'Law & Order' Veteran Officially Being Replaced by MCU Star for Season 26 on NBC

Cast turnover has been part of the deal at NBC’s longest-running procedural for the better part of four decades, and the squad room has rarely looked the same two years running. Detectives arrive, work a season or two of ripped-from-the-headlines cases, then hand the desk over to somebody new, usually with far less ceremony than a show of that size might warrant.

The next change is landing before the fall schedule has even started. Reid Scott, the Veep and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel alum who joined Law & Order in Season 23 as Vincent Riley and inherited the squad’s senior detective spot after Mehcad Brooks left, is exiting ahead of Season 26. Deadline reports that the decision was Scott’s own, made with a year still left on his contract, and driven by the strain of spending roughly nine months a year filming in New York while his family stayed on the West Coast.

The exit was amicable, and Scott is already back on set shooting a handful of episodes so that Riley gets a proper send-off rather than the two-line write-out Jeffrey Donovan’s Frank Cosgrove got in the Season 23 premiere.

Stepping in is James Badge Dale, who will play an entirely new senior detective rather than take over Riley’s badge. The character has not been named, and neither has the point in the season where the handover happens.

Dale is a familiar face to anyone who watches this kind of television, though most of his best-known work has sat outside the network procedural lane. He played Chase Edmunds in Season 3 of 24, Robert Leckie in HBO’s The Pacific, and the lead in Starz’s Hightown, and he has more recently turned up in Taylor Sheridan’s 1923 and Peacock’s Devil in Disguise: John Wayne Gacy.

The Marvel credit is Iron Man 3, where he played Eric Savin, the Extremis-enhanced enforcer working for Aldrich Killian, and his film career also takes in The Departed, The Grey, World War Z, 13 Hours, and the cult horror oddity The Empty Man. He is not new to this universe either, having turned up in a single episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit back in 2002. His film slate is busy too, with Jeremy Saulnier’s A24 fugitive thriller October still to come and The Savant, the Jessica Chastain series he shot for Apple TV, sitting on hold.

Dale joins a returning cast of Tony Goldwyn, Hugh Dancy, Maura Tierney, Odelya Halevi, and David Ajala, whose Theo Walker spent last season partnered with Riley and now needs somebody to ride with. Season 26, renewed back in April, premieres Thursday, Oct. 8 at 10PM, a slot shift that puts the flagship behind the SVU season opener rather than in front of it. We’ll have to wait and see whether Riley gets the closure Cosgrove never did, but we know Scott is on set right now filming the answer.