So, uh… What the hell’s going on with Law & Order: Organized Crime?
We ask, not so much out of curiosity about the actions of Christopher Meloni’s long-running detective character Elliot Stabler—who serves as the centerpiece for this latest spin-off of the Law & Order franchise—but due to the show’s increasingly visible behind-the-scenes drama. Specifically, Deadline reports tonight that showrunner Sean Jablonski has departed the series mid-way through its third season—making him the fourth showrunner to depart the show in the last year, and the fifth in the show’s brief three-year run.
That is, to put not too fine a point on it, a fuck-ton of executive producers/writers to bail/get fired from a network series in such a short span of time. (And that’s without even getting into the firing of potential writer Craig Gore, who got himself booted off the series back in 2020, before filming was even underway, due to Facebook comments he made in the wake of the death of George Floyd.) It doesn’t help that Jablonski is reportedly departing the series over “creative differences,” which seems like a pretty wild thing to run afoul of when you’re three episodes away from wrapping your third season.
The timeline on the various firings/departures runs something like this: Organized Crime was originally showrun by Matt Olmstead, who also departed the series before it aired, in October of 2020. Duties were then handed off to The L-Word co-creator Ilene Chaiken, who had the longest tenure on the series to date, helming it for all of its first season, and then most of the second. Chaiken left the series for unclear reasons (but with a note of thanks from Law & Order deity Dick Wolf) in February of 2022. And that’s when the revolving door really started to spin: She was replaced by Hannah Montana co-creator Barry O’Brien, who finished off the second season before handing the reins over to Law & Order: SVU alum Bryan Goluboff, who lasted just a few months on the job before being replaced by way-back-in-the-day original flavor Law & Order producer Jablonski in September of last year.
So, you can kind of see what we mean re: the huge number of people moving in and out of the top spot on this series in a very limited span of time. (It doesn’t help our perceptions of this all that NBC released the news late on a Friday night, which is, to entertainment news, what an alley near where a guy’s unloading a bunch of boxes from a truck is to the body-dumping killers of the Law & Order universe.) Luckily, all of that drama should abate now, as showrunning duties for the rest of the season will be handled by SVU showrunner David Graziano… who was recently the subject of an L.A. Times piece accusing him of unprofessional and bullying behavior on the sets of some of his previous shows. So, no worries there!
The biggest question here, obviously, is who Jablonski had those lethal “creative differences” with: Wolf? Meloni? There’s no way to know at present—but it’s clear that something highly disruptive, and increasingly public, is going on with this series at this point.
