Law & Order: Organized Crime now on its fourth showrunner in 7 months

Christopher Meloni’s Law & Order spin-0ff, Organized Crime, is absolutely blazing through showrunners this year, it seems: Deadline reports that the series has just acquired its fourth boss since the start of the year, when original series co-creator Ilene Chaiken stepped down from the position halfway through its second season. At the time, Barry O’Brien (whose long career as a writer encompasses everything from CSI: Miami and The Following to writing for Happy Days and creating Hannah Montana) was brought in to finish the season out as interim showrunner. O’Brien (who’ll stick around as a writer and producer on the series) then begat Bryan Goluboff (an SVU vet), who has now begat, just three months later, new incoming showrunner Sean Jablonski.

That is a lot of turnover for a major network show, in case that wasn’t clear, especially in light of Organized Crimes’ slow and rocky development. (Chaiken, for instance, only became showrunner after co-creator Matthew Olmstead departed the role; Olmstead, in turn, got the job after Craig Gore got fired by franchise god Dick Wolf for posting disparaging Facebook comments about the George Floyd protests back in 2020.) It probably doesn’t help that Organized Crime is an outlier to the general Law & Order formula, offering up more serialized storytelling (centered on Meloni’s Detective Elliot Stabler) as opposed to the franchise’s usual episodic approach.

It feels worth pointing out that Wolf doesn’t seem to have commented on one of these exits since Chaiken departed back in February (when the series mastermind gave the standard “we are incredibly grateful for her contributions” to press). There’s no word yet on why Goluboff is departing. Jablonski has a long pedigree with Wolf’s shows, having served as a co-producer and writer on the original Law & Order before moving on to produce on Nip/Tuck and Suits.

This is, by the by, the second time Law & Order has made headlines in as many weeks; SVU came into public focus over the upcoming departure of long-time cast member Kelli Giddish, with that show’s new showrunner, David Graziano, seemingly suggesting that said departure was handed down to him from on high.