Law & Order: Organized Crime is Rising Above the Rest of the Franchise

When Law & Order: Organized Crime premiered on April 1, 2021, it did two things — it introduced a new group of detectives that focused on solving cases related to organized crime, and it brought a character back to the franchise that Law & Order: SVU fans had been missing for a decade. The return of Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni), first in SVU’s Season 22, Episode 9, “Return of the Prodigal Son,” and followed immediately by Organized Crime’s Season 1, Episode 1, “What Happens in Puglia,” was the character comeback heard ’round the world. While that was great for fans of SVU and of Christopher Meloni, what is even better is just how incredible Organized Crime has become.

Led by Sergeant Ayanna Bell (Danielle Moné Truitt), NYPD’s Organized Crime Control Bureau deals with crimes related to illegal goods and services, like gambling and prostitution, and includes Detective Jet Slootmaekers (Ainsley Seiger), Detective Bobby Reyes (Rick Gonzalez), and, as of season four, Dr. Kyle Vargas (Tate Ellington), an AI expert, and Samir Bashir (Abubakr Ali), the team’s newest detective. Though the show is technically considered a spin-off of SVU and is part of the Law & Order franchise, Organized Crime stands out as the most unique police procedural audiences have seen in decades.

Updated by Jordan Iacobucci on May 31, 2024: Law and Order: Organized Crime is returning for a fifth season, which will air exclusively on Peacock rather than on NBC. Despite this challenging shift, the series remains one of the best entries in Dick Wolf’s Law and Order franchise, which could learn some lessons from the spinoff.

Organized Crime Is A New Kind of Cop Show

The Law & Order franchise is one of three franchises created by Dick Wolf and Wolf Entertainment. The other two franchises are the FBI franchise, which includes the shows FBI, FBI: Most Wanted, and FBI: International, and the One Chicago franchise, which includes Chicago Fire, Chicago P.D., and Chicago Med.Typical police procedurals have a consistent pattern, where each episode is a new case and, depending on the show, viewers might see the case solved and then taken to court, or they might see the case wrap up but never know what happened to the bad guy. While the Elliot Stabler-led spinoff has tinges of this, what makes Organized Crime particularly unique is that very rarely do cases on the show only last one episode.

This began with the investigation of Kathy Stabler’s murder in season one, as well as the investigation of Richard Wheatley, his businesses, his children, and his ex-wife, which bled into Season 2. This season also saw Elliott Stabler go undercover with an Albanian gang and then a corrupt group of cops, and both of these cases lasted multiple episodes, bleeding into one another as Stabler went to court or dealt with the fallout of his cover being blown. Season three had the team dealing with everything from the corrupt owners of New York’s first casino development and narcotics gangs to attempted murders and cyber crimes.

One of the things that can be frustrating about police procedurals for fans is that cases wrap up so quickly. Viewers know that in real life, any case you take to the criminal justice system, whether it’s sexual assault, robbery, or homicide, isn’t going to be wrapped up in a day or even a week. Most cases take months, if not years, to go through the entire process; it’s a flaw in our justice system that can’t be appropriately communicated in a police procedural, though Organized Crime seems to have found a workaround. Since cases span multiple episodes, and thus multiple weeks or months, viewers get a more realistic picture of what it might look like to solve a case similar to the ones that the Organized Crime Control Bureau is dealing with on the show.