Damn, Christopher Meloni’s Law & Order show is absolutely hemorrhaging showrunners
Sean Jablonski, who just departed Law & Order: Organized Crime over "creative differences," is the fourth showrunner to depart the series in a year
Aux News Law & Order
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.
18 Comments
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I still miss Happy!
Yup, time to wrap this up and starting working on Season 3
Have there ever been African-American showrunners for any of the Law & Order series? If not, now is the time. No more excuses.
So you have no idea but you still feel ok demanding this? You’re what’s wrong with the world.
your response is part of what’s wrong with Hollywood. later, trollster.
Cool. Your opinion means nothing.
say that in the mirror 10 times each day.
Nah I’m good. Has anyone ever told you how brave and important you are?
Not since last time you did.
Got it. Regardless, I think it bears repeating.
Considering David Wolf said he’ll never take on any controversial issues because he wants people to have as much faith in the police as possible, getting a black showrunner would be both amazing and also an immediate time bomb waiting to go off.Heck, they literally paired their SUV A story of police murdering a black guy with a completely unrelated parallel B story where a nameless black guy is preying on white women to soften the contemporary blow and remind people that it’s totally fine for the cops to kill a few black guys to keep the rest of us in check.
I could imagine the cast of this show has some pretty health egos but this is weird. For one thing does anyone involved with the show really think they are doing anything “creative”?
Character development and direction, plot development in order to provide a vessel for all of that, sure, there’s creativeness involved there.
I am really out of the loop with network procedurals because I didn’t even know this show was a thing, let alone a thing for three seasons now.
All this rearranging allows them to avoid talking about the real problem with this show: it lacks much of the L&O formula/charm, rendering it just another forgettable procedural. It’s really L&O in name only. I’m guessing that was a major chafing point for Dick Wolf veterans who probably knew exactly what was missing and weren’t allowed to fix it.
“Creative differences” is just what they say instead of what’s really happening, which is likely more lurid.
I read somewhere that Meloni’s character bangs some mob boss’s wife and then has he husband arrested and taunts him with it or something…? It sounds like they aren’t very clear on the character’s moral compass, which was supposed to be sort of the character’s thing but if they are luxuriating in scumminess I understand the viewers’ hesitancy.