf has a development deal at Universal Television for the next five years, so it’s only natural that NBCUniversal would strongly encourage him to make something for Peacock.
Now, as it turns out, we may already know what that will be. Deadline says Wolf and NBCUniversal are working on two particular show ideas, one of which is a reboot of Wolf’s ‘90s cop show New York Undercover that would see Malik Yoba and Luna Lauren Velez reprising their roles from the original. That one’s apparently a “priority for Wolf,” so it might be the frontrunner, but the other would be a new (or new-ish) installment in the Law & Order franchise. Apparently, NBC wants to resurrect the SVU spin-off Law & Order: Hate Crimes, which was canned by NBC last March after already landing a 13-episode order. At that time, NBC had said the project was still in development and just needed a little more time to cook, but we theorized that the network might have been scared off by the challenge of convincing people to watch a TV show where hate crimes are committed every week.
As a matter of fact, we might’ve been fairly close on that one. Deadline’s new story says that SVU showrunner Warren Leight has since admitted that Hate Crimes would be a better fit for a streaming service since—as Deadline puts it—”the language that people use when they commit hate crimes is not acceptable for network television.” So, to reiterate, this would not only be a show where hate crimes happen every week, but a show where racial slurs are freely tossed around while people commit hate crimes. On the one hand, there’s probably something appealing about watching racists get busted by Law & Order cops, but on the other hand… Law & Order cops are cops. Either way, NBCU hasn’t said if either of these shows will get picked up, so we’ll wait and see what happens.