Law & Order returns on NBC February 24. The crime drama had a stunning 20 seasons before going off the air in 2010, and totalled 456 episodes. It will soon add to those totals.
Sam Waterston plays district attorney Jack McCoy. Anthony Anderson, last seen in Black-ish, plays Detective Kevin Bernard. Camryn Manheim, Hugh Dancy, Jeffrey Donovan and Odelya Halevi are in the cast too.
Detective Bernard came to be in season 18. Anderson said he contacted executive producer Dick Wolf when he heard Law & Order was coming back. “Returning to the streets of New York, returning to our soundstages and that squad room and donning that badge, Badge No. 1901, was just, like, sitting in a well-worn saddle,” Anderson said at a TCA Winter Press Tour event. “It gripped you just right and was comfortable.”
Waterston said he was on board immediately for the reboot. “I don't think [Wolf has] ever stopped talking about it,” he said. “One of the reasons that we're back is because of his persistence and determination and his complete conviction that it was a terrible mistake to stop in the first place.”
Waterston said the other reason the show is coming back is that “the audience never stopped watching them.” Viewers’ “persistent appetite for Law & Order is a major reason why we're back,” he added.
Law & Order is executive produced by Dick Wolf, Rick Eid, Arthur Forney and Peter Jankowski. The series is produced by Universal Television, in association with Wolf Entertainment.
Halevi called landing on Law & Order, which she watched as a child in Israel, “a dream.”
“Ever since I was a kid growing up in a foreign country, I've been watching the show in the '90s with my mom,” she said. “And I said, ‘Oh, Mom, I want to be like her. I want to be a lawyer.’ ”
Donovan, who starred in Burn Notice, also called ending up on Law & Order a dream. “I‘ve watched almost every episode. I watched it when I was a college student at NYU in the ’90s, and my dream was always to be a guest star on it,” he said. “And I was always envious of all of my friends who were getting on, and now I’m walking on the hallowed grounds of the squad room with Camryn and Anthony. It’s just a dream come true.”
Manheim said her first job out of NYU was Law & Order back in 1991. She played three different characters over the years. “It was a badge of honor to be able to be in an off‑Broadway play or a Broadway play and say that you'd been on Law & Order and then how many times you'd been on Law & Order,” she said, adding that it’s “a huge full circle for me to come back and play [Lieutenant] Kate Dixon.”
Anderson said “the magic of the show” is that viewers don’t really get a good look at the main characters’ personal lives, with the focus remaining on how justice is delivered. “It's about the crime,” he said. “It's about solving it. It's about moving it along and bringing law and order to the world. I think that is part of the magic of what Dick Wolf created.”
Character is revealed in the choices the attorneys and detectives — and criminals, for that matter — make, according to Rick Eid. “It‘s story-first on this show,” he said. “But I think you‘ll see hints of personal backstories and how they inform decisions and choices that people make.”
Law & Order will continue to rip stories from the headlines of New York’s tabloids. “I think that‘s the core of the narratives of this show, year in, year out,” said Waterston. “And, boy, are there a lot of stories that need telling. Boy, are they out there. The challenge must be choosing which one to do first.”
The final season of Black-ish began on ABC last month. Anderson said he was psyched to jump to another well-established series. “Coming back to an iconic show in Law & Order was a no-brainer for me,” said Anderson. “Hopefully 20 years from now people will be clamoring to come back to the Black-ish reboot and hopefully I‘m around for that. But leaving one great show to go back to another great show, I jumped at the opportunity to do it.” ■
