In the decades since Law & Order first premiered, police procedurals have become inescapable—a cottage industry of fictional crimes and ripped-from-headlines riffs built around heated interrogations and third-act twists. Now, the series that started it all returns to NBC—and it should surprise no one that for its introduction, the revived Law & Order has chosen a thorny real-life inspiration: Bill Cosby.
The new Law & Order brings back Anthony Anderson, who appeared in Seasons 18 through 20 of the original as Detective Kevin Bernard. (And has his own history of sexual-assault allegations.) The Dick Wolf series premieres Thursday and introduces Burn Notice star Jeffrey Donovan as Kevin Bernard’s partner, Senior Detective Frank Cosgrove, and Hannibal star Hugh Dancy as Executive Assistant District Attorney Nathan Price. The premiere finds each of the show’s central trio asking a different version of the same question—and the distinctions between each of their answers will likely shape the series to come.
The case of the week? Henry King, an incomprehensibly famous singer accused of raping dozens of women using, at least in one case, a date-rape drug, is found dead after his release from prison. (His conviction was overturned under similar circumstances to the Cosby’s in real life.) Kevin and Frank’s investigation opens and closes in record time, but what comes next is far from simple.
Anderson, Donovan, and Dancy’s characters each bring clear, unsubtly distinguished perspectives. Anderson’s Kevin Bernard is the idealist—the one who can look at the body of an accused rapist and mournfully murmur, “Every victim deserves respect. Even the ones that raped 40 women.” He’s dedicated to both doing the job right and doing right by others while on the job. Donovan’s Frank Cosgrove, on the other hand, is more in the mold of SVU icon Elliot Stabler—a gruff personality who has no problem lying to interrogation suspects (which is perfectly legal but, at least among these fictional colleagues, frowned upon) and spends a lot of time loudly grousing about how hard everyone seems to be gunning for the cops these days.
And as for Nathan Price? He’s mostly preoccupied with getting a good, clean conviction, at least this week. He, like Kevin, doesn’t seem to love Frank’s approach to his job—and like Kevin, he gets into more than one tense confrontation with Frank because of it. Our new DA even calls in one of the big guns to help him figure out what to do: Sam Waterston returns this season as Jack McCoy.
The questions underpinning these characters’ conflicts all stem from the same source. In 2020, protests surrounding the police murder of George Floyd also amplified concerns about how procedural shows like Law & Order perpetuate inaccurate and damaging narratives about the criminal justice system. Seasons premiering since have observed cherished characters like SVU’s Olivia Benson and, yes, definitely Stabler in Law & Order: Organized Crime, forced to confront their own roles in a broken system that disproportionately kills Black people.
In that sense, Law & Order’s revival feels like a continuation in a slow franchise-wide turnaround. But these shows have always focused more heavily on plot than on social issues. This week’s premiere feels in keeping with the original formula, if a bit watered down—but its take only feels fresh if you’ve tuned out the rest of the franchise in recent years. There’s no question asked here (so far; it’s only been one episode, in fairness!) that has not already been asked in another corner of the Law & Order universe.
Given Frank and Kevin’s strained relationship, I wouldn’t rule out more complicated conversations in the future. Then again, if you’re looking for a nuanced take on these real-life cases, I also wouldn’t necessarily recommend the franchise that once mashed up the Trayvon Martin case with Paula Deen saying the N-word.
Bill Cosby’s case seems like obvious fodder for a Law & Order episode, but in some ways this introduction starts the show and its cast off on the wrong foot. This case reverses the traditional dynamic, in which the “villain” is the killer and the “victim” is the person they killed. Here, the suspect’s legal guilt is more than clear, but the show’s jury finds her sympathetic, given whom she killed and why. How are we supposed to feel about the people trying to lock her up?
Another version of this episode might have tackled that question more directly. Instead, we observe practical arguments about whether or not it was right for Frank to lie during an interrogation, whether the resulting confession should be used at trial, and how Nathan might sway the jury to find his defendant guilty despite their empathy toward her. Clumsily written arguments about whether cellphone videos are a public good or menace to police eat up time that could be better spent asking broader questions about policing and our justice system in general. For instance: Is there really no part of Nathan that feels shitty for prosecuting this woman, regardless of how ethically he does so?
It seems likely that at least some of the bigger questions will play out later this season as Frank, Kevin and Nathan search for ways they can all get along. In particular, it will be fascinating to see Kevin negotiate not only his relationship with his colleagues but also with his chosen profession. Law & Order fans looking for their usual fix will not be disappointed by this revival; the process of making these series appears to have been perfected to a science, and the formula clearly still works. Those looking for a little something more, however, might need to stay tuned for a few more dead bodies on the sidewalk to find out.
