Jeffrey Donovan to play a detective on NBC's Law & Order revival
NBC is being oddly quiet about his character, but we do know he'll be an NYPD detective
More than 10 years after killing off vanilla Law & Order—just short of what would’ve been a record-breaking number of season—NBC announced a month ago that it’s bringing the original series back for a new season. At the time, no cast members (new or old) had been attached, but NBC reportedly wanted Sam Waterston (who played DA Jack McCoy for many years on multiple shows) more than anyone else.
Well, apologies to Sam Waterston, because NBC apparently found somebody it wanted even more: Jeffrey Donovan, who is the first cast member to officially sign on to the new Law & Order. That comes from Variety, which says “details are under wraps as to the nature of Donovan’s character,” but we do know he’s playing an NYPD detective.
This is Law & Order, so it’s not like there’s going to be some kind of shocking thing going on with Donovan’s character, but maybe NBC is sitting on some fun hook for this and he’s, like, the long-lost son of Jerry Orbach’s Lennie Briscoe. Or maybe he’s just playing the same guy he played on Burn Notice, and he got a job as a cop after being a spy for all of those years.
Law & Order, of course, is a show about how, in the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate, yet equally important groups: The police who investigate crime and the district attorneys who prosecute the offenders. Those are their stories. Bong bong.
(That’s the Taco Bell noise, not the Law & Order noise, but it’s okay.) The Law & Order revival doesn’t seem to have a premiere date yet, but it would be funny if NBC just put it on the air one night without telling anybody. There’d be one person out there who would see it without knowing about it ahead of time, and they’d be like “whoa, Law & Order is still on?” Then we could all laugh at them for getting pranked.